#so called liberal thinkers

[moonworshippinglesbiandotcom]

scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds

[communistkenobi]

I was looking for a book recently on an online storefront and was recommended a book written by a physicist about the history of humanity. this was a popular press book that was not intended to be read by other academics, but it reminded me of this niche genre of books, with experts from the physical sciences writing about human behaviour or history or what have you. Could you imagine coming across the inverse? A popular press book that purported to explain physics written by a historian?

There is some deep imbalance in how public perceptions of “general intelligence” seem to work - those in STEM are generally recognised for their competence, expertise, and intellectual acumen, and this recognition can be generalised, that at some level a demonstration of your expertise of eg astrophysics is a demonstration of your abilities of investigation writ large, that you have figured out some central underlying element of science that allows for basically limitless intellectual extension to any field or subject. A physicist can write a book about human history and be taken seriously by the general public on the assumption that physics is more difficult to understand than history, so any lower domain of investigation is open to them. The reverse is often not extended to a lot of the social sciences, particularly the theoretically-heavy social sciences; theory is just making bullshit up at the end of the day, it has no real practical application because any questions about the philosophy of thought or knowledge - how did we come to know what we know and under what conditions do we know these things - is just the indulgent wankery of people who can’t find a real job.

And of course it would be silly to insist that because you have read Hegel, an infamously difficult thinker, you know how to interpret the lab print-outs of electrochemists - I don’t want this goofy concept of general intelligence to be applied everywhere, I want it to go away entirely, but its current uneven applications across scientific fields indicates a broader problem with public conceptions of expertise and knowledge.

This probably has something to do with anti-communism on some level - social science is not generally regarded as “real science” (in no small part because social science is often the field of bureaucrats, and while animosity towards bureaucrats is deeply sympathetic, I suspect the reasons for this animosity are not themselves scientifically grounded), that while there is a public understanding of “objective facts” that exist prior and external to human interpretation, the politics of knowledge are hegemonically oriented around liberalism, to such an extent that any critique of the assumptions of knowledge are viewed as a dogmatic denial of reality done for the purposes of political infiltration and brainwashing. And I don’t feel totally unqualified to say this, given that this is basically the de facto response from students encountering Marxism for the first time in university. “Marx is too dogmatic” may as well be inscribed above the doors to lecture halls. Hell, Jordan Peterson made a nice little public career for himself railing against “post-modern neo-Marxism,” a phrase so nonsensical that the fact he was not immediately and permanently laughed out of the public arena for saying it is an indictment of how politically illiterate we are as a society!

And the infuriating thing is that a lot of social science scholarship (not just from the US but especially from the US) is complete horseshit, just pure evil garbage motivated solely by a desire to justify the fact that we do really need to keep killing tens of thousands of people a year to keep this whole party going. Every sociologist who calls themselves a “methodological individualist” is contributing to the long-standing tradition of eugenics scholarship but is too craven and vain to admit to this. If you had to describe the sum-total of the social scientific scholarly output of the west in a word, it would be ‘mysticism.’ Because it is the case that anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and anti-capitalist investigations of the political-economic conditions of the world have produced social scientific knowledge on par with the discovery of the atom, but it is not treated as such. “It is right to rebel” is not just a moral claim about violence but a scientific summary of human history.

But I think it is precisely this reactionary state of affairs that makes people devalue the social sciences as an actual site of legitimate investigation, that understanding the historical trajectory of ideas or the political conditions of life are valuable pursuits for any just society. Because social science deals with the social world, the political conditions under which the social world is investigated and understood are themselves bound up in questions of political and economic power. But this equally extends to the physical sciences - I know at least in environmental sciences, there is an ever-growing reckoning with climate change as an imminent threat to all life on earth, and environmental scientists cannot avoid talking about the political conditions of our planet even if all they want to do is study a river. Genocide is measurable in soil samples taken in the American continent. The separation of the environmental from the social is itself a historically contingent arrangement of knowledge.

But this is infuriating to even complain about because I don’t want to sound like an entitled academic or ego-bruised professional. I have no desire to start a faculty war with the STEM fields. I feel secure in my own expertise. I do not want anyone to “recognise my greatness” I am just profoundly lonely in this whole affair. and it just so happens that we exist in terribly anti-intellectual conditions for the most cruel and ugly reasons possible, and so we (me, I) have to suffer seeing books on sale claiming to give a general account of human history written by a physicist

[fursasaida]

Emma Saltzberg: Your book chronicles a longstanding struggle over public opinion in the American Jewish world. What are the top-level conclusions you draw from this history?

Geoffrey Levin: The first big takeaway is that this history of American Jewish concern for Palestinian rights isn’t something that started yesterday, or even in the ’60s or ’70s. It goes back to 1948. As long as there has been a Palestinian refugee issue, there has been American Jewish concern for Palestinians, especially coming from Jews who spent a lot of time in the region and were deeply exposed to Israel and to the Palestinians. The second is that this American Jewish engagement with Palestinian rights was frequently influenced by state actors. Sometimes it was the Arab League [an organization of Arab states formed in 1945 to advance their shared interests], sometimes it was the CIA—but most often it was the Israeli government. I uncover this long record of Israeli diplomats trying to manage American Jewish discourse. And the last key point is that American Jewish groups were having nuanced and complicated debates in this period, as early as the ’30s, about the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. A lot of the groups that are arguing today that there’s a strong overlap between those two things, like the AJC and the Reform movement, didn’t hold that position 70 years ago.

[...]

ES: You also write about some Jewish figures whose anti-nationalist position led them to maintain their opposition to Israel’s creation even after 1948.

GL: A more extreme version of the AJC’s position emerged through the American Council for Judaism, which was an anti-Zionist group originally formed by Reform Jewish thinkers. Before and after ’48, they were against the creation of a Jewish state, but they were not focused on the Palestinian question initially. They opposed Israel because of their anti-nationalism, thinking the state would be bad for Jews. These anti-Zionists were focused on keeping Zionism and Israeli and Hebrew culture from dominating American Jewish life. They were concerned that doing so diverted American Jewish loyalties. Yet ultimately, some within the American Council for Judaism, mostly leaders like Rabbi Elmer Berger who had a lot of exposure to Palestinians themselves, did become strong advocates of Palestinian rights. And then they got kind of nudged out of the organization.

