There’s been a serious brouhahahaha about John Stewart’s takedown of Egypt’s “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood President Mursi’s for imprisoning Egyptian fellow political satirist, Bassem Youssef for making fun of the president. The take down is pretty devastating – from a Western point of view, and even received an endorsing tweet from the US Embassy in Cairo (oops).  The Tablet has a nice summary of some of the issues (HT: Elsie).

I’d like to discuss two honor-shame aspects to this affair, one obvious, the other less so, but both, I think, closely linked.

The first, obvious one, is the reaction of an honor-shame driven leader to having the mickey taken out of him publicly. Associating his own face with both his office and his religion, Mursi took the mockery as a direct assault on the legitimacy of the state. (Psychologists call this ego inflation.) This is classic behavior and explains, among other things, why fascists, who strive to regain the virility that modern values (like free speech) deny them, use the power of the state to suppress dissent.

Note the difference between Bush (Stewart’s target) and Mursi. Although even otherwise highly intelligent people could not stop accusing Bush of (incipient) fascism, somehow we can’t use the appropriate term “Islamofascism” because… it might hurt Mursi’s feelings.

The second aspect concerns one of Stewart’s “gotcha” moments. At one point he shows an earnest Mursi assuring an eagerly attentive Wolf Blitzer that when he’s president, he’ll embrace the whole Egyptian family, and wouldn’t dream of suppressing criticism. Stewart’s implication and our “reading”: what a ludicrous hypocrite.

Here I’d like to introduce an alternative reading. Mursi would not recognize himself as a hypocrite here. When he spoke with Blitzer he was perfectly sincere, and doing what he should do – please the audience by telling them what they want to hear. He was, to coin a term, “polishing his face” in the eyes of the West. In the West we would call this “lying to save face.” Had he told the truth, he would have lost face with his Western audience. But, as my father (definitely of the intergity-guilt school) often put it, “sincerity is the cheapest of virtues.”

However, when confronted with the painful experience of having his personal vanities mocked – the hat! – a different audience and different set of concerns, that cheap virtue proved unbearably light in the face of public mockery. My bet is that if you showed Mursi the interview with Blitzer and asked about Youssef, he wouldn’t see the connection. That’s not what he meant when he made his assurances to CNN and his American audience.

This kind of emotionally-driven dissonance between two different performances is a ubiquitous element of much Arab-West contact. (All of this, of course, analysis forbidden to post-Orientalists.) When Sari Nusseibeh indignantly denounces suicide terror before a Western audience and then praises the mother of a martyr for her son’s sacrifice, he’s sincere both ways. When Islamists deny the Holocaust ever happened and then accuse Israel of being the new Nazis bringing a Holocaust on the Palestinians, they do not see the contradiction. Both statements blacken Israel’s face and strengthen theirs; both offer immense emotional satisfaction and (alas for civil society), a strong resonance with Western infidels who apparently also find such debasing formulas about Jews almost irresistibly attractive.

Such a lack of concern for what would strike Westerners as hypocrisy is not because Mursi doesn’t know about hypocrisy. On the contrary, he and his defenders will readily use the term to accuse foes, including, I’m sure by now, John Stewart and Wolf Blitzer (those Jews who control the Western media). Public hypocrites are quick to throw stones.

But in some cultures where “face” is paramount, the term has a different meaning. I’m told in China, the term is the equivalent of “politeness.” And while Mursi was being polite with Wolff – it was a smashing interview – he expected the same politeness from his public and from his “friends” at the US Embassy. So when they tweeted the take-down, they extended the rude humiliation. (And to think that the field of international diplomacy has a very limited discussion of issues of honor and shame.)

From the perspective of an honor-shame culture (i.e., one in which it is permissible, expected, even required, that a “man” can lie, and even shed blood for the sake of his honor), the hypocrisy is all on Blitzer and Stewart (two of those “Jews who control the media”): from his perspective Blitzer was polite when it suited him, then Stewart stabbed Mursi in the back with Blitzer’s tape. At some level, there is a recognition that this criticism is true. Otherwise it wouldn’t hurt.

But the hurt, the embarrassment, are more powerful than any impartial commitment to equal standards, to conscience.

Which leads me to my final reflection. Why are people who are so easily hurt, so bent of hurting, and why, oh why, do so many Westerners, especially among the elites, cheering them on?

“Oh no,” she replied. We work through locals.” (I’m not sure that answers the concerns of the homeowners who had to know that both the poison and the organization came from the outside, but that’s another issue.)

The economist, however, made a number of derogatory comments about the “altruism” of the US, suggesting that we are not so positive-sum.

To which I responded by saying, “surely there are times and places where the US pursues its self-interest, even to the disadvantage of another culture/nation/group. But that’s the norm in human history. In the history of hegemons, however, name one that has anything near the record of positive-sum behavior that the USA does.” (This is particularly the case because so much of  commerce depends on robust economies all around, and given both the Marshall Plan and its counterpart in Japan, there is no record of a victor in a nasty war, who set about building up their enemies’ nations. Economics is, in many ways, the coin of positive-sum relations in modern democratic cultures.)

Long pause….

“How about Rome?” the economist responded.

“Rome? Slave-owning, imperialistic, bloody Rome, which used their military hegemony to conquer everyone they could, that embodied the Athenian saying, “Those who can do what they will; those who cannot suffer what they must? Surely you’re not serious.”

“Well they did build aqueducts and roads. They did benefit other nations…”

I felt like I was in a scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian:

“Wha ‘ave the Romans ever done for us? says Reg, the leader of the Judean People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

“Well, aqueducts… sanitation… roads… irrigation, medicine, education… wine… public baths… public order.”

“Awrigh’, but aside from roads, aqueducts, education, wine… wha ‘ave they ever done for us.”

But as I thought about it, I realized that this man operates on a world scene, where being derogatory about his own country actually serves as a lubricant. It reminded me of an incident in Cyprus in 2005, when I sat at a table of scholars from the world over, and someone made a nasty remark about the US’s response to 9-11, much to the assent of those assembled.

“I don’t know,” I had the temerity to say, “I think the US behaved pretty well. There were a couple of incidents of violence, but on the whole I thought Americans bent over backwards not to scapegoat Muslims. Certainly in comparison with the Dutch response to the assassination of Theo Van Gogh, where Muslims were attacked, schools bombed, and vigilante revenge widespread, I’d say American response was pretty exceptional.”

That was the last conversation I had with anyone at that table. I was persona non grata at a conversation in which dumping on the US was part of an invidious identity formation for the “progressive” global elite.

The irony of course of the economist’s self-deprecating remarks was that both the young woman was a committed altruist in her  endeavors, as were most of the people who graduated with her from program in Development Economics at Tuft’s Fletcher School of International Diplomacy. And so was my interlocutor. Whether they actually are “doing good” or further contributing to a mess may be a matter of discussion, but their good intentions are, I think, beyond question. So in a sense, the snarky remarks about American “benevolence” was not very nice either to her or to himself.

The reason I tell this story here is because I think it illustrates some important points about self-criticism. It’s one thing to be more modest and self-deprecating than realistic. It’s quite another to believe your modesty. And still another do so for people who take that modesty seriously because, driven as they are by resentment at America’s hegemony – who do these people think they are? The chosen people? – they behave in ways that undermine democracies everywhere, including their own.

Redesigning the Peace Process

Ignoring cultural difference and overestimating politics has left us without a resolution. We can do better.

(Photoillustration Tablet Magazine; original photos Shutterstock and Wikimedia Commons)

Since the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, there hasn’t been a moment when the punditocracy hasn’t insisted that Israel needs to make a deal with the Palestinians—and soon. Otherwise, they claim, Israeli democracy, saddled with millions of Palestinians living under Israeli control without citizenship, will have to choose between the twin catastrophes of democratic suicide and apartheid. And since the solution that everyone knows is the eventual one–land for peace–is so clear, let’s just get on with it.

It hasn’t panned out. We’re now approaching two decades of failure of the two-state solution. Every strategy for pulling it off—Oslo, Taba, Geneva, Road Map, Dayton, Obama/Clinton—has, despite sometimes enormous efforts, failed or died stillborn. And yet, with each failure, anew round of hope emerges, with commentators and politicians arguing that this time, if we just tinker with some of the details, we’ll get peace right. (Or, as an increasing number have now come to believe, it’s time we abandon the two-state solution entirely.)

The predominant explanation for this impasse in the West has focused on Israel’s role:settlements that provoke, checkpoints that humiliate, blockades that strangle, and walls that imprison. Palestinian “no’s” typically get a pass: Of course Arafat said “no” at Camp David; he only got Bantustans while Israelis kept building illegal settlements. Suicide bombers are excused as registering a legitimate protest at being denied the right to be a free people in their own land. In Condoleezza Rice’s words: “[The Palestinians] are perfectly ready to live side by side with Israel because they just want to live in peace … the great majority of people, they just want a better life.” The corollary to such thinking, of course, holds that if only the Israelis didn’t constantly keep the Palestinians down the world would be a better place. So, the sooner we end the occupation, the better, even if it means urging the United States to pressure Israel into the necessary concessions. It’s for Israel’s own good.

This line of thinking is driven entirely by politics. Oslo thinkers from Bill Clinton to Thomas Friedman believe that what was needed was a political settlement and the rest would take care of itself. In 2007, Rice reflected this outlook in a statement of faith that projected a peculiarly modern outlook: “I just don’t believe mothers want their children to grow up to be suicide bombers. I think the mothers want their children to grow up to go to university. And if you can create the right conditions, that’s what people are going to do.”

Overestimating the power of politics and dramatically underestimating the importance of culture has actually hindered the possibility for a political solution. For Jews, especially progressive Jews, the early second decade of the 21st century poses a particularly interesting and painful meditation just in time for Yom Kippur: In our quest for “fairness,” for splitting the blame evenly, for misidentifying problems as political and therefore easily solvable—so easily solvable they could be dispatched with a simple email, as one exasperated BBC anchor put it recently—are we actually working against both parties in the conflict?

I believe the answer is yes. And those who wish to pursue a peaceful resolution need to take a hard look at the cultural difference between Israelis and Arabs—and craft policy that confronts it.

***

Any approach that pays heed to cultural issues yields a very different view as to why the conflict persists. The zero-sum logic of Arab attitudes toward Israel does not represent merely the choices made by politicians, but Islamic religiosity and deep-seated cultural mores. From the Arab perspective, the very existence of Israel represents a stain on Arab honor and ablasphemy to Islam’s dominion in Dar al Islam. Some, like the Palestinian Authority, may have made a tactical shift in which they will, despite the shame of it, talk with Israelis and even make public agreements. But they have treated such engagement as a Trojan horse, a feint to position for further war. Within this cultural context, the peace process has actually served as a war process.

Well-meaning Oslo proponents, afraid that criticism of, and demands on, the Palestinians would delay the peace process, denounced anyone who made these kinds of observations as enemies of peace. So, when Arafat said “no” at Camp David in the summer of 2000, and a wave of suicide bombers came pouring out of the belly of the horse, these same Oslo supporters, including many an alter-Juif, rather than admitting they had called it wrong, preferred to blame Israel.

But bitterest of ironies, in so doing, they fed the very culture they denied. Palestinian hatredhas festered under the guidance of Oslo-empowered elites, unopposed by the very actors one would expect to have the courage to call out such vitriol: journalists, human-rights organizations, and progressives. Instead, these groups have gone out of their way not to inform their readers of this culture of hate.

By constantly reinforcing a Palestinian sense of grievance against Israel, activists like the lateRachel Corrie, journalists like BBC’s Jeremy Bowen and CNN’s Ben Wedeman, and Israel-obsessed organizations like Human Rights Watch have unwittingly contributed to the very war that rages. And as a result of this consensus, Israel appears to most in the West as a terrible oppressor when the sad but redeeming truth is that the Israelis are the best enemies one could hope for, and they face the worst.

Nothing illustrates the cultural gap between Israel and Palestine better—and offers a more immediate and constructive way out—than the problem of Palestinian refugees. They are the symbol of Arab political priorities. When faced with the catastrophic humiliation of 1948, when the combined Arab nations, fully confident of a glorious victory, failed to destroy the upstart Jewish nation in the heart of the Muslim world, the Arab leadership unanimously chose to herd Arab refugees into prison camps so that they could serve as a symbol of Israeli crimes and a breeding ground or the counter-attack.

For over 60 years, Arab leaders have blocked any efforts to remove these people from these wretched camps because to do so would be a tacit acceptance of Israel’s permanence and would acknowledge the humiliating defeat. (By contrast, Israel rapidly moved the even larger number of Jews chased from the Arab world in 1948 out of their refugee camps.) The Arabs thus went from a zero-sum loss (the establishment of Israel) to a negative-sum solution: sacrifice your own people on the altar of your lost honor. No negotiations, no recognition, no peace.

Not only do Palestinian negotiators insist on the return of 5 million refugees to Israel (it was one of two key deal-breakers at Camp David), but the Palestinian ambassador to Lebanon recently explained that Palestinian refugees not residing in the future Palestine would not be citizens in that state. In other words, Palestinian refugees still captive in camps in Lebanon and Syria and Jordan only have a right to citizenship in Israel.

So, here’s my proposal to those who somehow feel we must revive the peace process now, before it’s too late. Call for the Palestinians to show their good intentions, not toward the Israelis, but toward their own people. Get those “refugees” out of the prison camps into which they have been so shamefully consigned for most of a century.

Begin at home, with the over 100,000 refugees in Territory A, under complete PA control. Bring in Habitat for Humanity and Jimmy Carter to help them build decent, affordable, new homes. Let us all participate in turning the powers of Palestinian ingenuity away from manufacturing hatred, fomenting violence, and building villas for the rich and powerful, while the refugees live in squalor as a showcase of Israeli cruelty, and start to do good for a people victimized by their own leadership.

To take this position, so aligned with progressive values, however, we would have to confront two obstacles. First, overcoming our immense reluctance to criticize and make demands on the Palestinians. That would also mean we’d also have to renounce the impulse to attack as racists or Islamophobes those making the demands. We also have to consider, especially true for journalists in the field, the possibility that we’re intimidated, afraid to criticize people with so prickly a collective ego. Second, it would mean overcoming the widespread hunger for stories of “Jews behaving badly.” After all, if it weren’t for the appetite for moral Schadenfreude, the whole idea of pinning the miserable fate of the Palestinian refugees on Israel rather than on their Arab jailors would never have taken hold in the first place.

