AGAINST THE GAME OF TOTAL WAR
The sad conclusion is thus that Israel and Hamas/Iran, UK anti-immigrant racists and Muslim fanatics, they all play the same game: the game of total war which can only end in their mutual destruction.
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On August 5 2024, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said: “It is impossible in today’s global reality to wage war – no one in the world would let us starve and thirst two million citizens, even though it may be just and moral until they return our hostages.” He added that if Israel controlled aid distribution instead of Hamas, the war would have ended by now and the hostages would have returned.[1] It is easy to discern the roots of Smotrich’s reasoning: he longs for the good old times when it was normal to starve the population of a country we are at war with (in WWII Germany did this to the UK and the UK to Germany)… By saying this, Smotrich inadvertently produced the best argument for globalization: it is because we dwell in “today’s global reality” that such good old brutalities are impossible – even the US, which provided Israel with bombs to destroy Gaza, was simultaneously parachuting food parcels into the besieged city.
Smotrich’s statement perfectly fits what is going on now in Israel. 50 or so people die daily in Gaza, and the West Bank terror against Palestinians goes on unimpeded – but this is now reported as bottom-of-the-page small news since it is part of a new normality. Human rights group B’Tselem rendered public reliable testimonies about how “violence, extreme hunger, humiliation and other abuse of Palestinian prisoners has been normalised across Israel’s jail system”[2], but even such a clear case of “institutionalised abuse” is either ignored or mocked by Israeli stand-up comedians… These days (early August 2024) the focus is on the tension between Israel and Iran: will the eventual Iran’s revenge for the killing of Ismail Haniyeh trigger a large-scale war in the Middle East? So forget the Israeli terror – the US immediately confirmed that they will unconditionally defend Israel in the case of an Iranian attack.
Rarely mentioned is the fact that the winner of the 2024 Iranian presidential election is Masoud Pezeshkian, a very moderate figure who promised the end of Iran’s combative stance and the integration of Iran into international community. A sad conclusion imposes itself: what if this was the true reason Israel killed Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran? What if Israel’s true goal was to prevent at any price the normalization of Iran? Israel obviously succeeded, also with regard to Hamas: now that Hamas elected Yahya Sinwar as its new leader, Israel refers to this (expected) choice as the ultimate proof that Hamas is a terrorist organization with which no negotiation or peace are possible.
Although they are radical enemies, Israel, Hamas and the hardliners in Iran clearly want war. In this, they follow the same logic as some “radical” Leftists in the West whose stance was best formulated by Yanis Varoufakis: “I prefer to have bastards in power who claim to be bastards representing the aristocracy than bastards in power who claim to be representing the working class.”[3] The problem is that while this may hold for the UK (but does this mean that Sunak is better than Starmer?), in most of the developed West there are no “bastards in power who claim to be representing the aristocracy”; there are bastards (from Trump to le Pen) who claim to represent the (proper, white…) working class against the elites and immigrants or minorities used to state support, and there are bastards who claim to represent endangered (sexual, racial…) minorities against the intolerant new nationalist fundamentalists. Plus what about the working class itself preferring the bastards who claim to be representing them?
In today’s messy times, one should prefer hypocrisy to brutal reality, plus one should prefer the moderate center to the radical Right: yes, this center swims in hypocrisy, but this very hypocrisy leaves the space open for criticism (attacking those in power for not living up to their proclaimed principles); yes, the new populist Right is a symptom of the failures of the moderate center (it is the hypocrisy of the liberal center which enabled the growth of new Rightist populism), but the direct reign of Rightist populism nonetheless remains the threat of an unimaginable catastrophe. In the late 1930s, Communists and Marxists were tirelessly repeating that Fascism was an organic outgrowth of liberal capitalism (Adorno’s insight – and the essential motif in the Frankfurt School’s dialectical assessment of fascism – is that fascist movements are not exceptional to liberal democracy but rather are internal and structural signs of its failure), but this didn’t prevent the radical Left to join liberals and even conservatives like Churchill in a battle against fascism. This lesson holds today more than ever. It is easy to claim, from a comfortable “radical” Leftist position, that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are ultimately the same, instruments of the financial elites; however, who will win the 2024 US elections is a matter of life and death for millions of blacks and women. Just one – in no way minor – case: if Trump wins, poor black women will be the main victims of the further limitation of abortion rights, etc.
The same holds for the latest terrifying sign of the moral decay in the public space of the UK: the large anti-immigrant protests in the UK that exploded in late July of 2024, after the murderous assault and stabbing of dozens of young children attending a dance class in Southport. With regard to these protests, their moment of truth occurred in Belfast where Unionists were joined by some nationalist Catholics, and this unity was celebrated by racist protesters: “Finally we are united against the real enemy.”[4] We know this logic from the old anti-Semitic Fascism: instead of our inner antagonisms, we should all (workers and capitalists) unite against the Jews, our real enemy.