ES: You tell the story of Breira, an anti-occupation Zionist group founded in 1973 that tried to advocate for Palestinian rights in this context of increased Jewish nationalism. What happened to them?

GL: Breira was the first national American Jewish group arguing for what we now call the two-state solution. The leaders had gone to Israel and heard from Israeli leftists and had become convinced that Palestinians couldn’t be ignored forever. They framed themselves as nice Jewish boys and girls—people who wanted what’s best for Israel and for Jewish politics. And every chance they could, they highlighted Israeli voices. But they still ended up getting eviscerated as “Jews for Fatah”—Fatah being the leading PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] faction—after just a couple of members met with a few moderate members of the PLO. It was an early example of how no matter how much American Jews who want to recognize Palestinian rights try to burnish their Jewish and even Israeli credentials, people will push against that and question their Jewish identity. And that hurt people a lot. A lot of those figures in Breira could have contributed a lot more to the future of the American Jewish community, but they felt really burned.

ES: As you note in the book, some analysts today describe American Jews’ increased criticism of Israel and Zionism as a product of distancing from Israel. But, as the Breira story shows, this stance is often a product of very close engagement with Israel.

GL: I think this is crucial. Millennial and Gen Z Jews who are involved in the Jewish community are far more likely to have gone to Israel than people of older generations, because of all these newer subsidized programs, like Birthright. They are far more likely to have met Israeli shlichim [young adult “emissaries” from Israel] through camp or through campus Hillel, and far more likely to watch Israeli stuff on YouTube and enjoy Israeli cuisine. Younger Jews are far more likely to know Palestinians as well. In contrast, many in earlier generations may have had more positive views toward Israel, but less deep engagement with the actual place and the people living there, both Israelis and Palestinians.

In my book, those from the earlier generations who engaged with Palestinian rights did spend a lot of time over there. They knew Hebrew. When they were advocating for Palestinian rights, whether that meant self-determination, or civil rights for minorities in Israel, or a different approach toward Palestinian refugees, they often came to those conclusions from going there and talking to Israelis and talking to Palestinians.

ES: Why is it important to know this history, as we contemplate different American Jewish responses to Israel’s onslaught on Gaza today?

GL: The characters in this story are people that a lot of experts haven’t heard of before. By unearthing these stories, I show how seriously people were thinking through some of these same questions 70 years ago. I think that one of the most important chapters is this one where I am able to use the archives to put a Palestinian voice at the forefront. Fayez Sayegh was struggling to find a way that was acceptable in American public discourse to talk about Palestinian issues and Arab issues. I think it’s important to write these people back into history, because they were so eager to change the discourse.

These people all kind of failed; they were pushed out. The critical American Jews were fired. I think a lot of American Jews thought the problems would just go away. And I can’t tell you that we would have had peace if the dissenting voices had succeeded. But I do think if they had been successful in getting a more open discourse within the Jewish community 70 years ago, that we would probably be in a healthier place right now, both in terms of the American Jewish community and American discourse more broadly.

[odinsblog]

In the darkest chapter of German history, during a time when incited mobs threw stones into the windows of innocent shop owners and women and children were cruelly humiliated in the open; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young pastor, began to speak publicly against the atrocities.

After years of trying to change people’s minds, Bonhoeffer came home one evening and his own father had to tell him that two men were waiting in his room to take him away.

In prison, Bonhoeffer began to reflect on how his country of poets and thinkers had turned into a collective of cowards, crooks and criminals. Eventually he concluded that the root of the problem was not malice, but stupidity.

In his famous letters from prison, Bonhoeffer argued that stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice, because while “one may protest against evil; it can be exposed and prevented by the use of force, against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here. Reasons fall on deaf ears.”

Facts that contradict a stupid person’s prejudgment simply need not be believed and when they are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this, the stupid person is self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature.

This much is certain, stupidity is in essence not an intellectual defect but a moral one. There are human beings who are remarkably agile intellectually yet stupid, and others who are intellectually dull yet anything but stupid.

The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or rather, they allow this to happen to them.

People who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals in groups. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.

It becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power, be it of a political or religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. Almost as if this is a sociological-psychological law where the power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.

The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, such as intellect, suddenly fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up an autonomous position.

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us from the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him.

He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and is abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil – incapable of seeing that it is evil.

Only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then, we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person.

Bonhoeffer died due to his involvement in a plot against Adolf Hitler, at dawn on 9 April 1945 at Flossenbürg concentration camp - just two weeks before soldiers from the United States liberated the camp.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity

[mariacallous]

“Don’t mention the word ‘liberalism,’ ” the talk-show host says to the guy who’s written a book on it. “Liberalism,” he explains, might mean Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to his suspicious audience, alienating more people than it invites. Talk instead about “liberal democracy,” a more expansive term that includes John McCain and Ronald Reagan. When you cross the border to Canada, you are allowed to say “liberalism” but are asked never to praise “liberals,” since that means implicitly endorsing the ruling Trudeau government and the long-dominant Liberal Party. In England, you are warned off both words, since “liberals” suggests the membership of a quaintly failed political party and “liberalism” its dated program. In France, of course, the vagaries of language have made “liberalism” mean free-market fervor, doomed from the start in that country, while what we call liberalism is more hygienically referred to as “republicanism.” Say that.