***

Such introspection and self-criticism can be a little like chewing glass, but I can think of no more important communal task this Yom Kippur.

How often have I gone overboard, how often have I accepted a lethal narrative in order to save face with my friends who expect me to rise above being an “Israel-firster”? How often have I admitted to crimes on behalf of my people without checking to see if they were accurate? How often have I failed to speak out against the depravity of the Palestinian leadership, out of fear of being called an Islamophobe? In the answers to those questions lies the path to a real peace in this troubled, blessed land.

Do we outsiders who say we want peace want it badly enough to confront our own comfort zones? Let’s hope. Those Palestinians and Israelis who are ready to live in a win-win world depend on it.

***

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Not what I’d call a serious contribution to the issues at hand.

The Trouble With Judith Butler—and Her Critics

September 4, 2012, 2:24 pm

By Todd Gitlin

Whatever one wants to say about the philosopher Judith Butler’s contribution to contemporary thought, I suspect that not even her most devoted disciple would call her a lucid writer. In her introduction to an early book, Gender Trouble, she writes:

• There is a new venue for theory, necessarily impure, where it emerges in and as the very event of cultural translation. This is not the displacement of theory by historicism, nor a simple historicization of theory that exposes the contingent limits of its more generalizable claims. It is, rather, the emergence of theory at the site where cultural horizons meet, where the demand for translation is acute and its promise of success, uncertain.

What we have here, and throughout Butler’s writings, are not so much [sic?] sentences that carry propositions as a whiff of the burning of incense before an idol called “theory.” There are some in the academy who find this practice “emancipating.” I do not.

I agree (nice image), although this is hardly the most impenetrable of her smoke columns. It actually brushes close to comprehensibility.

Be that as it may, the author of those unilluminating sentences is soon to receive the City of Frankfurt’s triennial Theodor W. Adorno Prize, named for the brilliant, prolific, vastly complex, often tangled, so-called Frankfurt School German-Jewish thinker genius who was himself given to wild overstatement of the sort that Butler, in fact, quotes in the epigraph to another one of her books: “The value of thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar.” A moment’s reflection shows this to be nonsense. Adorno had bad days, too.

Actually it’s one of the unspoken goals of most academics who want to make an original contribution: the counter-intuitive truth. Who wants to spend a lifetime regurgitating Vérités de la Palice?

The politics of “theory” and prize committees would be interesting subjects on their own, but the focus of vehement attack by The Jerusalem Post and organizations devoted to My-Israel-Right-or-Wrong politics is a more specific claim.

This is an interesting trope that one runs across often: “my Israel right or wrong” or the “Israel firsters.” It’s an effort to dismiss as some kind of primitive incarnation of an “us-them” mentality, people who defend Israel against calumnies. Most people identified as Israel-firsters are not. They are capable of both recognizing legitimate criticism and even articulating it.

But we draw lines between constructive criticism and destructive, between criticizing policies soberly and demonizing, between concerned tochachah and existential hatred. Most people who dismiss defenders of Israel as Israel-firsters, on the other hand, are “Israel is wrong firsters,” who, like Judith Butler, have no trouble finding their full-throated voices when criticizing Israel in no uncertain terms and based on highly uncertain sources, but somehow mumble and fumble when it comes to denouncing her ferocious enemies.

In the context of a battle with an enemy that has one of the most regressive ”my side right or wrong” attitudes – “love my side and hate everyone else” – which is constantly being reinforced by the opposite “progressive” meme of “your side right or wrong” that must accept the epistemological priority of the subaltern “Other” (as does Helena Cobban), it’s a pretty ugly accusation. It goes hand in hand with the common trope, “any criticism of Israel is considered anti-Semitic,” which Butler and her convulsively anti-Israel colleagues uses constantly as a smokescreen for vicious criticism.

In the words of the Post’s Benjamin Weinthal, Butler “advocates a sweeping boycott of ties with Israel’s cultural and academic establishment and has defended Hezbollah and Hamas as progressive organizations.”

This slovenly slash-and-burn propaganda, masquerading as journalism, has occasioned a crisp reply by Butler:

Wow. This is pretty amazing. Weinthal’s piece is slash and burn propaganda, while her long, rambling, and insubstantial reply is “crisp”? Surely a scholar of nuance, like Todd Gitlin can do better. This is red-meat language for the carnivore “progressive” choir.

The accusations against me are that I support Hamas and Hezbollah (which is not true), that I support BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions] (partially true), and that I am anti-Semitic (patently false).

As to the first, here is Butler’s statement:

• I was asked by a member of an academic audience a few years ago whether I thought Hamas and Hezbollah belonged to “the global left,” and I replied with two points. My first point was merely descriptive: Those political organizations define themselves as anti-imperialist, and anti-imperialism is one characteristic of the global left, so on that basis one could describe them as part of the global left. My second point was then critical: As with any group on the left, one has to decide whether one is for that group or against that group, and one needs to critically evaluate their stand. I do not accept or endorse all groups on the global left. … To say that those organizations belong to the left is not to say that they should belong, or that I endorse or support them in any way.

Before we go into Gitlin’s comments on this, allow me to note the following (dealt with in more detail here): she did not make a “merely descriptive remark,” she included them – their violence aside – as part of the “social progressive global left.” If that’s descriptive it’s a) strange language for impartial description, and b)wildly inaccurate: there are no movements on the planet less socially progressive than Jihadis.

Whether Hamas does indeed define itself as “anti-imperialist” I do not know or care, and I do not know why Butler cares.

Really? How about: its the line of revolutionary nonsense about “resistance” (to Israeli imperialism) that Butler embraces, and because she’s under heavy pressure from her colleagues on the “global Left” to approve of Hamas and Hizbullah as part of the “movement of ‘resistance” fighting for emancipation” (remember, this is just after the Lebanon War of Summer 2006 and the corruption of the media). This silly stuff on “anti-imperial” (which she defends as being “perhaps too academic” (!!), is her transparent figleaf (which she invokes subsequently) for lacking courage. Actually, as you and her other supporters point out, they’re not fighting for “emancipation” (a socially progressive goal) but for domination and ethnic cleansing if not genocide (not exactly what one might call progressive).

Hitler defined himself as that contradiction in terms, a “national socialist.” The Japanese Empire was hostile to Western imperialism, preferring its own imperialism. Salafists of the Al Qaeda stripe would like to replace one empire with another, their own. So? There can be no doubt that Hamas, for example, is both anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic; it cites the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious czarist forgery, in its charter. In what she calls her descriptive remark, Butler obfuscates—unhelpfully.

I agree completely. So why do you think her response is “crisp”?

But the critics offer no evidence that she “supports” Hamas or Hezbollah. She explicitly denies it. Enough.

No, not enough. It’s not that she “supports them” – although a statement like

Yes, understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.

strike me as far too close to an endorsement.

But the point that I and other critics would make of Butler’s reply is that it’s not an issue of “I don’t endorse” H&H, but rather that, “as a progressive who believes in non-violence, women’s and homosexuals’ and unarmed civilians’ right to non-coerced dignity and freedom, I find H&H repulsive and think that anyone who wants to include them among the ‘socially progressive movements’ has taken leave of his or her senses.”

As for her view of boycotts, Butler writes:

• I do support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement in a very specific way. I reject some versions and accept others. … I do not accept any version of BDS that discriminates against individuals on the basis of their national citizenship.

The right to boycott in order to change the behavior of a state is a human right. One may agree or disagree. (I have myself written against recent academic boycotts, for example here.) But the political scientist Gerald Steinberg of Bar-Ilan University, quoted in the Post, does more than disagree. He believes that Butler is “immoral,” and that the BDS campaign “demoniz[es] the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and equality—the modern embodiment of anti-Semitism.”

Agree with me, says Steinberg, or be cursed as an anti-Semite.

That’s a strange gloss. He’s not saying that people (like you, or even Butler), who disagree with him are anti-Semites. He’s identifying a group of people who are, arguably genuine anti-Semites by almost any definition, even Chomsky’s (many in the BDS movement). He hasn’t accused Butler of being an anti-Semite, just aiding, abetting, and encouraging them. If that’s not “immoral” by Judith “I-must-distance-myself-from-all-complicity-with-racism” Butler’s own very high standard, then what is?

In full chutzpah mode, Steinberg goes on to accuse Butler of ignoring “the suffering of Syrians, Iranians, and millions of others who are victims of real rather than invented war crimes.” How does he seriously know her views on their sufferings? On the strength of her writings, what he says is, to say the least, implausible.

Please, Todd, give us some references. One of the criticisms leveled at Butler is that she has an obsession with extremely harsh criticism of Israel and almost non-existent criticism of the Arab political culture that surrounds her (see above comments on H&H). “Implausible,” even “at the very least” here, when you accuse someone of “full hutzpah mode” is really not enough. Try googling Judith Butler+Syria+Iran, and you’ll mostly come up with articles about her moral hypocrisy. Please tell us what panels over the last three years she participated in criticizing the Mullahs in Iran or the Assad regime in Syria for their attacks on civilian protesters.

Finally, Butler sets out a cogent view of Jewish ethics—which, as The Jerusalem Post and Gerald Steinberg probably know, has been the subject of considerable dispute for millennia. Her view is that Jews are called upon to pay particular attention to how they live with those who are not Jews on shared or neighboring land. On this subject, Butler stands foursquare in an honorable Jewish tradition, as she writes in a recent book, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism:

• If I show … that there are Jewish values of cohabitation with the non-Jew that are part of the very ethical substance of diasporic Jewishness, then it will be possible to conclude that commitments to social equality and social justice have been an integral part of Jewish secular, socialist, and religious traditions.

And, more recently:

• there are strong Jewish traditions, even early Zionist traditions, that value cohabitation [with non-Jews] and that offer ways to oppose violence of all kinds, including state violence.

A book known as Numbers has something to say (9:14) about a single law for natives and strangers, in fact. Argue away about who qualifies as which, but I must have missed the segment of Jewish history when the official orthodoxy of Israel declared Benjamin Netanyahu the pope of the Jews.

This is sad stuff. Numbers says something about strangers who live among you, not about enemies who live among you and want to destroy you. Similarly Leviticus says “love your neighbor as yourself,” not “love your enemy as yourself.” Butler does worse. She loves “herself” by being critical of her own people; she doesn’t criticize her own people’s enemies with a fraction of that passion.

Out of compassion? Or moral contempt?

And Bibi as pope? What’s that about? More silly slogans from the “Israel [is wrong] firster” club?

Butler is right about this, too:

• When one set of Jews labels another set of Jews “anti-Semitic,” they are trying to monopolize the right to speak in the name of the Jews. So the allegation of anti-Semitism is actually a cover for an intra-Jewish quarrel.

Like Butler, you are not listening to the criticism. We are not calling her an anti-Semite. Some may, that’s their prerogative, and there’s a case to be made, although not one I’d care to make. We’re accusing her of being a dupe to demopathic anti-Semites, their useful idiot, of lacking any real or theoretical courage to denounce the worst kind of anti-Semitism when it appears on the Left. Indeed, she’s one of the Leftist/Jihadi anti-Semites’ favorite laundry soap.

These days, even the most lucid writers fall victims to scurrilous, slovenly, sound-bite spitballing that pretends to be grown-up debate.

Ouch! How is this not a description of this, your article?

The gotcha habit of seeking the author’s clumsiest, least defensible moments and waving them in the air like chunks of raw meat, is a disgrace and a curse. I imagine there is Talmudic support for this view.

There certainly is one about being self-aware. It’s even in the New Testament. Something about beams and motes. This is not one of your more impressive pieces of work. Knee-jerk comes to mind.

What I don’t understand here is, some of your comments (rhetoric aside) indicate you are well aware of Butler’s intellectual and moral shortcomings. So why this hack piece in her defense. Have you no independent opinion?

Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University. He is author, with Liel Leibovitz, of The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election (Simon & Schuster, 2010).

Judith Butler’s feelings are hurt because some professors who claim they’re for “peace in the Middle East,” have criticized her and openly called on the Adorno Committee to withdraw the Prize that they have announced would be offered to her this year, on Adorno’s birthday, 9-11. Stung by the criticism, Butler responded at the site of the notoriously anti-Israel Jewish blog, Mondoweiss. in her defense. The defense illustrates every aspect of the problem with Butler’s approach to the criticism of her work, including the folly of German intellectuals to raise her up as a heroic example.

The criticism of her receiving the Adorno prize involves the following three points: 1) Her criticism of Israel for violations of (her) moral standards is exceptionally harsh, even though she has very little to say about exceptionally harsh violations among Israel’s enemies. 2) She has taken this moral imbalance from mere rhetoric to determined action, supporting extensive and punishing academic boycotts of Israel (e.g., Kafka archive should not go to Hebrew University). And 3) she enables and encourages virulent anti-Semitism both in this participation in BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), and in identifying some of the worst offenders where that ancient hatred is concerned (Hamas and Hizbullah) as part of the “progressive, global, Left.”

Her response was a long, rambling, self-defense (2000 words) in which she systematically misrepresents the critique, and shields herself by claiming the status of a suffering victim of a vicious attack that deeply hurt her feelings.

I.  Listening to Criticism, Reasoning Together about Anti-Semitism

Butler begins with a lengthy (500 word) repetitive complaint about how her “detractors” have misrepresented her positions in order to demonize her and silence her. Instead of paying attention to what she says, Butler claims, her critics systematically misrepresent her discourse as anti-Semitic in order to shut her up. We who criticize her and her anti-Zionist colleagues “target the person by taking the words out of context, inverting their meanings and having them stand for the person; indeed, …nullify the views of that person without regard to the content of those views.”

Take, for example, the problem of anti-Semitism which Butler dismisses out of hand as “patently false.” Butler makes three claims: 1) the accusation is absurd and offensive; 2) her opponents call any criticism of Israel anti-Semitic; and 3) she cannot be anti-Semitic because she intends to represent the highest values of Judaism, and to suggest otherwise, especially to someone like herself whose family was destroyed in the Holocaust, is deeply hurtful.

Let’s take them in order.