Enough was being said and written about these protests by the Left: the power elites who condemn their brutal obscenity are de facto complicit in their rise. Elon Musk, the owner of X, posted to the platform on August 4 2024 that “civil war is inevitable” in response to a post blaming the violent demonstrations on the effects of “mass migration and open borders.”[5] It was easy for the anti-racist reaction to his message to point out that Musk himself is part of the problem here: his decision to open X to hate speech contributed seriously to the atmosphere that created the terrain for the racist protests. Owen Jones was thus right: the elites which are now disgusted at the riots solicited them, laying the ground for them, by way of blaming the crisis on immigrants, not themselves.[6] The unpleasant fact is that, if immigrants were to be thrown out of Western Europe, the economies of Germany, Italy, UK… would stop to a halt: Western Europe needs new workers, and even if local inhabitants are unemployed they are not ready to take certain jobs (manual labor, personal care…). With their economic and military politics, our elites directly caused immigration – suffice it to mention the key role of the US attack on Iraq, the overthrowing of Gaddafi in Libya and the mess in Syria. What goes on now in Gaza and the West Bank is just the tip of the iceberg which comprises more than a century of the Western violence in Arab countries.
However, while all this is true, it is not the whole truth – two things should be added, at least. Protests have an authentic core, ordinary people do suffer, they are just misdirected against a wrong target. Plus Islam also harbors fundamentalists whose stance is incompatible with the Western liberal way of life (why leave the use of this term to the Right?), so the misdirection is in some sense well grounded – why would otherwise so many African and Middle Eastern countries complain that the West is destroying their way of life, imposing on them liberal individualist values?
The sad conclusion is thus that Israel and Hamas/Iran, UK anti-immigrant racists and Muslim fanatics, they all play the same game: the game of total war which can only end in their mutual destruction, and which is a false conflict obfuscating the true cause of troubles, the dynamic of global capitalism. In other words, I am not advocating a soft gradualist politics – quite on the contrary, the only way to lay the foundation for a radical change to come is to avoid false conflicts like a vampire is avoiding garlic.
[1] Israeli minister says it may be ‘moral’ to starve 2 million Gazans, but ‘no one in the world would let us’ | CNN.
[2] Palestinian prisoners describe systemic abuse in Israel’s jails | Israel | The Guardian.
[3] Capitalism is dead and so are we | Yanis Varoufakis interview (youtube.com).
[4] Aris Roussinos: Has ethnic conflict come to Britain? (youtube.com).
[5] Musk says U.K. civil war 'inevitable.' The British beg to differ. (nbcnews.com).
[6] How Our Elites INCITED Far Right Uprising In England: Don't Let Them Get Away With It (youtube.com).
I'm disappointed by Žižek's lack of historicization here. Hamas and the IDF are not two sides of the same coin: one is a group attempting to liberate their generational homeland and the other is a colonial force trying to drive them out. The attempt at liberation is violent, maybe even suicidal, but how could one possibly imagine this Israeli government recognizing self-determination for *any* Palestinian population, regardless of who is in charge or how accommodating they could be to Israel's wishes?
In an interview with Jeremy Scahill, a senior member of Hamas noted that they consider “Palestinians” to include Muslims, Jews, Christians, anyone there before 1948 (and it was a diverse population!)- essentially that their concept of “Palestine” is a pluralistic society- the opposite of what Israel’s policies and settler land grabs seem to aim at.
Regarding Islamic fundamentalism, it should not be forgotten that the most powerful figures in this realm are the ones the West is glad to do business with- in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, even Saddam's Iraq when it was at war with Iran (and Iran when it was at war with Iraq!). It should also not be forgotten that the US repeatedly backed coups and assassinations against democratically elected governments (in the Middle East and everywhere else) throughout the 20th century and opposed popular movements against US-friendly authoritarian governments. This is obvious to anyone who's read history, but falls through the cracks in our age of "brown people filching off muh government!"
The hubris and greed of the West created all of this. And still, we are told the main problem isn't the people in power, but those whose countries have been decimated by that same Western greed. As the saying goes, "we are here because you were there."
Otherwise intelligent people put blinders on when it comes to immigration. Most people are fine with common sense immigration and have no interest in the idiocy of racial labeling or group hate. What they despise are extremist policies that open borders to everyone and anyone with no plan for bringing immigrants in to a country intelligently. Then the same dopey government officials put extremist anti-speech limitations on frustrated citizens further flaming already heightened passions. If people want an honest debate on immigration, which can’t be conducted in the UK, then opening the door to other opinions is a must. Elon Musk isn’t the problem. He gives everyone a platform. It’s a shame the UK doesn’t allow opinions they don’t like. It could be a valuable indicator of how poorly they are managing issues, but instead they criminalize it, while ignoring the criminal acts of immigrants who should have been vetted prior to entry into the country. The UK is set to collapse. But not because of far right frustration, but because of a lack of recognition of the real problem. Open borders and the assault on those wishing to be smart about how a country welcomes the immigrant. Ultimately, like America, the ignorant voter deserves what they get. If you vote for kooks, be prepared for crappy logic, bad policies, the destruction of values, and the collapse of a country. Don’t worry UK, the USA isn’t far behind. Except ours will be much bloodier.