Liberalism is, truly, the love that dare not speak its name. Liberal thinkers hardly improve matters, since the first thing they will say is that the thing called “liberalism” is not actually a thing. This discouraging reflection is, to be sure, usually followed by an explanation: liberalism is a practice, a set of institutions, a tradition, a temperament, even. A clear contrast can be made with its ideological competitors: both Marxism and Catholicism, for instance, have more or less explicable rules—call them, nonpejoratively, dogmas. You can’t really be a Marxist without believing that a revolution against the existing capitalist order would be a good thing, and that parliamentary government is something of a bourgeois trick played on the working class. You can’t really be a Catholic without believing that a crisis point in cosmic history came two millennia ago in the Middle East, when a dissident rabbi was crucified and mysteriously revived. You can push either of these beliefs to the edge of metaphor—maybe the rabbi was only believed to be resurrected, and the inner experience of that epiphany is what counts; maybe the revolution will take place peacefully within a parliament and without Molotov cocktails—but you can’t really discard them. Liberalism, on the other hand, can include both faith in free markets and skepticism of free markets, an embrace of social democracy and a rejection of its statism. Its greatest figure, the nineteenth-century British philosopher and parliamentarian John Stuart Mill, was a socialist but also the author of “On Liberty,” which is (to the leftist imagination, at least) a suspiciously libertarian manifesto.

Whatever liberalism is, we’re regularly assured that it’s dying—in need of those shock paddles they regularly take out in TV medical dramas. (“C’mon! Breathe, damn it! Breathe! ”) As on television, this is not guaranteed to work. (“We’ve lost him, Holly. Damn it, we’ve lost him.”) Later this year, a certain demagogue who hates all these terms—liberals, liberalism, liberal democracy—might be lifted to power again. So what is to be done? New books on the liberal crisis tend to divide into three kinds: the professional, the professorial, and the polemical—books by those with practical experience; books by academics, outlining, sometimes in dreamily abstract form, a reformed liberal democracy; and then a few wishing the whole damn thing over, and well rid of it.

The professional books tend to come from people whose lives have been spent as pundits and as advisers to politicians. Robert Kagan, a Brookings fellow and a former State Department maven who has made the brave journey from neoconservatism to resolute anti-Trumpism, has a new book on the subject, “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again” (Knopf). Kagan’s is a particular type of book—I have written one myself—that makes the case for liberalism mostly to other liberals, by trying to remind readers of what they have and what they stand to lose. For Kagan, that “again” in the title is the crucial word; instead of seeing Trumpism as a new danger, he recapitulates the long history of anti-liberalism in the U.S., characterizing the current crisis as an especially foul wave rising from otherwise predictable currents. Since the founding of the secular-liberal Republic—secular at least in declining to pick one faith over another as official, liberal at least in its faith in individualism—anti-liberal elements have been at war with it. Kagan details, mordantly, the anti-liberalism that emerged during and after the Civil War, a strain that, just as much as today’s version, insisted on a “Christian commonwealth” founded essentially on wounded white working-class pride.

The relevance of such books may be manifest, but their contemplative depth is, of necessity, limited. Not to worry. Two welcomely ambitious and professorial books are joining them: “Liberalism as a Way of Life” (Princeton), by Alexandre Lefebvre, who teaches politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney, and “Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society” (Knopf), by Daniel Chandler, an economist and a philosopher at the London School of Economics.

The two take slightly different tacks. Chandler emphasizes programs of reform, and toys with the many bells and whistles on the liberal busy box: he’s inclined to try more random advancements, like elevating ordinary people into temporary power, on an Athenian model that’s now restricted to jury service. But, on the whole, his is a sanely conventional vision of a state reformed in the direction of ever greater fairness and equity, one able to curb the excesses of capitalism and to accommodate the demands of diversity.

The program that Chandler recommends to save liberalism essentially represents the politics of the leftier edge of the British Labour Party—which historically has been unpopular with the very people he wants to appeal to, gaining power only after exhaustion with Tory governments. In the classic Fabian manner, though, Chandler tends to breeze past some formidable practical problems. While advocating for more aggressive government intervention in the market, he admits equably that there may be problems with state ownership of industry and infrastructure. Yet the problem with state ownership is not a theoretical one: Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister because of the widely felt failures of state ownership in the nineteen-seventies. The overreaction to those failures may have been destructive, but it was certainly democratic, and Tony Blair’s much criticized temporizing began in this recognition. Chandler is essentially arguing for an updated version of the social-democratic status quo—no bad place to be but not exactly a new place, either.

Lefebvre, on the other hand, wants to write about liberalism chiefly as a cultural phenomenon—as the water we swim in without knowing that it’s wet—and his book is packed, in the tradition of William James, with racy anecdotes and pop-culture references. He finds more truths about contemporary liberals in the earnest figures of the comedy series “Parks and Recreation” than in the words of any professional pundit. A lot of this is fun, and none of it is frivolous.

Yet, given that we may be months away from the greatest crisis the liberal state has known since the Civil War, both books seem curiously calm. Lefebvre suggests that liberalism may be passing away, but he doesn’t seem especially perturbed by the prospect, and at his book’s climax he recommends a permanent stance of “reflective equilibrium” as an antidote to all anxiety, a stance that seems not unlike Richard Rorty’s idea of irony—cultivating an ability both to hold to a position and to recognize its provisionality. “Reflective equilibrium trains us to see weakness and difference in ourselves,” Lefebvre writes, and to see “how singular each of us is in that any equilibrium we reach will be specific to us as individuals and our constellation of considered judgments.” However excellent as a spiritual exercise, a posture of reflective equilibrium seems scarcely more likely to get us through 2024 than smoking weed all day, though that, too, can certainly be calming in a crisis.

Both professors, significantly, are passionate evangelists for the great American philosopher John Rawls, and both books use Rawls as their fount of wisdom about the ideal liberal arrangement. Indeed, the dust-jacket sell line of Chandler’s book is a distillation of Rawls: “Imagine: You are designing a society, but you don’t know who you’ll be within it—rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like?” Lefebvre’s “reflective equilibrium” is borrowed from Rawls, too. Rawls’s classic “A Theory of Justice” (1971) was a theory about fairness, which revolved around the “liberty principle” (you’re entitled to the basic liberties you’d get from a scheme in which everyone got those same liberties) and the “difference principle” (any inequalities must benefit the worst off). The emphasis on “justice as fairness” presses both professors to stress equality; it’s not “A Theory of Liberty,” after all. “Free and equal” is not the same as “free and fair,” and the difference is where most of the arguing happens among people committed to a liberal society.