1) Accusation of anti-Semitism Absurd: No one cited in the JPost article (Steinberg, Small, Bawer), nor in the German SPME statement (Küntzel, Schumann, Hansen, Rensmann) accuse her of anti-Semitism. They do accuse her of enabling, facilitating, spreading anti-Semitic discourse by engaging in a relentlessly hostile criticism of Israel while, at the very most, mumbling allusions of criticism towards relentlessly anti-Semitic enemies of Israel. The closest anyone came to the accusation was Gerald Steinberg who, with reference to her support of BDS, noted that “the boycott campaign is part of the wider NGO-led war targeting Israel and demonizing the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and equality – the modern embodiment of anti-Semitism.”

Not only does Butler refuse to listen to what her critics are saying, she does not want anyone else to pay attention either. Stung by the opposition, Butler rushed to the site of SPME to find out who had the nerve to smear her so outrageously. She rapidly landed on what she was looking for, evidence that, as she assures her readers, SPME claims [sic] that “Islam” is an “inherently anti-semetic (sic) religion.” She did not pause the three seconds it would have taken to realize that the headline, along with its misspelling, came from RTV (Russian), and that SPME had it up there to give its members and visitors access to the debate between the Norman Finkelstein, who systematically compares Israel with the Nazis, and Jeffrey Herf, who has chronicled the depressing history of Islamist-Nazi ties specifically bound up with the problem of Zion. Obviously it’s easier to wax indignant and dismiss someone if one believes he or she is a boorish, uneducated racist. After all, who else would oppose her award?

2) Her critics consider “any criticism” of Israel anti-Semitic. As part of her defense, Butler repeatedly characterizes her opponents as accusing “anyone who criticizes Israel… those who formulate a criticism of the State of Israel… people [who] offer a criticism of Israel…” as being anti-Semitic. This is a common rhetorical trope among Israel’s harshest critics: any criticism is immediately dismissed by the Israel-first crowd as anti-Semitism. Now if we’re looking for examples of systematically misrepresenting one’s opponents views for the sake of dismissing them and shutting down debate, this offers a fine exemplar.

Jews and Israelis have an extraordinary tolerance for dissent and debate. A wide range of often harsh criticism of Israel takes place without cries of anti-Semitism: critics have to overstep a remarkably high threshold before some counter-critics associate their attacks on Israel as anti-Semitic. Some draw the line at the remorseless recourse to accusations of malicious violence, what David Hirsch calls “The Livingstone Formulation”; many draw the line at apartheid; most at accusations of being as bad as, or worse than the Nazis. BDS is full of the whole rainbow of calumny.

3) I don’t intend to be anti-Semitic, so I can’t be. One aspect of the issues surrounding anti-Semitism becomes particularly salient and more broadly significant concerns the role of intention. Butler has been fighting this issue for over a decade now, ever since, in 2002, Larry Summers referred to academic calls for boycotting Israel in conjunction with a widespread campaign of vilification as “anti-Semitic in its effect if not necessarily in its intention.” (In Marxian terms, this is “objective” anti-Semitism – the product of false consciousness.) Butler then, as now, preferred to take the remark as an insult to her (pure) intentions, rather than, as it was intended, as an insult to her judgment in participating, pure intentions and all, in an anti-Semitic enterprise to which she gave her Jewish voice.

In terms recently coined by Gerald Steinberg, Butler is a tool used by anti-Semites in intent to “Jew-wash” their hatred by disguising it as “legitimate” criticism of Israel. “How can you say I’m anti-Semitic? I’m just saying what Jews themselves say.” In other words, she did not (or could not allow herself to) realize that the criticism leveled against her was not for anti-Semitism, but for her role as a useful idiot in the service of anti-Semites. Her insistence on her sincerity in all she does merely dots the i’s.

II.  Hamas and Hizbullah, Anti-Imperialism, and the Progressive, Global “Left”

Which brings us to her comments about Hamas and Hizbullah (H&H). Let’s begin with some known knowns about both organizations:

1. Both (Hamas most egregiously) engage in the kind of anti-Semitism that is indistinguishable from the Nazi variety: paranoid, racist, exterminationist, hatemongering.
2. Both believe a theocratic principle that considers any independent, non-Muslim state within the heart of historic Dar-al-Islam, (especially Israel), is an unbearable defamation of history; and are, therefore fully dedicated to Israel’s destruction.
3. Both are notoriously patriarchal and oppressive in their treatment of women (including honor-murders).
4. Both share a violent homophobia (to be found all over Muslim Arab lands), favoring the Sharia laws that call for the stoning of homosexuals.
5. Both have made a cult of death and killing, in which killing yourself if only you can kill your enemies, is the highest good.
6. Both participate in a larger, global imperialist project to subject the entire world to Sharia, a medieval code of law that establishes a religious and gender apartheid regime in which women and independent minds (kufar – those who “cover” the [Islamic] truth) are systematically and legally disenfranchised.

These are things that are not only true about Hamas and Hizbullah, but of all the other violent Jihadi movements aiming at global Sharia active around the world today. This data is available to anyone familiar with these groups: unlike Westerners, Hizbullah and Hamas have no inhibitions about expressing their adherence to any and all of these points on beliefs and goals, although they might disagree on tactics. And these constitute, at least in my moral universe, the inverse of the commitments to which Judith Butler identifies herself as champion, namely to “affirm multi-cultural co-habitation, and defend principles of equality.”

Now, for reasons that seriously need examination, the current activist “left” on campuses has decided to include these two astoundingly regressive political and cultural ideologies among “progressive” movements with which the “Left” works in common struggle. This active-cataclysmic apocalyptic  alliance between left and Jihadis – destroy the West to save the world – ran into predictable resistance on the part of (now old-fashioned) progressives who believe in non-violence. This debate took place in an atmosphere where members of the Links (Left) Party in Germany proudly marched with radical Muslims  shouting “Allahu-Akhbar” and “Death to Israel, “and in so doing, were only pursuing a public alliance that first found its full articulation in the “Anti-War” demonstrations against Bush in 2003.

So at a teach-in at her university held right after the summer war in Lebanon (2006), at UC Berkeley, a student asked Judith Butler whether groups like Hizbullah and Hamas should be included among progressive-left groups. The questioner herself asks a leading question, clearly leaning in favor of the inclusion, for which she receives some applause.

I’d like you to comment on the importance of Hamas and Hezbollah. And I think since the beginning of this year—and especially when Hamas was democratically elected by the Palestinian people and Hezbollah by the Lebanese—people are now supporting these violent resistance movements. But even within leftist and anti-war activists and intellectuals there is always this kind of condemnation and hesitation in supporting these two groups just because of the violent components of their resistance movements. Doesn’t our inability or hesitation in supporting these groups do more harm than good?” [italics mine]

Clearly this issue counts… Hizbullah’s inclusion meant the “Left” now formally affiliated itself with Israel’s deadliest enemies, who deliberately target civilians, and considered Israel’s argument for violence in self-defense, entirely illegitimate.

So the game is afoot. What does Judith Butler, the proud spokesman of “struggles for social justice, and the exceedingly important Jewish value of ‘repairing the world’,” the bold opponent of “violence of all kinds” respond to this opportunity to clarify where she, at the least, stands?

…Yes, understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.

In other words, she grants a priori that “as social movements,” these organizations are “progressive… on the Left… part of the global Left,” despite their astonishingly regressive social, political and theological agendas. Does building schools that indoctrinate Jihadi beliefs and apocalyptic hatred against Jews and other infidels make them “progressive” and “Left”? Does the “Left” support (political) culture that promotes violent authoritarianism and espouses apartheid laws that discriminate against women and dissenters? Or is this just “the anti-imperialism of fools”?

That does not stop us from being critical of certain dimensions of both movements. It doesn’t stop those of us who are interested in non-violent politics from raising the question of whether there are other options besides violence. So again, a critical, important engagement. I mean, I certainly think it should be entered into the conversation on the Left. I similarly think boycotts and divestment procedures are, again, an essential component of any resistance movement.

In other words, I want to maintain my personal, non-violent self, apart from this kind of openly violent group, but I would not object to those of you on the Left less opposed to violence, pursuing this “critical, important engagement.” The link between Left and Hamas/Hizbullah on the basis of shared progressive values, social justice, resistance. Personally, I, Judith Butler, prefer the legitimate “resistance” to Israel – i.e. the means to destroy her – which we can do through the “non-violent” attacks of BDS.

Among the many questions one might have in light of such an astonishing statement, a serious progressive might ask, “but why concede the ‘progressive’ label at the outset to such a regressive crew, why approve of this destructive collaboration as ‘a critical, important engagement’?” The answer to that has to do with the post-colonial paradigm from which Butler and her fellow queer theorists operate: for them, Israel is (the last remnant) of the vicious Western tradition of imperialism and colonialism, while the Palestinians are an indigenous, innocent, victim people of that aggression. In her refutation at Mondoweiss, Butler returns to the issue:

My first point was merely descriptive [NB: as with “doubtless” always get suspicious when you hear the word “merely” - RL]: those political organizations define themselves as anti-imperialist, and anti-imperialism is one characteristic of the global left, so on that basis one could describe them as part of the global left.

Butler actually didn’t speak of H&H as anti-imperialist in the recorded part of her Berkeley answer, but it’s part of the package. When later asked to clarify her Berkeley remarks in Berlin four years later, she noted:

They are “left” in the sense that they oppose colonialism and imperialism, but their tactics are not ones that I would ever condone. I have never supported either group, and my very public affiliation with a politics of non-violence would make it impossible for me to support them.

Here, “they describe themselves as…”, there “they [actually?] oppose colonialism and imperialism.”

This may be the most remarkable part of Butler’s “discourse.” Just because they say they are anti-imperialist, does that mean we should believe them? Have you read their charters? The only colonialism and imperialism they oppose is that of their enemies. They embrace [Islam’s] imperialism and colonialism and practice it on infidel and fellow Muslim alike in all its violent splendor.

Indeed, and alas, the only value that H&H (and the rest of the global Jihadis) share with the global “Left” – what Amira Hass called the “global Hamoulah of the progressive Left” – is their common anti-Zionism, their passionate conviction that Israel is the source of evil in the Middle East, and that the sooner she disappears the better a place the world will be. After all, if we look at the “social justice” dimensions of Zionism – social work, women’s issues, environmental awareness, gender tolerance – then Zionism belongs on the “global Left” far more than H&H, whatever one’s reservations about violence.

In allusion to this (how much of this does she actually know about?), Butler insists at Mondoweiss on her non-violent bona fides:

I do not endorse practices of violent resistance and neither do I endorse state violence, cannot, and never have. This view makes me perhaps more naïve than dangerous [“dangerously naïve”? –RL], but it is my view. So it has always seemed absurd to me that my comments were taken to mean that I support or endorse Hamas and Hezbollah! I have never taken a stand on either organization, just as I have never supported every organization that is arguably part of the global left – I am not unconditionally supportive of all groups that currently constitute the global left. To say that those organizations belong to the left is not to say that they should belong, or that I endorse or support them in any way.” [italics mine]

To be very generous, this is disingenuous. For someone who doesn’t distinguish too well between “H&H say they oppose imperialism” and “H&H oppose imperialism,” this is a finely sliced point. If I were an admirer of Butler, but thought her a bit naïve about omelet-making, I’d take it as an endorsement of the “important, critical engagement” of the Left with H&H, to say that “understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.”

It’s certainly not, “OMG! or WTF! Hizbullah and Hamas represent everything that we on the progressive Left are opposed to.”

What does this tell us about Judith Butler? That either she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, or she’s in way over her head, and would not be able to articulate a morally coherent critique of the Left’s embrace of H&H even if she wanted to. One would think, coming from the background of the academic “theories” school (Queer, Post-colonial, pomo), in which otherness is celebrated, that it would not be hard to generate such a moral critique. And, again one would think, such a moral critique would fit elegantly into a framework in which one ardently hopes for and works towards “a truly democratic polity on those lands [based on] the principles of self-determination and co-habitation for both peoples, indeed, for all peoples.”

And in so doing, Butler might actually spare the Left the embarrassment of ludicrous movements like “Queers for Palestine,” where Western gays embrace the very cause that, were it to prevail, would kill them all. To paraphrase Lenin on capitalists (and not to essentialize as he did), “[some of] today’s leftists will embrace the ideology with which we will hang them.” (And they’ll do it not for profit, but for free, just to prove their sincerity.)

But no. In her pursuit of her “Jewish, diaspora morality” and its secular analog in academic “theory” of embracing the “Other,” because of the redemptive power of its performativity, trumps all reality-testing. We all (want to) live in a post-nationalist, post-sovereignty, world where the respect for the “Other” redeems and repairs the fallen world of “othering” and oppression. We make peace by embracing our enemies. These are precisely the themes that Saïd exploited so brilliantly in his demopathic masterpiece, Orientalism.

So those “people of color,” those post-colonial subalterns, who oppose us – we Westerners who believe in equal justice for all creeds, colors, and schools of thought, we women who believe in equal rights to both genders, we gays who believe in equal rights for queers, we Jews who believe that Jews have the right to create a sovereign entity and defend themselves against millennia of cruelty – they may seem like they want to destroy us, but they really don’t. They “resist” our (residual) imperialism and colonialism. As a Jew, in the name of Jewish values, Judith Butler tells her fellow Jews that there is no “enemy” to our people, only “resistance” to our injustice – not all of which she endorses, but all of which she understands. How much better to depend, like her, on the generous protection of the (currently glorious) diaspora.

Why is Israeli violence – what they claim self-defense – so radically illegitimate that stopping it justifies banishing Israel from the global Left (the flip side of embracing H&H on the global Left), whereas H&H violence, even the targeting civilians, is legitimate? Because the latter is resistance, resistance to Jews not living up to Judith Butler’s belief that all this can be resolved by the great and glorious “Jewish traditions that oppose [all?] state violence,” a “vital ethical tradition [that is] is forgotten or sidelined when any of us accept Israel [a sovereign state that exercises, as do all sovereign entities, violence] as the basis of Jewish identification or values. We do not need Israel to create the world of “multi-cultural co-habitation,” to “defend principles of equality… and social justice,” indeed, Israel impedes that goal, that “the substantial political rights of all people in that land – Jews, Muslims, Christians – be secured through a new political structure.” Like most BDSers, Butler is a utopian one-stater (i.e. a believer that a one-state solution will be fundamentally democratic).

