NATO, BELIEF AND SARCASM

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Below, more one Ukraine and Gaza.

Today, many of those on the “Left” who pretend to advocate a more “balanced” (i.e., pro-Russian) view of the Ukrainian war repeat again and again that the main cause of the continuing bloodshed is NATO’s military support of Ukraine which boosts the profits of the military-industrial complex… There is an element of truth in this claim: yes, without NATO’s support, peace would soon be established there because Ukraine would be forced to capitulate. For this very reason, we could paraphrase Churchill apropos NATO: NATO is the worst possible thing for Europe, but all alternatives to it are much worse. This is why we should also reject what, on March 9 2024, Pope Francis has said in an interview and what was then celebrated by many peaceniks as a great wisdom: Ukraine should have what he called the courage of the "white flag" and negotiate an end to the war with Russia.[1] But the white flag is not a call for negotiations, it signals surrender, and if Ukraine falls, this would give incentive to Russia to go on to conquest other countries – Ukraine must defend itself and survive to keep the long-term peace prospect viable… To avoid a misunderstanding, yes, economic relations matter - to quote Zorana Baković, an outstanding Slovene journalist specializing in China; for quite some time the Chinese leader was not as relaxed and loquacious as he was during the meeting with the presidents on the greatest American companies”:

“The only serious interlocutor of the Communist Party of China is big international capital. State leader Xi Jinping not only complies with international capitalist forces, but is willing to change segments of his politics to appease them. This question concerns him greatly: will Western investments continue to passively participate in Chinese markets, or will they find a better domain for their profitable enrichments?”[2]

When, on June 16 2023, Xi Jinping met Bill Gates in Beijing, he called Gates "an old friend" and said he hoped they could cooperate in a way that would benefit both China and the United States.[3] There is, however, a limit to such a vulgar economist approach: at the end of this road, we will be told that the Nazis did the holocaust in order to boost the profits of IG Farben which was making the gasses to kill the Jews… True, war can help the economy – remember that the US got out of the great depression during World War II; however, the enormous amounts spent on arms could also be used for ecology and social solidarity without automatically causing an economic crisis.

But the main problem with such a “realist” approach is that it leads to a cynical distance which precludes serious political engagement: its ultimate message is “don’t struggle, your fight will just help the military industry (or medical industry or…)”. What is missing here is the relatively-autonomous madness of ideological processes which regulate our social activity, and the way to counter this madness is not just abstract argumentation but, to cut a long story short, belief in its authentic sense which today is needed more than ever - so what does “belief” stand here for? Remember the denouement of le Carre’s The Little Drummer Girl when Khalil, the Palestinian fighter, a sincere “terrorist,” discovers that the English actress Charlie who pretended to join his cause and even voluntarily became his lover betrayed him:

“She tried not to look at him, but could not help herself. “Who do you work for, Charlie? For the Germans?” She shook her head. “For the Zionists?” He took her silence for yes. “Are you Jewish.” “No.” “Do you believe in Israel? What are you?” “Nothing,” she said. “Are you Christian? Do you see them as the founders of your great religion?” Again she shook her head. “Is it for money? Did they bribe you? Blackmail you?” She wanted to scream. She clenched her fists, and filled her lungs, but the chaos choked her, and she sobbed instead. /…/ Slowly, without aggression, he reached out his left hand and touched the side of her face, apparently to make sure that she was real. Then looked at the tips of his fingers, and back at her again, somehow comparing them in his mind.”[4]

In both the movie and in the BBC miniseries version, they inserted another line by Khalil at /…/: “So you don’t believe in anything.”(the miniseries) / ”You believe in nothing. You have no beliefs at all.”(the movie) Although the movie and TV versions are not to be underestimated (in the TV ministeries, Florence Pugh is excellent as Charlie, while in the movie Juliano Mer-Khamis – founder of the Jenin Freedom theatre - totally steals the show as Khalil), the inserted line is basically superfluous, it just renders explicit what is obvious from the scene itself: Khalil’s properly ethical disappointment at Charlie. When he asks Charlie if she did it because she believes in Israel or Christianity, or because she was blackmailed, this is not an accusation but an attempt to find acceptable reasons for her betrayal. When he realizes that Charlie believes in nothing, his reaction is not violence but just a sad total resignation mixed with a minimum of compassion.

While I, of course, totally disagree with Khalil’s acts, the worst mistake would have been here to dismiss such a full commitment as something that necessarily leads to religious fundamentalism - on the contrary, to make life worth living, a human being should act as more than a human animal following its needs and interests, a full commitment to a Cause is needed. What distinguishes such commitment from religious fundamentalism is that it is fully aware of its subjective character, which is why it always functions against the background of a possible loss of belief enacted, among other cases, in Christ’s “Father, why have you forsaken me?”. What remains for a Christian in such cases?