Indeed, readers may feel that the work of reconciling Rawls’s very abstract consideration of ideal justice and community with actual experience is more daunting than these books, written by professional philosophers who swim in this water, make it out to be. A confidence that our problems can be managed with the right adjustments to the right model helps explain why the tone of both books—richly erudite and thoughtful—is, for all their implication of crisis, so contemplative and even-humored. No doubt it is a good idea to tell people to keep cool in a fire, but that does not make the fire cooler.

Rawls devised one of the most powerful of all thought experiments: the idea of the “veil of ignorance,” behind which we must imagine the society we would want to live in without knowing which role in that society’s hierarchy we would occupy. Simple as it is, it has ever-arresting force, making it clear that, behind this veil, rational and self-interested people would never design a society like that of, say, the slave states of the American South, given that, dropped into it at random, they could very well be enslaved. It also suggests that Norway might be a fairly just place, because a person would almost certainly land in a comfortable and secure middle-class life, however boringly Norwegian.

Still, thought experiments may not translate well to the real world. Einstein’s similarly epoch-altering account of what it would be like to travel on a beam of light, and how it would affect the hands on one’s watch, is profound for what it reveals about the nature of time. Yet it isn’t much of a guide to setting the timer on the coffeemaker in the kitchen so that the pot will fill in time for breakfast. Actual politics is much more like setting the timer on the coffeemaker than like riding on a beam of light. Breakfast is part of the cosmos, but studying the cosmos won’t cook breakfast. It’s telling that in neither of these Rawlsian books is there any real study of the life and the working method of an actual, functioning liberal politician. No F.D.R. or Clement Attlee, Pierre Mendès France or François Mitterrand (a socialist who was such a master of coalition politics that he effectively killed off the French Communist Party). Not to mention Tony Blair or Joe Biden or Barack Obama. Biden’s name appears once in Chandler’s index; Obama’s, though he gets a passing mention, not at all.

The reason is that theirs are not ideal stories about the unimpeded pursuit of freedom and fairness but necessarily contingent tales of adjustments and amendments—compromised stories, in every sense. Both philosophers would, I think, accept this truth in principle, yet neither is drawn to it from the heart. Still, this is how the good work of governing gets done, by those who accept the weight of the world as they act to lighten it. Obama’s history—including the feints back and forth on national health insurance, which ended, amid all the compromises, with the closest thing America has had to a just health-care system—is uninspiring to the idealizing mind. But these compromises were not a result of neglecting to analyze the idea of justice adequately; they were the result of the pluralism of an open society marked by disagreement on fundamental values. The troubles of current American politics do not arise from a failure on the part of people in Ohio to have read Rawls; they are the consequence of the truth that, even if everybody in Ohio read Rawls, not everybody would agree with him.

Ideals can shape the real world. In some ultimate sense, Biden, like F.D.R. before him, has tried to build the sort of society we might design from behind the veil of ignorance—but, also like F.D.R., he has had to do so empirically, and often through tactics overloaded with contradictions. If your thought experiment is premised on a group of free and equal planners, it may not tell you what you need to know about a society marred by entrenched hierarchies. Ask Biden if he wants a free and fair society and he would say that he does. But Thatcher would have said so, too, and just as passionately. Oscillation of power and points of view within that common framework are what makes liberal democracies liberal. It has less to do with the ideally just plan than with the guarantee of the right to talk back to the planner. That is the great breakthrough in human affairs, as much as the far older search for social justice. Plato’s rulers wanted social justice, of a kind; what they didn’t want was back talk.

Both philosophers also seem to accept, at least by implication, the familiar idea that there is a natural tension between two aspects of the liberal project. One is the desire for social justice, the other the practice of individual freedom. Wanting to speak our minds is very different from wanting to feed our neighbors. An egalitarian society might seem inherently limited in liberty, while one that emphasizes individual rights might seem limited in its capacity for social fairness.

Yet the evidence suggests the opposite. Show me a society in which people are able to curse the king and I will show you a society more broadly equal than the one next door, if only because the ability to curse the king will make the king more likely to spread the royal wealth, for fear of the cursing. The rights of sexual minorities are uniquely protected in Western liberal democracies, but this gain in social equality is the result of a history of protected expression that allowed gay experience to be articulated and “normalized,” in high and popular culture. We want to live on common streets, not in fortified castles. It isn’t a paradox that John Stuart Mill and his partner, Harriet Taylor, threw themselves into both “On Liberty,” a testament to individual freedom, and “The Subjection of Women,” a program for social justice and mass emancipation through group action. The habit of seeking happiness for one through the fulfillment of many others was part of the habit of their liberalism. Mill wanted to be happy, and he couldn’t be if Taylor wasn’t.

Liberals are at a disadvantage when it comes to authoritarians, because liberals are committed to procedures and institutions, and persist in that commitment even when those things falter and let them down. The asymmetry between the Trumpite assault on the judiciary and Biden’s reluctance even to consider enlarging the Supreme Court is typical. Trumpites can and will say anything on earth about judges; liberals are far more reticent, since they don’t want to undermine the institutions that give reality to their ideals.

Where Kagan, Lefebvre, and Chandler are all more or less sympathetic to the liberal “project,” the British political philosopher John Gray deplores it, and his recent book, “The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is one long complaint. Gray is one of those leftists so repelled by the follies of the progressive party of the moment—to borrow a phrase of Orwell’s about Jonathan Swift—that, in a familiar horseshoe pattern, he has become hard to distinguish from a reactionary. He insists that liberalism is a product of Christianity (being in thrall to the notion of the world’s perfectibility) and that it has culminated in what he calls “hyper-liberalism,” which would emancipate individuals from history and historically shaped identities. Gray hates all things “woke”—a word that he seems to know secondhand from news reports about American universities. If “woke” points to anything except the rage of those who use it, however, it is a discourse directed against liberalism—Ibram X. Kendi is no ally of Bayard Rustin, nor Judith Butler of John Stuart Mill. So it is hard to see it as an expression of the same trends, any more than Trump is a product of Burke’s conservative philosophy, despite strenuous efforts on the progressive side to make it seem so.