Now those of us who criticize her, feel that this is reckless ideological behavior that systematically misreads empirical reality and feeds the most dangerous, violent and intolerant social and political forces at work currently around the world. Indeed, by spinning a messianic fantasy of a secular democratic state for all in the land from the river to the sea, taken from Buber and Magnes, un-problematized by over two generations of Arab cruelty towards Jews and fellow Arabs in this same land, Judith Butler can side with the “resisters” of Israeli aggression, regardless of does how deranged and delirious their hatreds. She is uniquely placed to give voice to their lethal narratives – to “keep the memory of their oppression alive” – even as she insists on her own moral purity.

She seeks “to affirm what is most valuable in Judaism for thinking about contemporary ethics, including the ethical relation to those who are dispossessed of land and rights of self-determination.” That’s her opinion. Some of think that what she finds most valuable in Judaism for thinking about our contemporary world and how to live morally in it, is a warmed over version of a deracinated soft messianic read of some wonderful but badly mistaken thinkers, and that presenting their thoughts as not just possible, but imperative moral guidelines which permit us who embrace them to cast those who do not agree with us out of the ethical heaven of the “global Left.” But the Devil’s account is, that the Messiah fell, & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss.

III. Moral Narcissism, False Consciousness, and Superficial Scholarship

Butler fits perfectly into the category of what Shmuel Trigano and other French Jewish intellectuals, overwhelmed with a tsunami of Jew-hatred in the early aughts (‘00s), called the alter-juifs. These were (largely) fully assimilated Jews who had not previously identified publicly as Jews, but who, suddenly, once the images of al Durah and the Al Aqsa Intifadah hit their TV screens in October 2000, felt the need “as Jews” to denounce loudly before the most hostile audiences, the sins, even the basic character flaws, of their people.

Not only do alter-juifs believe whatever lethal narratives they hear about Israel (Butler apparently thinks that 60,000 Palestinians lost their homes to the apartheid fence)… not only do they at most mumble criticism of the violence and dishonesty of their people’s enemies… but they join international punitive projects designed to eventually destroy Israel, all as part of their well-intentioned desire to “alleviate suffering the world over.” For the alter-juif, that noble tasks starts and finishes with concern for the suffering of everyone but their fellow Jews. Well, actually, alter-juifs will come to the aid of fellow “good Jews,” who, like them, denounce Israel before the world, and who as a result, are the noble victims of smearing by their own people. 

Bawer referred to Butler as a “postmodernist colossus… [and] almost certainly the most revered living figure in Queer Studies,” a field he argues “fetishizes otherness and ‘transgression’.” By this I think Bawer means the following: Queer Studies embraces a kind of messianic project (in Butler’s terms, Tikkun Olam) by which transgressing identity boundaries (starting with homosexuals and gender identities), through abandoning our “us-them” dichotomies (patriotism and patriarchy are so regressive), and embracing the oppressed (subaltern) “Other,” leads to a world of post-national, non-coerced, “multi-cultural co-habitation.” By fetishizing, I think he means that the practitioners of Queer Studies who perform this redemptive discourse, have turned it into a kind of idol worship in which any “Other” – them – has priority over the (potentially oppressive) self – us.

So instead of going from the hard-zero-sum principles of “my side right or wrong,” to the positive-sum principles of fairness and justice of “whoever’s right my side or not,” Butler and post modern ideologues dedicated to destabilizing the Western canon, end up adopting an inverted us-them, or “their side right or wrong.” What ensues is the unholy union of pre-modern sadism and post-modern masochism: they in their desire to destroy us, accuse us of the most terrible crimes, we, in our effort to win over our enemies, say, “you’re right” and “we’re sorry.”

From this perspective, Muslim “Others,” no matter how regressive (e.g., H&H), should benefit from the respect and support afforded the oppressed, the resisters of our “othering,” no matter how ferociously, even sadistically, they define their “us-them” relationships. Thus, when Islamists engage in homophobic speech and deeds, gays should not look to Judith Butler to denounce such primitive and violent attitudes, despite her moral commitments. On the contrary, Butler turned down an award from a group of German gays, and publicly scolded them for their Islamophobic complaints about Muslim gay-bashing.

Indeed, this fetishizing of the Islamist “Other,” means Butler has to betray every moral constituency one might have expected her to defend: fellow Jews, women, LGBT. That’s why, when participating in the act of denouncing Israel before an audience of global leftists, Butler the non-violent can at most mumble criticism about distancing herself personally from violent organizations that trample her values at every turn.

Butler the alter-juif, the non-violent activist of true Jewish values, the self-consciously moral voice that insists on her ideological purity, turns out primarily to be a moral narcissist. Butler’s concern is not that the world be a better place – that’s her good intention; more important is the ability to “perform” as a moral person, no matter what the consequences. “Not in my name… I represent the finest values, and I will not get ‘dirty’ with the unseemly behavior of fighting back.”

Like most narcissists, Butler lives in the moment, her historical memory virtually non-existent. Her definition of both the “Jewish tradition” and the Jewish “diaspora” are deracinated self-serving notions that float in a modern/post-modern bubble, completely detached, even contradictory to, the ballast of a history about which she is profoundly uninformed (or prefers to ignore). Ignoring that past (unless she needs to trot it out to defend herself), makes it much easier to dismiss the problems of (her stirring up) anti-Semitism, lest they cramp her redemptive style.

Bawer refers to Butler’s notion of “performativity” as “a kind of high-rent postmodern version of showing off.” To be slightly less generous, it’s moral preening. (Obviously if this is the case, anything written about performativity needs to keep things abstruse, and indeed in 1998, Butler won the “Bad Writing Contest” for “the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles published in the last few years.”)

And moral show-off, she is. She, the “good Jew” the good feminist, the good post-modern, post-identity, post-sovereignty, embracer of the “Other,” will show her bona fides on the international stage by denouncing Israel’s crimes, no “ifs” “ands” or “buts,” no excuses allowed concerning the feverish violence in word and deed arrayed against that nation that “state beyond the pale.” “As long as I, Judith Butler, shine in ethical performativity, and serve as a living example to others who want to maintain their identities as Jews without the moral stain of Israel’s barbaric ways, things are well with the world. How dare you criticize me for not attending to the consequences? Moi, a victim of false consciousness? Moi, unable to engage in serious self-criticism? Moi, ignorant of history? Moi, preen for audience approval? You should be ashamed to even entertain the thought.”

And behind this moral performativity, lies something much more troubling, what one might call a “post-modern honor-killing.” Progressive Jews, who believe in tikkun olam as social justice and who want Jews to “lead the world” in the belief that we – all humans – “are called upon by others, and by ourselves, to respond to suffering and to call for its alleviation,” have been horribly shamed by the behavior of the Israelis. Images of their brutality, oppression, and aggression towards their Palestinian victim neighbors, has given Judaism a bad name. How can I, a good Jew, hold my head high when the media reflects back on me the awful behavior of my fellow Jews in Israel.

And in order to restore that good name, in order that progressive Jews can regain their honor in the eyes of the world, and present themselves as redemptive performers of tikkun olam, Israel must be slain. Then all will be fine for us fine diasporic Jews.

Of course, the pre-modern performers of honor-killings will – indeed must – carry out the violent deed themselves, Butler and her post-modern, non-violent performers, however, cannot. They can only empower the forces that seek, openly, to do so violently. They can only identify with aggressors. Would she intentionally stir up genocidal forces against her people? God Forbid! Would she do so in practice by signing petitions and writing denunciations of that allude to a comparison between Israel and the Nazis, and by hanging with people like the gang at Mondoweiss, who have no problem making the analogy? Yes. But as long as it’s not an intentional murder, her hands are clean.

Not surprisingly, so solipsistic a moral approach to the real world of people, expresses itself with striking self-absorption. In her essay of 2000 words, “I” appears 50 times, often followed by irrelevant (but apparently not to her) personal information. The consequences of her deeds, what Summers referred to as the effects of her performance on her own people, apparently carry no weight in her moral calculus. Her good intentions absolve all accidental sins, defend from all criticism.

Nothing illustrates this hot-house morality better than he invocation of her Hungarian family, perished in the Holocaust, to reject the notion that she is anti-Semitic.

For those of us who are descendants of European Jews who were destroyed in the Nazi genocide (my grandmother’s family was destroyed in a small village south of Budapest), it is the most painful insult and injury to be called complicitous with the hatred of Jews or to be called self-hating. And it is all the more difficult to endure the pain of such an allegation when one seeks to affirm what is most valuable in Judaism for thinking about contemporary ethics, including the ethical relation to those who are dispossessed of land and rights of self-determination, to those who seek to keep the memory of their oppression alive, to those who seek to live a life that will be, and must be, worthy of being grieved. [italics mine]

Obviously, given that members of your family perished in the Holocaust, you would find accusations of collaborating with the kind of forces that destroyed them painful. But does that make the criticism a priori wrong? You, apparently, do not feel you need to consider whether you are, “in effect if not in intent” complicitous with Jew-hatred. Your intentions alone matter to you: because you mean to “affirm what is most valuable in Judaism for thinking about contemporary ethics,” those of us who think you’re reckless in your behavior and contributing to Jew-hatred have no right to point this out. On the contrary, we unfairly “seek recourse to… scurrilous and unfounded charges.” Where you look in the mirror and see proof of sincerity, critics might see serious hypocrisy.

But let us ask you a question that you have apparently not considered. Who will grieve your passing? Will your grandmother’s family, and their descendants? Or will the people who seek to “do it again”? Will women, LGBTs, non-Muslims, moderate Muslims, Jews, independent thinkers, believers in the human right and dignity to be free of coercion… mourn your passing, or will they, living in a world animated by a Islamist hatred and aggression, encouraged by Europeans too ashamed to openly espouse such attitudes, whose path you paved with your good intentions, rue the long days you performed your dance of moral narcissism on the world stage? When the consequences of your betraying all those you should be protecting become clear, will the only people who grieve your passing be the nastiest warmongers on the planet? And will they mourn, or laugh at your useful infidelity?

IV. Germany and the Adorno Prize

And Germany. What on earth is their intelligentsia up to? They have a prize dedicated, in Adorno’s memory to promote “the liberal and enlightening spirit” Adorno so decisively and exactingly labored to encourage by stripping away false consciousness. They choose, already well into the second decade of the new and deeply troubled century, to continue to hold up as an example of “cutting edge” intellectual achievement, a poster-woman for moral narcissism who, in abiding (willful) ignorance of the forces opposed to that spirit, has systematically encouraged its worst enemies. It’s of a piece with a European intellectual elite so addicted to their anti-Americanism that they, in utter contempt for their own exceptional intellectual traditions, consider Noam Chomsky the leading American intellectual.

Few things better illustrate the folly and self-destructiveness of “objective” anti-Semitism, than the spectacle of Germany, itself in disarray at the challenge of Islamism, offering as an exemplary model to its intelligent youth, a woman whose scholarship of the real (rather than hoped for) world is as shallow as it is mistaken, who has not done the most elementary work self-criticizing her own and her comrades’ false consciousness.

If there’s anything honest German academics can admit, it’s that they, like the French and others, have no idea how to handle the challenge of Islamism. And although I cannot tell them what to do, I can suggest some things they not do. And one of the most obvious and basic things not to do, is to encourage further precisely the kind of virulent anti-Semitism that produced their last paranoid psychotic episode and which this time, in post-modern rather than pre-modern mode, foments hatred and violence not against their (imagined) enemies, but against their very selves.

A sympathetic outsider might wonder: are Germans so addicted to hearing and believing stories about Jews behaving badly, that they can’t give up such lethal narratives, even when to do so is suicidal?  Do they not understand that in today’s global scene, Jew-baiting is no longer a freebee, not a bit of innocent fun? Or have they become so morally disoriented by their effort at Nie Wieder, that they don’t understand how inadvisable it is to embrace an “Other” that really does want to take over your society, and how dangerous it is to accept Jewish moral narcissists (who are trying to please your worst instincts) as guides to dealing with real moral dilemmas?

If the latter is the case, then please, German intellectuals, wake up! Stop the ideological and moral hemorrhaging before it’s too late.

For the sad and redeeming truth of the Twenty-First century, is that if Europeans truly treasure their progressive inheritance, their spirit of liberal enlightenment, if they truly want the sovereign entities dedicated to protecting all people’s rights and dignity to endure, if they truly desire to “choose life,” and to stay true to their commitment to Nie Wieder, they will have to genuinely overcome their anti-Semitism, and not hide behind anti-Zionism, Islamist anti-Semites, and Jewish useful infidels to indulge their ancient craving for moral Schadenfreude about the Jews.

Not only does Judith Butler fail to contribute to that truly ethical accomplishment, she impedes it. If the dead can weep, Adorno and Butler’s Hungarian ancestors grieve for those of us living in the darkening shadow of her monstrous ethical performativity.

UPDATE: The first person to comment on this issue, months ago, was Clemens Heni:

The German city of Frankfurt awards the “Professor of Parody” and hatred of Israel: Judith Butler

We were doing so well. Writing about economics and politics for the last five months here without once mentioning the US presidential race. But it’s all over. Mitt Romney has given us no choice, wading into the debate about the origins of inequality and prosperity around the world.

Here is what Mitt says:

I was thinking this morning as I prepared to come into this room of a discussion I had across the country in the United States about my perceptions about differences between countries. And as you come here and you see the G.D.P. per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000, and compare that with the G.D.P. per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality.

He continues:

Culture makes all the difference. And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things. One, I recognize the hand of Providence in selecting this place.

Mitt Romney also identifies the origins of his thinking as David Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations  and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (though presumably not the origin of his numbers, which are incorrect; the gap between per capita in Israel and West Bank and Gaza is about tenfold).

Well actually, Jared Diamond doesn’t say much about culture. In fact, his thesis is about how geographic and ecological conditions led to the differential development paths and prosperity among otherwise identical peoples. In fact his theory would predict that Israelis and Palestinians should have identical levels of prosperity.

Actually Romney cites Diamond to contrast him with Landes along precisely these lines.

Readers of this blog and of Why Nations Fail have already heard us inveigh against geographic determinism. Those interested in this debate can start from Jared Diamond’s engaging and critical review of our book in the New York Review of Books, and then look at our letter and Jared’s response . Perhaps it’s just us. But doesn’t Diamond just say that he disagrees with us but without substantiating how he counters our arguments?