Towards the end of River Runs Through It (Robert Redford, 1992), Rev. Maclean gives a sermon about being unable to help loved ones who are destroying themselves and will not accept help: all that those who truly care for such a self-destructive person can do is to give unconditional love, even without understanding why.[5] This is the Christian stance at its purest: not the promise of salvation but just such unconditional love whose message is: “I know you are bent on destroying yourself, I know I cannot prevent it, but without understanding why I love you unconditionally, without any constraint.” Do these lines not evoke the enigmatic scene in Gethsemane from Matthew where Jesus tells to his disciples who lay tired around him: “I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me.” (Matthew 36-38)? Liza Thompson pointed out that Jesus is here “asking for solidarity. Not followers or crowds to listen to his teachings but an act of togetherness. And it comes from a place of such radical vulnerability that it disrupts notions of Jesus as some kind of hierarchical leader.”[6] Jesus himself is here on the path to his self-destruction (knowing next day he will die in terrible pain), and the only thing he asks his followers is to give him their unconditional love, even without understanding why.

Does such a stance imply a boring stance of a preacher? In no way: the paradox today is that we live in a crazy time in which authentic belief can be displayed only through humor. Recall the famous Jewish joke (quoted by Freud) on the marriage-mediator who reinterprets the deficiency of the bride-to-be as a positive asset: “She is poor…” “… so she  will know how to handle the family money, making most of it!” “She is ugly…” “So the husband will not have to worry that she will cheat on him!” “She stutters…” “So she will keep quiet and not annoy the husband with incessant prattle!”, and so on till the final “She really stinks!” “So what do you want her, to be perfect, without any failure?” IDF learned its lesson from this tradition: in the last months it justifies every violation of human rights, no matter how obvious it is. The latest example: the IDF admitted to killing two Palestinian men and burying their bodies with a bulldozer after Al Jazeera published a video claiming to show the incident. But it justified this quite obscene disrespectful act with, surprisingly, two incompatible reasons. The first one belongs to common sense: “It is straightforward. You don’t leave bodies lying around.”[7] The second reason is that, after the two Palestinians were killed, their bodies were buried using a bulldozer due to the fear of hidden explosives… Among other similar cases, let’s mention just two. Why is no food allowed to enter northern Gaza out of the fear that it will be appropriated by Hamas when Israel claims that area is cleansed of Hamas? Because some sympathizers of Hamas may still be there. Why so many children in Gaza were killed by IDF bombs? Because Hamas uses them as human shields… When confronted with something really impossible to justify, the reply is like the one in the Jewish joke: nobody is perfect, such things happen in every war… (plus they try to turn this confession into an advantage: you see, we are better than our enemies, we admit our mistakes).

When a logic that otherwise characterizes jokes is used in legitimizing mass killing, things get so crazy that plain rational argumentation no longer really works – in such conditions, only sarcastic humor works. (The only time when a logic of jokes disappears is when the Israeli authorities practice open racism, like on April 2 2024 when Netanyahu said the deaths of seven aid workers in Gaza are a “tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people”[8] – so when thousands of Palestinian children die in Gaza, this is NOT “a tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people”?)

For this reason, the Egyptian stand-up comedian, Bassem Yousef, who now lives in Los Angeles is best qualified to pass adequate observations not only about the Gaza war but also about many other problems that beset us: his approach includes something that cannot be simply qualified as humor or satire. It’s rather a comic sarcasm which includes mocking exaggeration of the opponent’s argumentation which brings out its implicit consequence (“Yes, kill all Palestinians in Gaza!”), absurd praising of the enemies (“Ben Shapiro is the most intelligent person I know”), and similar strategies. Such an approach is very efficient because it’s not just a simple caricature: it reveals the absurd comic dimension of our social reality itself, which is why in our reaction to it laughter is mixed with deep anxiety.

And this brings us back to Christianity: does, as Kierkegaard saw, such a mixture of sarcasm and despair not pervade all of Gospels, all of Christ’s great moments? It seems quite appropriate that this year (2024) Jesus will resurrect on April 1, just hours before the fool’s day: measured by the standards of our ordinary common sense, Christ was a fool, definitely not a wise person.

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[1] Pope says Ukraine should have 'courage of the white flag' of negotiations | Reuters.

[2] Edini sogovornik Xi Jinpinga je zahodni kapital - Delo (in Slovene).

[3] Xi Jinping meets Bill Gates in China, calls him 'an old friend' | Reuters.

[4] John le Carre, The Little Drummer Girl, London: Penguin Books 2018, p. 295.

[5] A River Runs Through It (film) - Wikipedia.

[6] Liza Thompson, personal communication.

[7] IDF admits to killing to two Gazans and burying them with a bulldozer - The Jerusalem Post (jpost.com).

[8] Middle East crisis live: Netanyahu says deaths of seven aid workers in Gaza is ‘tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people’ (theguardian.com).