Gray’s views are learned, and his targets are many and often deserved: he has sharp things to say about how certain left liberals have reclaimed the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his thesis that politics is a battle to the death between friends and foes. In the end, Gray turns to Dostoyevsky’s warning that (as Gray reads him) “the logic of limitless freedom is unlimited despotism.” Hyper-liberals, Gray tells us, think that we can compete with the authority of God, and what they leave behind is wild disorder and crazed egotism.

As for Dostoyevsky’s positive doctrines—authoritarian and mystical in nature—Gray waves them away as being “of no interest.” But they are of interest, exactly because they raise the central pragmatic issue: If you believe all this about liberal modernity, what do you propose to do about it? Given that the announced alternatives are obviously worse or just crazy (as is the idea of a Christian commonwealth, something that could be achieved only by a degree of social coercion that makes the worst of “woke” culture look benign), perhaps the evil might better be ameliorated than abolished.

Between authority and anarchy lies argument. The trick is not to have unified societies that “share values”—those societies have never existed or have existed only at the edge of a headsman’s axe—but to have societies that can get along nonviolently without shared values, aside from the shared value of trying to settle disputes nonviolently. Certainly, Americans were far more polarized in the nineteen-sixties than they are today—many favored permanent apartheid (“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”)—and what happened was not that values changed on their own but that a form of rights-based liberalism of protest and free speech convinced just enough people that the old order wouldn’t work and that it wasn’t worth fighting for a clearly lost cause.

What’s curious about anti-liberal critics such as Gray is their evident belief that, after the institutions and the practices on which their working lives and welfare depend are destroyed, the features of the liberal state they like will somehow survive. After liberalism is over, the neat bits will be easily reassembled, and the nasty bits will be gone. Gray can revile what he perceives to be a ruling élite and call to burn it all down, and nothing impedes the dissemination of his views. Without the institutions and the practices that he despises, fear would prevent oppositional books from being published. Try publishing an anti-Communist book in China or a critique of theocracy in Iran. Liberal institutions are the reason that he is allowed to publish his views and to have the career that he and all the other authors here rightly have. Liberal values and practices allow their most fervent critics a livelihood and a life—which they believe will somehow magically be reconstituted “after liberalism.” They won’t be.

The vociferous critics of liberalism are like passengers on the Titanic who root for the iceberg. After all, an iceberg is thrilling, and anyway the White Star Line has classes, and the music the band plays is second-rate, and why is the food French instead of honestly English? “Just as I told you, the age of the steamship is over!” they cry as the water slips over their shoes. They imagine that another boat will miraculously appear—where all will be in first class, the food will be authentic, and the band will perform only Mozart or Motown, depending on your wishes. Meanwhile, the ship goes down. At least the band will be playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” which they will take as some vindication. The rest of us may drown.

One turns back to Helena Rosenblatt’s 2018 book, “The Lost History of Liberalism,” which makes the case that liberalism is not a recent ideology but an age-old series of intuitions about existence. When the book appeared, it may have seemed unduly overgeneralized—depicting liberalism as a humane generosity that flared up at moments and then died down again. But, as the world picture darkens, her dark picture illuminates. There surely are a set of identifiable values that connect men and women of different times along a single golden thread: an aversion to fanaticism, a will toward the coexistence of different kinds and creeds, a readiness for reform, a belief in the public criticism of power without penalty, and perhaps, above all, a knowledge that institutions of civic peace are much harder to build than to destroy, being immeasurably more fragile than their complacent inheritors imagine. These values will persist no matter how evil the moment may become, and by whatever name we choose to whisper in the dark.

[microtheory]

This is part one on the philosopher Carl Schmitt and his critique of liberalism. I hope you love the show today.

So we’re three episodes into this new arc of the show and, as you know, we’re talking about the early 20th century here. Once again, it’s important to keep in mind all that’s going on during this time. Political philosophy is going through a serious transition phase because, in many ways, the world is going through a serious transition phase. Revolutions are taking place, world wars are on the horizon, the rise of fascism, authoritarianism. The entire legacy of the Enlightenment is being called into question. And what this means for the world of philosophy is that the thinkers doing their work during this time are very quickly coming face to face with the realization that, in this post-nuclear world, where for the first time the consequences of war could threaten the entire existence of the human race, they are the people that are going to have to figure all this out.

Think of the pressure these thinkers were faced with at the time. To be a thinker born into the early 20th century is to be born into a world where the strength of your ideas is going to be tested in real time while the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Being born into this time period is like the forces of history commandeering you for one of the most stressful jobs in the history of the world. I mean, imagine your first day at a new job, and the orientation is, here's the entire history of Western civilization; and day one at the new job is, “Well, time for you to fix it all. Now, get to work.”

Now, this job would be difficult enough if we were looking back at a history of total chaos in the West. But, keep in mind, the Western world at this time is the self-proclaimed center of political thought, the self-proclaimed most advanced collection of societies that have ever existed in history. So, if this really is such an advanced, developed environment that the rest of the world should draw inspiration from, why do we have such a rich history of things failing miserably? Think of the history this world is emerging out of. The Age of Reason and the political thought of the Enlightenment produced for us what we’ve long considered to be the greatest political strategy in existence, liberal, capitalist democracy. By this time, for over a hundred years liberal, capitalist democracy has been the gold standard in the West when it comes to how we should be structuring our societies.

The problem facing political philosophers at the beginning of the 20th century is this: What exactly is it about our longstanding strategy of liberal, capitalist democracy that seems to invariably lead society into an endgame of dictatorship, bloodshed, and political instability? When John Dewey and Antonio Gramsci show up with their lunchbox on the first day at the new job, this is the first order of business people like them are going to have to deal with. Now, it’s right here that we can understand why the two of them went in the respective directions they did. Because like we talked about, the beginning of the 20th century can be broadly understood in terms of three major branches of political discussion, three primary conversations that are going on. We’ve already talked about two of them. And understanding all three of them is going to be absolutely crucial, because the contents of these conversations is going to go on to dictate the direction of almost all subsequent political philosophy all the way up to the present day.