In any case, we digress. Mitt Romney is instead taking his cue from David Landes. But as we show in Why Nations Fail, cultural differences cannot explain differing levels of prosperity. Deng Xaioping didn´t change Chinese culture after 1978 to make the economy grow, but he did change economic institutions a lot. Indeed, many cultural differences we see are the outcomes of different institutional choices. This is surely the case between North and South Korea, for example. After all, does Mitt and David think that there were huge cultural differences between the north and the south of the 38th parallel before the separation of Korea into two?

As I’ve argued against Zakaria, the issue is not a simple dichotomy. Let me state three theses:

1) Without cultural foundations (what I call “demotic religiosity“), no one, including the geographically favored Western European continent would have generated modern economies.

2) Even once modern economies have emerged, with both the technological and social blueprints available (and, more recently with the intensification of  globalization), without some kind of cultural preparation, changes in economic institutions will make limited difference (Arab economies).

3) Innovation remains largely the product of specific cultural conditions that favor independent, creative thinking, risk-taking entrepreneurship and a strong learning curve based on the ability to self-criticize (Israel).

Of course the difference between Israel and Palestine is not the same as the two Koreas. It was created by the migration of Jewish people, mostly after World War II. Many came from much more developed parts of the world than Palestine which had endured centuries of debilitating Ottoman and then British colonialism. They brought more advanced technologies and high levels of human capital, which in themselves were the result of the institutions and incentives that they faced. As Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein point out in their book The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History , the origins of these very high human capital levels are in the historical adoption of institutions in Jewish society.

I’d consider this much more a matter of culture than institutions, which are the product of that culture. Schools are institutions, but the culture of those schools determines their contribution to the society. Madrassas where students learn the Qur’an by heart are schools, but they hardly contribute to a modern economy. What distinguishes Jewish schools, both religious and secular, is a culture of disagreement and controversy which prizes the ability to give and receive rebuke (tochachot). As the Ethics of the Fathers puts it, one of the features of a Torah scholar is that he “loves rebuke.”

This is one of the most important and difficult traits to foster. Most cultures, even ones that have escaped the heavy gravitational pull of “honor-shame” dynamics, have difficulty with open discord. They prefer consensus, in which the egos of “big men” are not bruised by public contradiction. Of course such societies are vulnerable to “Emperor’s New Clothes” scenarios in which, afraid to break with consensus, people line up to confirm patent falsehoods.

This is where the roots of Israel’s current prosperity lie. They have further been strengthened by Israel’s integration into the world economy, which has enabled it to continue the process of technology transfer and encouraged trade and investment.

Again, these are cultural matters. The UN study of Arab economic development emphasized the appalling lack of translations into Arabic. As a culture, the Arab world is insulated by their language not only from other cultures but, some pre-post-moderns would argue, from reality. Israeli culture – technological, intellectual, business – is wide open to foreign influences.

Why hasn’t this prosperity spilled over to the Palestinians since the British left in 1948? A definitive answer would need to be based on much more research, but a plausible one comes from the reaction of Saeb Erekat, an aide to President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, to Mitt´s remarks:

this man doesn’t realize that the Palestinian economy cannot reach its potential because there is an Israeli occupation.

It seems to us that Mr. Erekat, not Mitt Romney, has the right idea.

What a sad and uninformed cop-out. As I’ve pointed out in more detail elsewhere, Erekat’s scape-goating of the “occupation,” which has arguably done much more good for the Palestinian economy than damage (compare the economy from 1948-67 under Jordanian rule with the period 1967-1987). The difficulties and impediments imposed by the “occupation” – checkpoints, barriers, blockades – are specifically a response to the hate-mongering terror campaign generated by a radically zero-sum Palestinian political culture. Erekat won’t own that element of the story because it might mean he’d be forced to do something about it. But why would intelligent and free people in the West indulge his radical lack of self-criticism?

We end this by agreeing with what Sandeep Baliga and Jeff Ely say on their blog . Mitt should do some more reading.

I can think of some other people who could afford to do some more reading before taking public positions.

For a formal review of the book by Lazar Berman, who used to post at the Augean Stables, see “The Unmaking of Gershom Gorenberg.”

Fisked below.

How to Save Israel
The three steps that could rescue it from endless conflict and international ostracism.
By Gershom Gorenberg|Posted Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2011, at 6:59 AM ET

For Israel to establish itself again as a liberal democracy, it must make three changes.

It’s pretty revealing that Gorenberg thinks Israel needs to establish itself again as a “liberal democracy.” He apparently thinks that the first round ended in 1967. That means that the key moment in a democracy – when an opposition group can be voted into power – which occurred for the first time in 1977, doesn’t even count, along with the in some cases excessive commitment to radical democratic principles of Aharon Barak’s Supreme Court (1978-2006). As will become apparent later on, this schema has a great deal to do with his moral perfectionism and, tangentially I think, his concern for what others think, an aspect of his thought revealed in his concern about “international ostracism.”

The following is adapted from Gershom Gorenberg’s new book The Unmaking of Israel. Read the earlier excerpts about why, exactly, Israel ended up losing most of its Arab population in 1948 and about why a new kind of old-time Judaism has taken hold in Israel.

I write from an Israel with a divided soul. It is not only defined by its contradictions; it is at risk of being torn apart by them. It is a country with uncertain borders and a government that ignores its own laws. Its democratic ideals, much as they have helped shape its history, or on the verge of being remembered among the false political promises of 20th-century ideologies.

What will Israel be in five years, or 20? Will it be the Second Israeli Republic, a thriving democracy within smaller borders? Or a pariah state where one ethnic group rules over another? Or a territory marked on the map, between the river and the sea, where the state has been replaced by two warring communities? Will it be the hub of the Jewish world, or a place that most Jews abroad prefer not to think about? The answers depend on what Israel does now.

For Israel to establish itself again as a liberal democracy, it must make three changes. First, it must end the settlement enterprise, end the occupation, and find a peaceful way to partition the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

Second, it must divorce state and synagogue—freeing the state from clericalism, and religion from the state.

Third and most basically, it must graduate from being an ethnic movement to being a democratic state in which all citizens enjoy equality.

Proposing these changes provokes several reflexive objections, inside Israel and beyond. First, many Israeli Jews translate any call for full equality of all citizens as a demand that Israel cease to be a Jewish state. The supposed choice is a false one. Israel can be a liberal democracy and still fulfill the justifiable desire of Jews, as an ethnic national group, for self-determination.

The liberal meaning of self-determination begins with the rights of individuals. As Israeli political thinker Chaim Gans argues, it expresses the justifiable desire of members of an ethnic group to maintain a basic aspect of their humanity and personal identity: their culture. To live in their culture and preserve it, they need a place where that culture shapes the public sphere. The natural and must justifiable place for that to happen is their homeland, or in part of it.

But in the real world, in contrast to utopias, individual rights clash. The classic metaphor for this is the man crying fire in a crowded theater: Dogmatically preserving his right of expression robs others of their right to stay alive. Nation-states can be liberal democracies, but each faces the constant challenge of balancing the right of self-determination and other rights.

Israel does not have to give up being a Jewish state. It does need to establish a very different balance of rights. In a country with a significant Jewish majority, it is reasonable for the usual language of the public sphere to be Hebrew. It is reasonable for offices to close on Jewish holidays, because most people would not show up for work on those days anyway. It is also reasonable for the kitchens in government institutions—such as the army—to be kosher, since this preserves the right of Jews who observe religious dietary laws to participate fully in society.  It is not acceptable for the government to favor Jews in allocation of jobs, land, or school buildings, or for it to prevent Muslim citizens from maintaining a mosque in a mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhood. Nor is it acceptable for the government to condition the rights of non-Jewish citizens on their swearing fealty to this particular balance of rights.

A second objection is that creating two states between the river and the sea is no longer possible. Settlements are too large, Israel and the occupied territories too entangled; the tipping point has been passed. All that is possible now is a one-state solution.

Especially outside of Israel, this practical argument often hides a psychological tendency: even progressives sometimes fight the last battle, especially if it was a heroic fight for which they were born too late. One person, one vote was the answer in South Africa, they say; therefore it is the solution for Israel.

In fact, a one-state arrangement would solve little and make many things worse. Imagine that tomorrow Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip were reconstituted as the Eastern Mediterranean Republic, and elections were held. With the current population, the parliament would be split almost evenly between Jews and Palestinians. One of the first issues that the parliament and judiciary would face is the settlements that Israel built on privately owned Palestinian property, whether it was requisitioned, stolen, or declared state land over Palestinian objections. Palestinian claimants would demand return of their property. The problem of evacuating settlers wouldn’t vanish. Rather, it would divide the new state on communal lines.

Likewise for refugees. Palestinian legislators would demand that Israel’s Law of Return be extended to cover Palestinians returning to their homeland. Jewish politicians would oppose the move, which would reduce their community to a threatened minority. Palestinians would demand the return of property lost in 1948 and perhaps the rebuilding of destroyed villages.  Except for the drawing of borders, virtually every question that bedevils Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations would become a domestic problem, setting the new political entity aflame.

Issues not at the center of today’s diplomacy would also set the two communities at odds. Israel has a post-industrial Western economy; The West Bank and Gaza are underdeveloped. Financing development in majority-Palestinian areas and bringing Palestinians into Israel’s social-welfare network would require Jews to pay higher taxes or receive fewer services. But the engine of the Israeli economy is high-tech, an entirely portable industry. Both individuals and companies would leave, crippling the new shared economy. Meanwhile, two nationalities who have desperately sought a political frame for cultural and social independence would wrestle over control of language, art, street names, and schools. Psychologically, it would be a country with two resentful minorities and no majority.

Even in the best case, the outcome would be the continued existence of separate Jewish and Palestinian political parties. And even the more liberal-leaning parties of each community would be hard-pressed to bridge the divide to form stable coalitions. Israel would become a second Belgium, perpetually incapable of forming a stable government. In the more likely case, the political tensions would ignite as violence. The transition to a single state would mark a new stage in the conflict. For a harsh example of the potential fluctuation between political stalemate and civil war, Palestinians and Jews need only look northward to Lebanon.

A single state could easily be the result of Israel failing to make any choices. It would not be a solution—even a workable arrangement, which is what politics normally offers in place of solutions. It would be a nightmare: another of the places marked on the globe as a country, in which two or more communities do battle while the most educated or well-connected members of each look for refuge elsewhere.

A third objection to a two-state solution, from the Israeli right and its overseas supporters, is that it requires Israel to sacrifice too much for peace. This reflects an old habit of thought in which territory is the coin that Israel reluctantly pays for a peace agreement.

It’s true that peace is an essential end in itself. But Israel must also give up land to reestablish itself as a state and a democracy. It needs to put a border back on the map. Within that border, the government needs to rule by the consent of the governed. It needs to restore the rule of law and end the ethnic conflict.

Peace with the Palestinians is a means for achieving these goals. It provides the way for Israel to end its grip from outside on the Gaza Strip and to leave the West Bank safely. “Hold too much, and you will hold nothing,” the Talmud says. If the state of Israel tries to continue holding the West Bank, there will be no state.

9-11 and the dysfunctional “aughts”

In the years before 2000, as the director of the ephemeral Center for Millennial Studies, I scanned the global horizon for signs of apocalyptic activity, that is, for movements of people who believed that now was the time of a total global transformation. As I did so, I became aware of such currents of belief among Muslims, some specifically linked to the year 2000, all predominantly expressing the most dangerous of all apocalyptic beliefs – active cataclysmic – that is the belief that this transition from evil to good demands massive destruction, and that we true believers are the agents of that destruction, warriors of God, Mujahidin. Death cults, cults of martyrdom and mass murder… destroying the world to save it.

Nor were these beliefs magical, like the far better known Christian, but largely passive-cataclysmic, Rapture scenarios where one must await God’s intervention. They had practical means and goals. In the same year 1989, that Bin Laden drove the Russians from Afghanistan, Khoumeini issued a global fatwah against Rushdie, and the West trembled. Iran and Afghanistan, however, like so many utopias born of such death cults, proved terrifyingly dystopic – acid in the faces of unveiled women. But these bitter new heavens on earth also showed remarkable staying power… and spreading power. So when Bin Laden struck with such spectacular force on 9-11, he took his Jihad, already declared in 1998 against America (the “Second ‘Ad”), to the next level. He put deeds to words.

We, in the West, were taken totally by surprise. Who are these people? Why haven’t we heard about them before? (NB: the blogosphere, which first “took off” in the early “aughts” is largely the product of a vast number of people turning to cyberspace for information that their mainstream news media had conspicuously failed to deliver.)

What was the logic of such a monstrously cruel attack that targeted civilians? A warning shot to pay attention and address grievances? Or the opening shot in a battle for world domination? Was this primarily an act of retribution for wrongs suffered, i.e., somewhat rational? Or global revenge at global humiliation, i.e., a bottomless pit of grievance?

Some of us said, “What can they possibly believe to make them hate so?” Others, “What did we do to make them hate us so?” And while both are legitimate questions, over the last decade, the “aughts” (‘00s), we have split into two camps, each of which will not allow the other question’s consideration.

A Frenchwoman said to me in 2003, “after 9-11, there are two kinds of people: those who understand that we are at war, and those in denial.” Some pointed to a culture of genocidal incitement in the ideology of this religious enemy. They identified the totalistic reasoning, and warned that what these Mujahidin said in their own language was radically different from how “moderate” Muslims portrayed them to the West.

Others dismissed and downplayed these issues, pointing to rational and moderate trends among Muslims, and insisted that the vast majority are peaceful and moderate who can be reached by dialogue, and that rounding up the tiny percentage who are terrorists can be, and should be, a matter of criminal proceedings. They showed more concern for the tendency of fascist war-mongering movements to appear in Western culture than deal with far more advanced such trends in Muslim political culture; they favored a moral relativism that permits one to spread the blame. Some showed a near-messianic will to self-criticize: “Aren’t we guilty of terrorism when we let people starve to death?” opined Derrida. Others delighted in moral inversion: Chomsky “reminded” us that the USA is the world’s worst terrorist. After all, those alleged civilians were really little Eichmanns, cogs in the wheel of a genocide of “people of color.”

At one extreme, then, we find racists and xenophobes who want to get rid of all Muslims; at the other, oikophobes, who don’t even believe there’s a Muslim-inspired terror, but that 9-11 – the whole threat – was invented by fascist Western politicians looking to establish their dictatorships. “My side right or wrong,” vs. “Their side right or wrong.” Both end up supporting fascism – ours, or theirs.

By and large, we tend to label these two directions of political thinking “right and left.” Using this distinction, however, reflects primarily the “policy” postures involved rather than serious political thought. Since the “left” adopts a discourse and posture of accommodation, it seems like the party of peace and understanding; anyone pointing out the evidence for implacable enmity, and the counter-indicated effects of pursuing peace with such a foe, seems like the party of war.

Now if it were merely a matter of different emphases, this could be a productive tension. Indeed, I’m convinced that there are a host of rightfully troubled thinkers who, despite strong liberal and progressive impulses, nonetheless acknowledge the evidence and want to talk about it. There is a hugely creative and productive conversation still waiting to take place, one that would include people from all faiths and ethnicities, of people genuinely committed to societies committed to the freedom and dignity of all their people. One that was not afraid of its own shadow.

But during the aughts that conversation has not place: on the contrary, the “left” has asserted a strong grip on the public sphere, exiling those who begin to pay attention to the problems with Islam rather than focus on the sins of the West, muffling both their voice, and the Muslim voices to which they point. I remember Fox News interviewing me on 9-11. When I identified this as part of an apocalyptic global Jihad, the interviewer informed me that that was impossible because – here quoting President Bush, “Islam is a religion of Peace.” They never played the interview and didn’t come to interview me again.

Those who doubt the wisdom of pursuing messianic demands for self-criticism and openness on the West at this time, who suggest we exercise our free speech and lay some of the moral onus here at the feet of Muslim spokesmen, who themselves so loudly denounce our racism and prejudice, but tolerate so much among their own – such people have rapidly found themselves labeled “right wing” and exiled from the “mainstream.” “If I speak of Muslim anti-Semitism,” confessed one French colleague to me in 2005, “it’s the last invitation to speak at a conference that I’ll get.”

As a result of this animosity, the adversarial “right-left” axis has reached dysfunctional proportions. The “left” views the right as at best mean-spirited, increasingly as malevolent; the “right” views the left as traitors and fools, as useful infidels. And these two camps now so bitterly speak about each other, that the presidential campaign of 2012 looks like a nightmare of inappropriate candidates. And in the meantime, our disarray fills the sails of our apocalyptic enemy. As one of my friends said to me recently, “I thought that Mayan 2012 stuff was ridiculous. Now I see how global disaster really could happen by then.”

And among the elements that played into making this situation far worse, one of the cruelest winds blew from Europe and from the “progressive left.” It’s worth remembering that the week before 9-11, the UN had assembled at Durban all the major “human rights” NGOs, representing the “best of the left,” to fight racism world-wide, an assembly that turned into of demopath’s delight, an orgy of hatred aimed at two Western democracies, by a voting bloc with members who still engage in slavery. When the “Magnificent 19” struck, they had every reason to believe that they would be cheered on by a Western elite, a global tribe, called “left wing”, inebriated with anti-Americanism.

And they were, to some extent, right. Although the initial European response to 9-11 was sympathy for the US – the next day, Le Monde wrote “Nous sommes tous des américains” – it did not take long for anti-Americanism to emerge. Ten days later, Jean Baudrillard wrote a masterpiece of what Nietzsche would call ressentiment in a Le Monde: “It’s natural to want to strike at such a suffocating hegemon as the USA… They did it, we wanted it.” According to Nidra Poller, within weeks of the event, le tout Paris resounded with this kind of Schadenfreude. “America had it coming.” When Michael Moore’s sophomoric Fahrenheit 9-11 came to Europe, crowds stood and cheered.

No good deed goes unpunished by the envious. The French find it easier to forgive the Germans for conquering them, than the Americans for saving them, twice. When David Marash resigned as editor in chief of Al Jazeera English because it was so anti-American, he commented that it was the British, not the Arabs, who were the worst – and by that he meant the products of a media elite that clusters around a BBC-Guardian nexus.

The anti-American left, like courtiers in a 21^st century production of the emperor’s new clothes, embraced Jihadis who struggled so mightily against American hegemony. The “peace” rallies of 2003 against Bush’s war in Iraq brought the pacifist left and the Mujahidin together in common cause. One Pakistani participant in Islamabad wore a headband with Kill Jews; Berkeley radicals would not be outclassed in their demonizing. And yet, too few were disturbed by the oxymoron of an anti-Semitic peace rally. They failed to note that in apocalyptic politics, my enemy’s enemy is my enemy.

When Bin Laden’s men took out the twin towers, they, in a typical act of cognitive egocentrism, thought they would bring down the arrogant and empty tyrant of the US. What they did accomplish, however unintentionally, was to fend their foe – us – into two self-recriminating and dysfunctional halves. These halves, who so inaccurately identify themselves as “right” and “left,” seem to despise each other more than they do an enemy who passionately hates both of them – us! – a foe that hates all we collectively believe in about those messy and productive societies that treasure tolerance and dignity and freedom.

Demotic polities that protect everyone’s rights and request everyone’s disciplined participation, are rare historical accomplishments. They’re based on the difficult civil meme: “whoever is right, my side or not.” They need high levels of ability among their citizens for self-criticism, compromise, positive-sum behavior, and mutual trust and respect. Eli Sagan, one of the more astute observers of these issues notes: “Democracy is a miracle, considering human psychological disabilities.” However imperfect our democracies, they are as valuable as they are vulnerable.

Among the many memes widely circulating in Western circles, one of the most absurdly noxious is “Who are we to judge?” All the great progressive victories of demotic polities – equality before the law, freedom of religion and dissent, respect for those disadvantaged by “might makes right,” women, workers, weak – arises from harsh value judgments on the authoritarianism that exploits them: patriarchy, exploitation, cruelty. Not judging too quickly – admirable; not judging at all – folly. We end up ferociously judging ourselves, and giving others, whose values and motives are far more base, a free pass. In doing so we illustrate Pascale’s warning, “the more we want to be angels, the more we become beasts.”

So when, in order to seem peaceful, we abandon non-westerners to brutal political cultures in the name of some quasi-religious commitment to cultural relativism, we betray everything we claim we support. Such attitudes seem particularly inadvisable when facing an apocalyptic foe dedicated to the destruction of all our progressive values.

If the only people who fight Islamic triumphalism are really on the right, their solutions will obviously favor harsh responses. Liberals and progressives would, presumably, struggle harder to come up with more creative and less violent forms of effective resistance. So it constitutes a catastrophic loss of creative energy to have a “left” that believes that somehow, if only we were nicer to Muslims, they’d be nicer to us, one that views as an alarming embarrassment anyone who points out the Islamic contribution to the problem, as a saboteur of this effort at placation, an “enemy of peace.” It also represents a colossal betrayal of genuine Muslims moderates who really do want to live in a vibrant civil society that respects everyone; where Muslims respect infidels, and infidels respect Islam.

If the aughts were a debacle of culture wars in the West and a period of growing radicalization in Islamic circles, let the teens be a period when finally, we turn around this self-destructive behavior. The well-being of billions of people on this planet depend on our commitment to Western progressive values.

In my book on millennialism I have a chapter devoted to Marx in which, among other less than flattering remarks, I note the following about his “dialectical” thinking:

The totalizing discourse operates as a kind of scientistic magic, making millennial promises about total liberation—“complete” control over the instruments of production and universal intercourse. But Marx offered this promise not to the intellectuals of his age, but specifically to those then suffering the most from the throes of industrialization.

. . . Marxist revolutionaries adopt Hegel’s dialectic to prove that each step downward into deeper misery simultaneously and inevitably hastened the coming of paradise. “Imperialist” wars and “capitalist” depressions became, for the apocalyptic Marxists, what the “fortunate fall” and the “signs of the End” are for Christians, the same gratifying dialectic that Bakùnin had in mind when he announced that “the passion for destruction is a creative passion.”[1]

With such a promise comes a fury to console and soothe the agony of one’s current condition—the very crushing pains the laborer now experiences will be transformed into the opposite, the very totality of their alienation will make it possible for all to achievecomplete self-activity.

And behind the apocalyptic historical analysis lay an enticing millennial premise and promise: a “new man” would emerge on the other side of this wrenching process of alienation. Just as the French Revolution had promised a new citizen, so the Marxists promised a “new comrade”—an interesting shift, given the sad fact that “fraternity” was the first of the promises to vanish from the millennial formula of liberté, égalité, fraternité.[2] Here, over the course of the nineteenth century, revolutionaries availed themselves of John Locke’s theories about man as a blank slate who had no “innate ideas,” that is, no innate character, that rather sensory perceptions and experiences mold man. Whatever Locke believed he meant, both Enlightenment thinkers and subsequent radicals seized eagerly on this nurture versus nature perspective to believe anything possible.[3]

As in the case of many millennial texts, this one seems far less compelling with hindsight; indeed, these expectations were and still are completely unrealistic.[4] But, “[o]ne may poke holes in the theories . . . mock any number of embarrassing contradictions. None of that matters. It is the myth, as Sorel saw, and its inspirational powers that count. And apocalyptic Marxism is the perfect myth.”[5] One of the reasons that Marx succeeded in winning so many fervent disciples was not despite the bizarre reasoning here displayed, but because of it.[6]

[1]. Mendel, Vision and Violence, 153.

[2]. By the time of the Directory (1794–99), it appears in the variant: “Liberté, égalité, propriété.” See, for example, a print of the three directors (Barras, La Révellière, and Reubell), after the coup-d’état of the 18 of Fructidor (4 September 1797) entitled La trinité républicaine, BNP, Estampes, reproduced in François Furet and Denis Richet, La Révolution du 9-Thermidor au 18-Brumaire (Paris: Hachette, 1966), 123. See also Mona Ozouf, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” in Lieux de Mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, 3 vol. (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 3:4353–89.

[3]. Richard Pipes discusses the link between Locke and the Communists in Russian Revolution, 1899–1919 (London: Harvill Press, 1997), 125–36; see above on the French revolutionaries’ use of this notion, chapter 9 n. 87.

[4]. For an attempt at a sympathetic but realistic review of the completely impracticable assumptions that underlie so much of Marx’s thought about the Communist state to come, see Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 521–27. He repeatedly refers to the elements of Marx’s assumptions and allusions that are “extremely” (522) and “irredeemably Utopian” (526), of coming from “Cloud-cuckoo-land” (524). See also Axel Van den Berg’s characterization of Marx’s salvific vision as an “absurdly bucolic . . . utterly cloudy millennium.” The Immanent Utopia: From Marxism on the State to the State of Marxism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988) 56-7,

[5]. Mendel, Vision and Violence, 152.

[6]. “Such utopian images of the future command society, however scattered and fragmentary in the writings of Marx and Engels, form an essential component of Marxist theory—and one that is essential for understanding the appeals of Marxism in the modern world.” Maurice Meisner, “Marxism and Utopianisn” in Marxism, Maosim and Utopianism, Eight Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); see also Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, “Marx and Engels in the Landscape of Utopia” in Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1979), 697–716.

I also, in a subsequent chapter on the Russian revolution, note the way Western intellectuals dealt with the cognitive dissonance of the failed communist millennium:

Fellow Travelers and the Cognitive Dissonance of Failed Revolutions

The reaction of Western Marxists to the Soviet debacle, namely, the length and depth of their denial that the dream had turned into a nightmare, has astounded and puzzled most intellectuals not in thrall to Communist ideology. This is particular true since some of these people, like George Bernard Shaw and Jean-Paul Sartre, were both brilliant and otherwise known for their mordant observations on people’s “bad faith.” And yet, just like believers incapable of allowing the evidence of apocalyptic prophecy’s failure to enter their consciousness, these people could not admit to themselves or anyone else that the millennial experiment in which they had invested so much (intellectual) energy could have failed.[1]

… these pilgrims proved capable of the most extraordinary ability to ignore whatever anomalies they observed in their terrestrial paradise. George Bernard Shaw’s visit to Moscow in 1931 illustrates some of the psychology involved. A devastating critic of Western capitalism, he checked his skepticism at the border, along with the numerous tins of canned meat that his friends had given him to bring to their starving Russian friends, and arrived oblivious to all that surrounded him, including the dismay of the Russians when he told them about the jettisoned cans of meat since he “knew” there was no famine in the socialist paradise.[5] Russia served not as a case of the “real world,” subject to his penetrating criticism, but the foil for his own dislike of the world he inhabited, no matter how it welcomed the products of his socialist genius. Despite the horror that surrounded him in Russia, he came back with glowing reports. As Russell noted, Shaw “fell victim to adulation of the Soviet government and suddenly lost the power of criticism and of seeing though humbug if it came from Moscow.”[6]

[1]. One of the significant exceptions was Bertrand Russell, who, among other things coined the expression the “fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed,” in his 1937 essay “The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed,”Unpopular Essays (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950). For the broader phenomenon, see  David Caute, The Fellow Travelers: A Postscript to the Enlightenment (New York: Macmillan, 1973); Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1998).

[5]. Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937), 428–35.

[6]. Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956), 59; cited in Hollander, Political Pilgrims, 139.

Now, too late to add to the footnotes, Terry Eagelton, one of the major figures in the abuse of post-modernism for political purposes, comes up with a book entitled Why Marx was Right. I fisk his article for the Chronicle of Higher Education in which he summarizes his argument and tries to rehabilitate Marx for a modern progressive audience. I put Eagelton’s article in bold to distinguish from other quotes I add to this post.

For other excellent critiques, see Ron Radosh, Marx and the American Academy: When Will the High Priests ever Learn? and John Gray, The Return of an Illusion.

April 10, 2011
In Praise of Marx

By Terry Eagleton

Praising Karl Marx might seem as perverse as putting in a good word for the Boston Strangler. Were not Marx’s ideas responsible for despotism, mass murder, labor camps, economic catastrophe, and the loss of liberty for millions of men and women? Was not one of his devoted disciples a paranoid Georgian peasant by the name of Stalin, and another a brutal Chinese dictator who may well have had the blood of some 30 million of his people on his hands?