When a philosopher sets out to contribute something to the political discussion of the 20th century, they’re almost without exception doing so in consideration to one of these three major critiques of the way we’ve done things in the past. Once again, what we’ve done in the past is liberal, capitalist democracy. The three major critiques are going to be John Dewey and his critique of traditional democracy, Antonio Gramsci and his critique of capitalism, and the guy we’re going to be talking about today, the philosopher Carl Schmitt and his critique of liberalism.

But where’s the best place to begin explaining one of the most scathing critiques of liberalism in existence? Maybe the best thing to preface this with, just given the demographics of this show, is that when Carl Schmitt sets out to critique the doctrine of liberalism, he’s not setting out to critique liberalism in the context that some living in the modern United States may think of liberalism -- you know, that it’s one end of a political spectrum, diametrically opposed to conservatism, with these two poles being defined by the current state of the US political landscape -- that’s not the liberalism he’s talking about here. Carl Schmitt, believe it or not, is not setting out in his work to critique some modern political cliché, you know, some pro-choice Greenpeace platinum card member who roller blades to work and thinks healthcare should be a human right. That’s not the liberalism he’s talking about.

So let’s talk about what the word liberalism is actually referring to in the context of this broader philosophical discussion that’s going on. The term liberalism is referring to a political philosophy and method of determining political legitimacy that emerged out of the beginning of the Enlightenment. Modern historians, when looking back at history, often describe liberalism as the dominant political strategy of the Enlightenment era that should be contrasted with the methods of determining political legitimacy before the Enlightenment, which historians sometimes just group all together and refer to as pre-liberal thought. So we have the liberalism of the Enlightenment that is to be contrasted with the pre-liberal thought, which is the way we did things before the Enlightenment.

To put all this is in a very Philosophize This! way -- look, people form into societies. Those societies have problems that need to get solved. The people that make up those societies have to figure out the answer to several basic but very important questions. What kind of society do we want to produce? What sort of values do we want to uphold when engaging in our political process? What makes something a legitimate political problem at all? How do we solve these problems? Specifically, what is having a political disagreement even going to look like in our society? Because that’s a very important distinction that might not immediately seem like something our political process defines the parameters of. But, keep in mind, political disagreements of today look nothing like the political disagreements of a thousand years ago, and this is a big reason why liberalism is often contrasted with pre-liberalism.

Before liberalism burst onto the scene, societies determined levels of political legitimacy with very different methods than we do today. Pre-liberal societies often informed their political process through things like divine revelation, tradition, ritual, pure authoritarianism, theological scholarship; you know, the interpretation of scripture was an important part of the political process. Pre-liberal societies relied on these methods, and these methods reliably produced a certain type of society. People got fed up with this type of society and put their heads together in the Enlightenment to try to come up with some better criteria to try to base our political decisions on. These criteria and the positions they naturally arrive at have come to be known as liberalism.

Now, what this transition looks like, in keeping with the theme of the Enlightenment overall -- political strategy starts to move away from revelation and instead is beginning to rely a lot more on reason. Once again, from pre-liberal to liberal. When making political decisions, there’s a turn away from pre-liberal methods of theological scholarship and a turn towards a new liberal focus on secular scholarship. There’s a turn away from political decisions based on divine intervention towards a new confidence in decisions that are hashed out through rational debate. The pre-liberal standard of there being some single, anointed authoritarian leader that has ultimate say over the political process is quickly being replaced by things like parliamentary politics, separation of powers, democracy, civil and human rights. There’s a new focus on issues regarding equality. Capitalism starts to become the dominant economic approach. Liberal, capitalist democracies as opposed to feudal aristocracies.

Liberalism primarily aims to do away with the authoritarianism and divine revelation of the past and replace it instead with things like limited government, equality, freedom of expression, secular science, and rational debate. Now, somebody born into our modern world that’s largely grounded in liberal principles might be confused as to how anybody in their right mind could ever possibly disagree with this method of doing things politically. This episode is not talking about the merits of liberalism, but Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberalism. You might think, “Look, I know we’ve had our problems in the West over the years, but all this stuff just seems like common sense. I mean, back to the modern United States, liberalism seems to be the foundation of both political parties. How could anybody possibly think that it’s liberalism that’s the problem with liberal, capitalist democracy?”

Carl Schmitt would probably say to this person that the most dangerous political ideology is the ideology that’s currently popular, the kind of ideological assumptions you make about the political process that are so engrained, so steeped in tradition, that you don’t even think twice about them. Because if we should regard the thinking before the Enlightenment as pre-liberal and the thinking during the Enlightenment as liberal, then Carl Schmitt can be regarded as someone trying to bring about a new post-liberal way of thinking politically. Modern anti-liberal is how he’s often described.

So, for the sake of understanding where Carl Schmitt’s coming from, the important thing to keep in mind right here at the beginning is that, when there’s this shift towards liberal principles during the Enlightenment, what comes along with that is a promise from the thinkers of the time that this new strategy is going to bring about a better world for everyone. One of the dominant theories among the thinkers of the Enlightenment was that, if we let these liberal values play out and allow them to reach their natural conclusions, we will be the architects of a brand-new, cosmopolitan, peaceful world, the likes of which we’ve never seen. To understand Carl Schmitt, this is the perspective from which we need to view liberalism.

Liberalism was created as an alternative political philosophy that was supposed to be a solution to many of the political problems of the past. These thinkers are looking back at history, seeing the pattern of dictators, bloodshed, and political instability, and they’re trying to come up with some new way of conducting politics where these things aren’t going to happen anymore. This is actually a really good way to understand it. I mean, you can see why many of the hallmarks of liberalism are what they are, when you think about them in relation to some historical problem they were trying to solve. History of dictatorships and authoritarianism? Let’s introduce separation of powers, checks and balances on the executive branch. History of sprawling empires and rigid national and religious identities? Well, we’re all members of a global economy. Let’s have political and religious identities take a back seat for now and instead unite the world under a flag of mutually beneficial consumerism. History of political and religious wars? Well, let’s not fight on the actual battlefield anymore. Let’s instead hash out our political differences in the battlefield of rational debate, where people can still be at odds with each other, they can still go to war, but this way nobody has to die. This was the hope and ambition of liberalism as a political philosophy. Liberalism was supposed to be an alternative way of doing stuff that solved these problems of the past, but Carl Schmitt is going to say this is nowhere near what actually happened.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of Carl Schmitt. Try to see liberalism through the eyes of a philosopher living in the early 20th century. Similar to the early liberal thinkers, Carl Schmitt is looking back at history, and he too sees the pre-liberal world of dictatorships, bloodshed, and political instability. Oh, but then along comes liberalism to save the day. And then what he sees is really not much changing at all. What he sees is that, throughout the entire tenure of liberalism, things continue to descend into dictatorships, bloodshed, and political instability all the way up to the present day. And he thinks the only reasonable thing to conclude from this state of affairs is that there is a big difference between the hopes and ambitions of liberalism and how things actually play out in the world. Liberalism, to Carl Schmitt, doesn’t produce the world that it claims to produce.

Throughout several years of his career, Carl Schmitt attacked liberalism from so many different angles that there really isn’t a clear starting point here. So I want to just jump right in to some different examples of hallmarks of liberal thinking that Carl Schmitt takes issue with, use that as a skeleton, and then try to flush out the rest of his position from there.

So, just to get us started, one of the biggest delusions of liberal thought in the eyes of Carl Schmitt is the expectation that it is possible for us to produce a society where people can have extreme political differences and, by adhering to the tenants of liberalism, these people can coexist, live peacefully amongst each other, and just agree to disagree if things ever get heated. Put in the words of political philosophy, this is the toleration of difference. We see this kind of thinking in Western, liberal democracies every second of every day. I mean, you’ll often hear people talk about political discussion with the expectation that this sort of thing is possible. You know, we may be totally different people. We may disagree on almost every element of how a society should be structured. But, at the end of the day, we can shake hands, live and let live, and just go on about our lives.

Carl Schmitt would say that this is a liberal fantasy world, that if you pay attention to what’s actually going on in the real world of the political, this is not the way extreme political differences interact with each other in our societies. Liberalism just creates the illusion that they do. To Carl Schmitt, this expectation that we’re going to be able to coexist, tolerant of extreme political differences, comes from the more fundamental liberal belief that there is no political difference so extreme that there can’t be some sort of solution eventually arrived at in an open forum of rational debate, that there is no chasm between worldviews that is so unbridgeable that there can’t be some sort of reasonable compromise that’s arrived at by both parties. This is a hallmark of liberal thought and a cornerstone of the liberal political process.

Now, Carl Schmitt would say, this idea just in theory, no doubt, sounds really great. I mean, who doesn’t want a world where we can always just talk things through politically? Who wouldn’t want a world where we never have to implement political philosophy by force? The problem for Carl Schmitt is that this isn’t how the world works. Liberalism is marketed to people as an alternative, more peaceful way of engaging in the political. But Carl Schmitt believes all that liberalism really does is allow people to avoid engaging in the political.

Rational debate puts on a good show, but it’s mostly political theater. We have long periods of normalcy where a bunch of people get dressed up in suits and go to this building downtown and scream at each other for a few hours about issues that are almost entirely inconsequential. This all provides a nice soap opera for people to watch that’s supposed to be evidence of the liberal political process in action. “Hey! Look at how peaceful we’ve all learned to be. Hurray for liberalism!” is what we’re supposed to say.

But Carl Schmitt would say, look at history. What happens every single time there is a truly serious political issue where the differences between parties are irreconcilable? I mean, what happens when you try to have a rational debate with someone whose whole political belief is that I should be king of the world, and you should all be my slaves? Well, it doesn’t work. There’s no reasoning with that person. You wouldn’t try to solve that difference of opinion with rational debate. No, you’d tell that person to sit down and be quiet, or else they’re going to be thrown in jail.

So it’s at least possible to have a political situation that all the debating in the world isn’t going to solve. Okay. Now, think of all the political differences that can possibly present themselves that are far less of a cartoon. Carl Schmitt would start by saying, look, there are going to be groups that emerge in the political landscape whose entire existence is predicated on the destruction of another group. The reality of the world is that there are political differences that are irreconcilable. And these differences are not all that uncommon.

To Carl Schmitt, this is one of the failures of liberal political philosophy. No matter how good it feels to tell ourselves we’re going to be open to outsiders and just talk things out when we disagree, rational debate cannot solve political problems of this magnitude. No matter how much of a poster child you are for liberalism, faced with political beliefs sufficiently hostile to liberalism, faced with, for example, an authoritarian regime that wants to ascend to power, you are eventually going to have to do one of two things. Choice number one, be willing to accept the destruction of liberalism simply because something else was popular at the time. Or, choice number two, use the power of the state to silence opposition or, in other words, temporarily behave like what we would otherwise call a dictator by using the sovereign authority that, to Schmitt, is intrinsically embedded into the political process.

Choice number two of those two is something that liberals are absolutely terrified of, and for good reason. Remember, they’re looking to societies of the past that are structured around social contract theory. Society is an agreement between the citizenry and the sovereign. The citizen’s job is to serve the sovereign. The sovereign’s job is to ensure the security of the citizen. Sometimes in order to do this effectively, the sovereign needs to wield an authoritarian level of power. To political philosophers in the days of pre-liberalism, having a designated sovereign body, like a king, that has the ability to maintain certain elements of society unencumbered by the political process, was absolutely crucial. During the formation of liberalism, people looked back at our history of doing things this way and realized many of the downfalls of the great societies of the past occurred when in this volatile place of a sovereign body seizing control. Liberal philosophers, understandably, tried to do away with the concept of a sovereign. They saw it as an outdated and dangerous idea.