That’s much more likely 70 million. See Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (2010) on the “great leap forward” alone which brought on over 45 million untimely deaths. One of the comments Dikötter highlights is the determination of Mao to downplay the number of deaths, something that, even as he pretends to admit the truth, Eagelton continues to do.

The truth is that Marx was no more responsible for the monstrous oppression of the communist world than Jesus was responsible for the Inquisition.

For someone who has contributed so much to post-modern decentering of the notion of “truth” to begin a sentence with “the truth is…” should give pause to wonder what he’s up to. Moreover, to make the “truth” a reference to a very bad analogy is even more striking. The time between Jesus and the Inquisition was about 1200 years, the time between Marx and the Totalitarian Russian revolution is less than half a century, and the links between Marx’s angry active cataclysmic apocalyptic impatience and the sins of his epigones defies any comparison to the radical difference between Jesus and the Inquisition, so memorably depicted by Ivan in Dostoyevski’s The Brother’s Karamozov. See below for the rather distressing links between Marx and the dialectic’s “shift to the East”.

For one thing, Marx would have scorned the idea that socialism could take root in desperately impoverished, chronically backward societies like Russia and China.

I’m not sure where he gets this idea. Marx should have been scornful, but it’s not clear that he was. Here’s Marx writing in the International Herald Tribune(1853), on the Taiping Revolution which eventually killed over 25 million Chinese and was led by a religious megalomaniac who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus, God’s Chinese son (subject of chapter 8 of my book).

[I]t may safely be augured that the Chinese revolution will throw the spark into the overloaded mine of the present industrial system and cause the explosion of the long-prepared general crisis . . . It would be a curious spectacle, that of China sending disorder into the Western world.[1]

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[1]. Marx and Engels, MEW 12:98; cited in John Newsinger, “The Taiping Peasant Revolt,” Monthly Review 52, no. 5 (October 2000): 29. Compare Foucault’s response to the Khoumeini Revolution in Iran (below, chapter 15, n. 117).

Marx was a proponent of the politique du pire, the notion that the worse it got the better for the workings of the “dialectic.” He scorned nothing that promised to “set the spark.”

If it did, then the result would simply be what he called “generalized scarcity,” by which he means that everyone would now be deprived, not just the poor. It would mean a recycling of “the old filthy business”—or, in less tasteful translation, “the same old crap.”

Actually, partly as a result of the magical thinking of the dialectic (when alienation becomes total, then the transformation will produce a perfect world), people like Lenin and Trotsky actually believed that, once the revolution in motion, a backward country like Russia could surpass the West in a matter of months [sic!]:

The reorganization of Russia on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the nationalization of the banks and large-scale industry, coupled with exchange of products in kind between the towns and the small-peasant consumers’ societies, is quite feasible economically, provided we are assured a few months in which to work in peace. And such a reorganization will render socialism invincible both in Russia and all over the world, and at the same time will create a solid economic basis for a mighty workers’ and peasants’ Red Army.[1]

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[1]. Thesis 20, written 7 January 1918; published inPravda 34 (24 February 1918); in Lenin, Collected Works, 26:442–50; trans. Yuri Sdobnikov and George Hanna.

In the book, I analyze how serious Lenin was about this “great leap forward” and the kind of magical millennial thinking that lay behind this Marxist version of Paul’s “twinkling of an eye” (1 Corinthians 15:51–52).

Marxism is a theory of how well-heeled capitalist nations might use their immense resources to achieve justice and prosperity for their people.

This is classic retrospective narrative. For Marx there were no “well-heeled” capitalist nations. They were all on the brink of collapse. If one were to restate this from Marx’s perspective, rather than that of a well-heeled pomo Marxist apologist, one might say:

Marxism is a theory [read: fantasy] about how the technology that Capitalists have deployed with unparalleled effectiveness, will inevitably [sic] become the possession of the proletariat and thereby achieve justice and prosperity for the (now universal) working class.

Eagelton tries here – rather dishonestly in the name of Marx – to appeal to the (completely unforseen) success of capitalist countries (industrial and post-industrial West) to turn their wealth in the service of the poor and disadvantaged. Perhaps a good cause (whatever the limits on its possibilities – eg, end of poverty may be an impossible millennial dream for humans), but with only the vaguest connection to Marxist analysis.

It is not a program by which nations bereft of material resources, a flourishing civic culture, a democratic heritage, a well-evolved technology, enlightened liberal traditions, and a skilled, educated work force might catapult themselves into the modern age.

In the book, I discuss the tendency of people to rewrite the story of failed apocalyptic prophecies and millennial projects in the “retrospective perfect,” or what I call ex post defectu, “from out of the failure.” Here Eagelton offers us a democratic Marx, fan of “flourishing civic cultures and democratic heritages” when he had nothing but contempt for the kind of reformist ideologies that contributed to just such developments.

Marx certainly wanted to see justice and prosperity thrive in such forsaken spots. He wrote angrily and eloquently about several of Britain’s downtrodden colonies, not least Ireland and India. And the political movement which his work set in motion has done more to help small nations throw off their imperialist masters than any other political current.

I welcome readers’ comments on this last statement. My sense is that the political movement he set in motion has done more to make the “overthrowing” of imperialist masters into the replication/intensification of the oppression of the newly “freed” people than anything else.

Yet Marx was not foolish enough to imagine that socialism could be built in such countries without more-advanced nations flying to their aid. And that meant that the common people of those advanced nations had to wrest the means of production from their rulers and place them at the service of the wretched of the earth.

Huh? This sounds a lot like the liberal, post-war, de-colonializing efforts of the West to help the rest of the world industrialize. It’s not Marx.

If this had happened in 19th-century Ireland, there would have been no famine to send a million men and women to their graves and another two or three million to the far corners of the earth.

There is a sense in which the whole of Marx’s writing boils down to several embarrassing questions: Why is it that the capitalist West has accumulated more resources than human history has ever witnessed, yet appears powerless to overcome poverty, starvation, exploitation, and inequality?

This is only embarrassing when one mistakes technological prowess for omnipotence, a megalomanic tendency of many people in the 19th century, what I call in the book, “Promethean millennialism.” As Marx himself admitted (in processing the failure of the 1848 revolutions): “Men make their history, but they do not do so freely . . .”[1]

[1]. Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Selected Works, 1:247; translation revised by Kosselleck.

Articulated in a slightly more modest form (i.e., non-millennial) it certainly is a valid question to ask: how do we,  in the modern West, share our remarkable, unprecedented wealth with those, domestic and abroad, who are less fortunate? (I think much of the discussion of medical coverage for everyone in the USA gets framed in these terms: how can a nation as rich as the USA have citizens who cannot get decent health care?)

But the answers to these problems are not as simple as we might think, and the millennial notion that we can abolish hunger the world over is not as obviously simple as we might think. Abolishing hunger is clearly “good” – who would argue with that? – and industrial society can produce unheard of quantities of food. But to take that production for granted, to assume that because we have never known real, life-threatening hunger, it is a norm that we can extend to all mankind overlooks the extraordinary nature of our condition. In pre-modern societies, famines came once or twice a decade, and peasants repeatedly had to make decisions that affected the life or death of their family members in order to save enough seed grain for the next year.

Hunger and the search for food are embedded in our human evolutionary make-up, and we seek to abolish these laws at our own peril. This hardly means we show no compassion for the hungry – right now in the horn of Africa, for example, or, when I was a child, in China, India, Biafra – but to imagine that we can abolish hunger by dint of our technology and good intentions is precisely a millennial fantasy which, in its failed attempt, will produce (and has produced), unintended consequences that may not be so attractive.

For anyone writing responsibly about Marx in the 21st Century (certainly not the case with Eagelton), the question should be phrased as follows:

Why is it that every time Marxist have tried to more equitably distribute the accumulated resources of the West (and generate still more), they have done far worse that the Capitalist West, and rather than overcoming, increasing poverty, starvation, exploitation, and inequality in their very effort to eliminate these blights on humanity?

That is the meditation that well-meaning people today, who all too often think that good intentions are all you need in order to be “doing good in the world” need to think about. Urgently.

What are the mechanisms by which affluence for a minority seems to breed hardship and indignity for the many? Why does private wealth seem to go hand in hand with public squalor? Is it, as the good-hearted liberal reformist suggests, that we have simply not got around to mopping up these pockets of human misery, but shall do so in the fullness of time? Or is it more plausible to maintain that there is something in the nature of capitalism itself which generates deprivation and inequality, as surely as Charlie Sheen generates gossip?

This, more than anything, gets to the core of why (vulgar, well-heeled) Marxists (like Eagelton) are such bad thinkers. The obsession with Capitalism as the source of exploitation, the idea that Capitalist societies are somehow peculiarly given to private wealth and public squalor – compare the worst of the US with Egypt, Calcutta, Mexico City, etc. – is just bizarre. It’s something in the nature of human nature that produces these inequities (libido dominandi anyone?). Indeed, and this is one of the things that confounded Marx’s expectations and sent Marxist scurrying eastward, capitalist societies have done more for the material well-being of commoners than any other societies on record… alas for the radical dreamers who want to point the finger at their own society.

Marx was the first thinker to talk in those terms. This down-at-heel émigré Jew,

The idea that Marx was Jewish is, at least as here formulated, rather bizarre. Both parents converted to Lutheranism, Marx was baptized at six years old, and raised as an “enlightened” Christian (with all the prejudices towards Jews that such “enlightenment” entailed).

a man who once remarked that nobody else had written so much about money and had so little, bequeathed us the language in which the system under which we live could be grasped as a whole. Its contradictions were analyzed, its inner dynamics laid bare, its historical origins examined, and its potential demise foreshadowed.

To put it mildly, this is a fairly sycophantic account (and poorly written) of what Marx offers us of useful analysis, perhaps best illustrated by the final remark about “potential demise foreshadowed.” I guess I’d have to read Eagelton’s book to find out just what he thinks Marx’s analysis offers that so valuable. If someone wants to help out with this, I’ll read a summary.

This is not to suggest for a moment that Marx considered capitalism as simply a Bad Thing, like admiring Sarah Palin or blowing tobacco smoke in your children’s faces.

Eagelton’s idea of a “Bad Thing” is so grievously petty (we are talking about the cruel oppression of vast numbers of people), and putting admiring Palin together with blowing smoke in your child’s face as examples, puts him firmly in the camp of “group mind.” Anyone who disagrees with him, no matter how thoughtful, is clearly either a fool, or a”a Bad Thing.”

On the contrary, he was extravagant in his praise for the class that created it, a fact that both his critics and his disciples have conveniently suppressed. No other social system in history, he wrote, had proved so revolutionary. In a mere handful of centuries, the capitalist middle classes had erased almost every trace of their feudal foes from the face of the earth. They had piled up cultural and material treasures, invented human rights, emancipated slaves, toppled autocrats, dismantled empires, fought and died for human freedom, and laid the basis for a truly global civilization. No document lavishes such florid compliments on this mighty historical achievement as The Communist Manifesto, not even The Wall Street Journal.

Eagelton’s right that Marx has a great admiration for the accomplishments of the Bourgoisie which he expresses in The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.[3].

[3]. Marx and Engels, “Communist Manifesto,” in Marx-Engels Reader, 476.

There is, however, nothing in Marx about the Bourgeoisie “inventing human rights, emancipating slaves, toppling autocrats, dismantling empires, fighting and dying for human freedom. This is utterly anachronistic, turn-of-the-millennium human-rights palaver, designed to convince the current crop of moral narcissists that Marx is on their side.

That, however, was only part of the story. There are those who see modern history as an enthralling tale of progress, and those who view it as one long nightmare. Marx, with his usual perversity, thought it was both. Every advance in civilization had brought with it new possibilities of barbarism. The great slogans of the middle-class revolution—”Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”—were his watchwords, too. He simply inquired why those ideas could never be put into practice without violence, poverty, and exploitation.

The conflation of Marx with modern sensibilities is complete here, and wildly inaccurate. Marx didn’t wonder why they could not be put into practice without violence; he assumed they could be put into practice only with violence. As for poverty and exploitation, as far as I can make out (see above), Marx thought that the full achievement of total alienation would somehow, magically (ie dialectically) lead to the end of such horrors.

Capitalism had developed human powers and capacities beyond all previous measure. Yet it had not used those capacities to set men and women free of fruitless toil. On the contrary, it had forced them to labor harder than ever. The richest civilizations on earth sweated every bit as hard as their Neolithic ancestors.

This, Marx considered, was not because of natural scarcity. It was because of the peculiarly contradictory way in which the capitalist system generated its fabulous wealth. Equality for some meant inequality for others, and freedom for some brought oppression and unhappiness for many.

This assumes, of course, that the many were not oppressed and unhappy before capitalism.

The system’s voracious pursuit of power and profit had turned foreign nations into enslaved colonies, and human beings into the playthings of economic forces beyond their control.

As if human beings – certainly the manual labors – were not already victims of forces beyond their control. That’s the fate of the peasant since the neolithic revolution.

It had blighted the planet with pollution and mass starvation, and scarred it with atrocious wars.

Again the fundamental error of Marxism and Eagletonism is the assumption that captialism brought evil to new heights. Indeed, what Eagelton has done here (as Lenin before him) is to conflate capitalism and imperialism (which was responsible for the “atrocious wars” that he invokes. In every case where a culture developed a massive technological superiority over its neighbors, the leaders of that society have engaged in imperialist wars of conquest. That is the relationship of various metal “ages” and the spread of empire. Capitalism produced the most enormous advantage, and imperialism used it. But to blame capitalism for the imperialism is putting the cart before the horse.

Some critics of Marx point with proper outrage to the mass murders in Communist Russia and China. They do not usually recall with equal indignation the genocidal crimes of capitalism: the late-19th-century famines in Asia and Africa in which untold millions perished; the carnage of the First World War, in which imperialist nations massacred one another’s working men in the struggle for global resources; and the horrors of fascism, a regime to which capitalism tends to resort when its back is to the wall. Without the self-sacrifice of the Soviet Union, among other nations, the Nazi regime might still be in place.

Avoiding the issue by pointing the finger at others is the time-honored practice of people without integrity. Are these things he cites reasons/excuses for what Marxism did? Do they mitigate Communism’s crimes? Does he take his readership for fools? And who says that it’s only Marxists who recoil at the horrors of Western (capitalist) imperialism? Only in the universe where “Marx was right” do we find people who think that if you criticize Communists, you let imperialists off the hook.

The issue in question when one wants to argue that “Marx was right” is hardly to point out that Marx’s enemy was wrong. What’s at issue is that if all these things attributed to capitalism here are “a Bad Thing” then what are Marxists doing matching (or outdoing them 4:1, horror for horror, hundreds of millions dead to tens of millions dead? As Radosh notes here:

As for his answer to Communist mass murders, he neglects the obvious fact that its supporters argued they were going to create a humane alternative to the horrors of capitalism, not a society that slaughtered millions in the name of their theory, and perpetrated deliberate horrors that were the byproduct of the system they created.

Eagelton just keeps on going:

Marxists were warning of the perils of fascism while the politicians of the so-called free world were still wondering aloud whether Hitler was quite such a nasty guy as he was painted.

As for the Marxists denouncing Fascism and Nazism, one of the great intellectual scandals that any self-respecting “Marxist” must acknowledge concerns the way that Western fellow travelers – who at the time found no contradiction between being Marxists and Stalinists – lined up with Stalin and ceased to denounce Hitler after Stalin (foolishly it turns out) made an alliance with the devil himself. In other words nothing stopped Marxists from supporting the most revolting deeds in search of their millennium, not then, and apparently not now.

Almost all followers of Marx today reject the villainies of Stalin and Mao, while many non-Marxists would still vigorously defend the destruction of Dresden or Hiroshima.

This strikes me as a doubly perverse inversion of reality. First, the analogy is (again) abominable. Dresden and Hiroshima were wartime decisions, not peace-time “policies” like the disasters brought on by Stalin and Mao. Even if you don’t agree with the calculus, these acts were designed to save lives by bringing the wars to an end. No one can argue that for the famines in Ukraine or China.

Second, on the contrary, it’s still fashionable to be left and to shield even Stalin from criticism. As one German historian wrote me in response to my query about why modern historians resist identifying Communism as a millennial movement:

It is a widespread resistance among German historians and social scientists dealing with Marxism-Leninism to describe and analyze this movement in terms of a religious fait social in Emile Durkheim’s sense. Most of the critics still are convinced that Marxism-Leninism is a historical fellow of the French Revolution, which brought humanity the sun of reason, progress and a new brotherhood. Thus they believe that even Stalinism has some connections with this project of historical progress and any attempt to put this totalitarian system in the category of a closed and barbarian theocracy is very often vehemently refused. In this case, very emotionally seated aspirations and hopes of young or older intellectuals are at stake . . . Everybody who dares to take the Bolshevik world as a religious community is considered as a traitor betraying the humanitarian ideals of the modernity of the French Revolution . . . If you see it in this sense, say the proponents of the project of modernity, the distance between the old and the new modern world would shrink too much and the debts to the Christian tradition would become too heavy. Thus, when you treat the Bolsheviks as a millennial sect you are going to betray the project of modernity and treat the Bolsheviks despite their very modern efforts to industrialize the backward Russia as a medieval sect of obscure believers.[1]

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[1]. Email communications from Klaus-Georg Riegel, 18 and 20 November 2008. See also Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York: Talk Miramax Books, 2002), 255–57.

The very equation of Dresden with the Gulag is loopy, as inappropriate as (but not parallel to) the equation of the Gulag and Gitmo. These are classic expressions of “moral equivalence” designed to shield ruthless tyrants (as long as they’re on the left) from moral opprobrium while heaping it on those who actually represent a humane tradition: at the end of the war, both Japanese and Germans fervently preferred to be liberated/conquered by American rather than Russian troops.

Modern capitalist nations are for the most part the fruit of a history of genocide, violence, and extermination every bit as abhorrent as the crimes of Communism. Capitalism, too, was forged in blood and tears, and Marx was around to witness it. It is just that the system has been in business long enough for most of us to be oblivious of that fact.

This is a bit jejune to say the least. It is true that imperialist capitalism – especially the European variety had terrible consequences for natives, especially at the end of the 19th century (see Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts). And of course the American whites did quite a number on the natives. But the more democratic values advanced, the more these cultures rejected precisely such actions. Communists, on the contrary, consistently regressed upon gaining power and promoting their values. And the proof of their perversity is that, rather than kill some feared/despised/hated “other”, they killed their own people.

The selectiveness of political memory takes some curious forms. Take, for example, 9/11. I mean the first 9/11, not the second. I am referring to the 9/11 that took place exactly 30 years before the fall of the World Trade Center, when the United States helped to violently overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende of Chile, and installed in its place an odious dictator who went on to murder far more people than died on that dreadful day in New York and Washington. How many Americans are aware of that? How many times has it been mentioned on Fox News?

This is a pretty amazing segue. It’s not about Marx, but about Global Jihad and Latin American Dictatorships. From the point of view of historical argumentation or analogy its about as useless as comparing Gitmo to Gulag: it’s not related to historical analysis in anyway, it’s just an easy way to shift attention and blame from the people one can’t defend directly.

How about a different calculus. How many people died at the hands of the Shah, installed when the CIA got rid of a democratically elected government in Iran in 1951 vs. how many people died because progressive presidents like Carter and Obama let religious fanatics take over in Iran in 1979 and hold power violently in 2009? The point is not to make the latter case, but to point out how ludicrous this form of thinking is.

Marx was not some dreamy utopianist. On the contrary, he began his political career in fierce contention with the dreamy utopianists who surrounded him. He has about as much interest in a perfect human society as a Clint Eastwood character would, and never once speaks in such absurd terms. He did not believe that men and women could surpass the Archangel Gabriel in sanctity. Rather, he believed that the world could feasibly be made a considerably better place.

This is really amazing, and exactly the opposite of what was the case (see my passage at the top of this post).

In this he was a realist, not an idealist. Those truly with their heads stuck in the sand—the moral ostriches of this world—are those who deny that there can be any radical change. They behave as though Family Guy and multicolored toothpaste will still be around in the year 4000. The whole of human history disproves this viewpoint.

4000? When normal people talk about radical change (e.g., Marx in his day) this had nothing to do with millennial-long changes, but with rapid, radical change in their own day. The point is that those who attempt to bring about constructive radical change inevitably find they’re not successful, and end up with far less (or worse) change than what they thought they were effecting. Marx, and subsequent “Marxists” are among the least realistic of people when it comes to issues of rapid change for the better. They want it; they bring its opposite.

Radical change, to be sure, may not be for the better. Perhaps the only socialism we shall ever witness is one forced upon the handful of human beings who might crawl out the other side of some nuclear holocaust or ecological disaster. Marx even speaks dourly of the possible “mutual ruin of all parties.” A man who witnessed the horrors of industrial-capitalist England was unlikely to be starry-eyed about his fellow humans.

And yet, his promises of what will happen with the “withering away of the state” are all based on the most ludicrous of “philosophical” speculation, itself based on the most starry-eyed notions of how people will change once capitalism has been destroyed.

All he meant was that there are more than enough resources on the planet to resolve most of our material problems, just as there was more than enough food in Britain in the 1840s to feed the famished Irish population several times over. It is the way we organize our production that is crucial. Notoriously, Marx did not provide us with blueprints for how we should do things differently. He has famously little to say about the future. The only image of the future is the failure of the present. He is not a prophet in the sense of peering into a crystal ball. He is a prophet in the authentic biblical sense of one who warns us that unless we change our unjust ways, the future is likely to be deeply unpleasant. Or that there will be no future at all.

I’ve lost my appetite for fisking this astonishingly shabby piece of intellectual drivel. As Radosh points out, the very fact that the Chronicle of Higher Educations published so long a piece, suggests just what level of intellectual bankruptcy now permeates the intellectual organs of academia. (I really doubt they’ll do as much for my book; they’ve already rejected a piece of mine which I’ll publish here soon.) For those with the stomach for it, read the rest.

Breivik’s Epistemic Closure

Chris Bertram analyzes it:

We may be, now, in the world that Cass Sunstein worried about, a world where people select themselves into groups which ramp up their more-or-less internally coherent belief systems into increasingly extreme forms by confirming to one another their perceived “truths” (about Islam, or Obama’s birth certificate, or whatever) and shutting out falsifying information. Put an unstable person or a person with a serious personality disorder into an environment like that and you have a formula for something very nasty happening somewhere, sooner or later. Horribly, that somewhere was Norway last Friday.

This is an interesting quote for what it vaguely alludes to in its “whatever.” The whole paragraph is an analysis, quite shrewd indeed, of the epistemological slippery slope to what Damian Thompson calls self-brainwashing. But that depiction applies equally well to those on the other side of the political divide, including (probably – I’m guessing here) to the author of the blog and the person he’s quoting.

In this case, as acute as they are to what’s in the eyes of the “right,” the “left” has a major beam in their eyes that they seem to have difficulty acknowledging. On the contrary, their tone, their style, their rhetoric all express a kind of supreme confidence that treats all dissonant voices as not merely wrong but bad, not merely dismissively, but contemptuously. And yet that “whatever,” can be expanded far wider than the current list of “right wing” examples Bertram offers, starting with 9-11 truthers who swarm within the epistemic clotures of the left far more than birthers do on the right, and not just among the weirdo fringes.

Anders Sandberg urges us to check our cognitive biases when calling Breivik insane and bin Laden an ideologue. Richard Landes (cited in Breivik’s manifesto) tries, but doubles down, in some almost Malkin-worthy rhetoric, on blaming the other side:

Then Sullivan cites me without comment.

All those people who, in the mid-aughts, like Cherie Blair and Jenny Tonge among so many, thought that Palestinian terror was an understandable response to their hopeless condition, for which Israeli was responsible, owe it to themselves to think: what did I to contribute to Breivik’s despair, with my insistence that anyone who sounded the alarm was an Islamophobe?

Now I’ve been told by a close and trusted source that this passage made at least one sympathetic reader wince.  So let me explain.

The comparison has several possible interpretations. On the one hand, we have what I think Sullivan objects to, an accusation that people like Tonge are as responsible for Breivik, as he and his colleagues think the people Breivik cites in his manifesto (Theodore Dalrymple, Bruce Bawer, Daniel Pipes, Roger Scruton, Melanie Phillips, Mark Steyn, Robert Spencer, etc. etc.) are responsible. And I’d be very interested to see how, were we to lay out the data, an impartial audience might decide about which side, those who warn about Islamist ambitions and those who shut down the conversation, contributed to Breivik’s frustration and rampage. However facetious the premise, I even think it would be a valuable conversation.

But that’s not what I meant. My point runs as follows: Tonge and Blair are quick to blaming Israel for Palestinian hatred because they frustrate the Palestinians. They have nothing to say about the way the Palestinians (and their supporters in the West) incite genocidal violence against Israel. If they were consistent, then in this case they would not blame those they see as inciting hatred against Muslims for inspiring Breivik, but those who frustrate his desires (to be heard). It may be a bit convoluted and, as my friend says, when almost a hundred people have been horribly murdered, then it’s important to be limpidly clear. For any lack of clarity, I apologize.

On the other hand, my invocation of Tonge and Blair’s blaming Israel for Palestinians suicide bombing is an effort to say, “this kind of thinking – blaming someone for someone else’s staggeringly inappropriate behavior – is morally unacceptable.” This is something that people on the left have done repeatedly over the last decade in particular, and especially about Israel. For Tonge and Blair to say, “I understand why the Palestinian’s blow themselves up – it’s what Israel’s done to them,” shows an astoundingly, indeed racist attitude towards the Palestinians whom these “liberals” treat as if they have no moral agency. “If Israelis frustrate them, then that explains their ferocious hatreds; who am I to question their despair. On the contrary, everything bad they do is because they’ve been mistreated. The moral opprobrium falls on those they hate.

The broader version of the liberal cognitive egocentrism gone wild is “terrorism comes from poverty,” regardless of how many desperately poor people there are who don’t become terrorists, and numerous rather well off people, who driven by other and far less “legitimate” desperations who get involved quite energetically.

How is this related to Breivik? With these easy accusations that Israel is responsible for the frustrated hatred of the Palestinians, we have an argument that could be turned against the Left: “you have frustrated Breivik by silencing him.” Now, unlike the Left’s easy blaming of Israel for Palestinian “rage,” I wouldn’t go anywhere near laying responsibility for Breivik on the left. What I would say is, this rush to nail the “Islamophobes” for Breivik reveals the appalling double standards of those who do it. They are the very ones who would reject the argument that PA sponsored incitement is responsible for the terrorists; indeed, they would sooner accuse those of pointing out the incitement for making a bad situation worse.

If there were any moral consistency here, then the Left would indeed examine its own camp for their flaws. But the only consistency I see is, dump on the “right,” dump on Israel, dump on anyone who dares to suggest that Islamism is a serious threat. Don’t dump on ourselves. It may be “natural” and predictable behavior, but it violates major aspects of the moral code  by which the “left” considers itself outstanding. Indeed, it seems quite close to the quote Sullivan started out his post with:

groups which ramp up their more-or-less internally coherent belief systems into increasingly extreme forms by confirming to one another their perceived “truths” (about Islamophobia, or Bush’s involvement in 9-11, or whatever) and shutting out falsifying information.

For a decade, people like me have been trying to warn people who love civil society, and freedom, and human dignity, and generosity, and empathy for the “other,” and the rich and vibrant fabric of human life that comes from peaceful diversity, that they’ve a) gotten the Arab Israeli conflict profoundly wrong, and b) in granting the Palestinians permission (encouragement) to hate the Israelis, they have mistakenly empowered people who hate them just as much, for reasons they (we, the demotic West) can’t even consider lest we be called Islamophobes.

One of the themes I have repeatedly addressed in this problematic situation of epistemic closure, is the radical imbalance between the left’s demands that anyone defending Israel self-criticize on the one hand, and the astonishing lack of any kind of self-criticism among the attackers of Israel, whether they be Palestinian/Muslim or progressive Left.

It’s time to get serious. Let’s try and work through some of the following:

1) how do we distinguish between Islamophobia and legitimate criticism of Islam?

2) how do we distinguish between Anti-Zionism and legitimate criticism of Israel?

3) how do we reframe the debate so as to avoid the kind of puerile epistemic closures that characterize both right and left?

I’m ready for any and every one of these conversations.