Carl Schmitt makes the case that this is why, once liberalism comes onto the scene, the thinkers at the time become absolutely obsessed with finding any possible way they can to make it so that we don’t have to have a sovereign anymore. The idea of a dictatorship, which at the time was historically one of the most common structures of a successful society -- dictatorships in this new liberal world become unthinkable. And Carl Schmitt wants to mark another distinction here between liberal theory and the reality of how the world is. The reality of the world is that societies sometimes need the ability to make swift and decisive decisions. And, in the post-Enlightenment world, this reality gets swept under the rug for the sake of pandering to the liberal fear of authoritarianism. He thinks this taboo towards the idea of a dictatorship certainly makes us feel good, but it simultaneously ignores the need for capabilities that healthy societies require.

To Carl Schmitt, this is yet another failure of the liberal political process. Not only does liberalism ignore society’s occasional need for a sovereign but, even if it wanted to get rid of the sovereign altogether, liberalism doesn’t actually remove the sovereign from the political process. Once again, it just creates the illusion that there isn’t a sovereign until we actually need one. Liberalism performs this illusion by engaging in various different types of what Carl Schmitt refers to as “normativism.” To put it bluntly, Carl Schmitt’s saying that liberalism’s terrified of the idea of a sovereign dictator holding power. So, to safeguard against that possibility, they’ve come up with all these different attempts to hold political power to a set of predefined norms and rules. Liberals are obsessed with this process of normativism. This is the rise of constitutional democracies in the West. Constitutions are designed to be safeguards against the swift and decisive action of authoritarianism. Normativism is sold as an incredible feature of liberalism that helps protect the will of the people.

Now, Carl Schmitt uses this term of normativism in a way that’s mostly intended to poke fun at the hopes of liberalism because, like I just alluded to, normativism is an illusion to Carl Schmitt. The hope and ambition of liberalism is that, by coming up with these norms that political leaders have to follow, whenever somebody comes along that starts to look like one of those sovereign dictators we’ve seen throughout history, well, we’ll just pull out the constitution. We’ll wave it in their face. They’ll burst into flames; and we’ll never have to hear from them again. But Carl Schmitt’s going to say this is yet another delusion of liberalism that doesn’t shore up with the reality of the world.

First of all, he would say, it doesn’t matter how long you sit down and talk about what the parameters should be for someone holding a position of power. You are never going to be able to come up with a set of rules that accounts for every contingency, given how many moving parts are involved when making decisions that affect this many people. To Carl Schmitt, trying to normativize these highly volatile moments that leaders are faced with is, at best, drastically oversimplifying how complex the world can be and, at worst, severely weakening your society and its ability to adapt and defend itself in a bad situation.

Here’s the good news though. To Carl Schmitt, this isn’t actually how things ever play out in liberal societies anyway, because even the most liberal society in existence eventually recognizes how necessary temporary extra-constitutional power is, given the right circumstances. Carl Schmitt is saying that even in liberal societies, whenever it really comes down to it and they’re faced with some sort of existential crisis, the constitution goes out the window anyway. Citizens of liberal, constitutional democracies often have this expectation of, “Oh, well, the government can’t just go rogue and do whatever they want. They’re held to the constitution. There are checks and balances. They got to get permission to do something, right?” But what happens every time there’s an emergency and something needs to get done? Oh, well, they just take action.

In other words, to Carl Schmitt, liberalism claims to have gotten rid of the sovereign from the political process. But what happens in these societies whenever something actually has to get done and we need a sovereign? Abracadabra! Poof! The sovereign was there the whole time. Who would have thought? I mean, this is a great magic trick. And to Carl Schmitt, the misdirection of this magic trick was performed by the liberal political process.

This is yet another liberal theory versus reality thing to him. The hope of liberalism was to get rid of the sovereign. The reality of the world is that we have these long periods of normalcy, where the government does almost nothing, punctuated by rare moments of extreme action whenever things actually need to get done. Liberalism hasn’t removed the sovereign from the political process, and the only time pieces of paper like the constitution prevent the sovereign from acting are during periods of normalcy, when the sovereign wouldn’t be exercising authoritarian power anyway. To Carl Schmitt, the biggest difference between our modern societies and the ones that existed in the pre-liberal world is that the pre-liberal societies were just a lot more honest about the authoritarianism that was going on. Nowadays, we got this grand illusion of liberalism that puts a bunch of window dressing on the whole process and pretends the world is something that it’s not. Liberalism is, in many ways, an impossible, utopian fantasy, in the eyes of Carl Schmitt.

Episode #132 - Transcript - Carl Schmitt On Liberalism pt 1 - Philosophize This! - Stephen West

[txttletale]

socialism: elysian and scientific

[whispering to you in a movie theater in between mouthfuls of salted caramel popcorn--other moviegoers who just want to watch we bought a zoo (2011) are glaring at us but i don’t care]

so in 1880 friedrich engels wrote a snappy little number called ‘socialism: utopian & scientific’. it’s a foundational marxist text and one i’d recommend to everybody--and i think some of the ideas in it are incorporated and built on in disco elysium in really interesting ways.

socialism: utopian & scientific does a few things. first, it lays out the ideas of the 18th century utopian socialists and explains the societal context in which they developed their ideas--and the core idea of the dialectic development of ideas. engels harshly critiques the enlightenment's conception of the history of thought as a history of individual thinkers attempting to capture an eternal, immutable corpus of truth and justice--he describes this worldview thusly (emphasis mine):

What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chains of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering.

and of course it jumped out to me playing disco elysium that this is exactly how human development works the world of elysium--innocences are singularly world-changing individuals who personally establish systems and ideologies within their lifetimes:

dolores dei in particular is a pretty clear synechdoche (both narratively and, because of how innocences work, diegetically) for the bourgeois revolutions of the enlightenment--her followers, the moralists, are clearly analogous to the real-world post-enlightenment liberal international system. the “kingdom of conscience”, is, i think, also a pretty heavy-handed reference to engels’ sardonic use of the “kingdom of reason” to describe the empty promises of the 18th century bourgeois revolutions:

Now, for the first time, appeared the light of day, the kingdom of reason; henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on Nature and the inalienable rights of man.

so--moralists are liberals, that’s not exactly groundbreaking. the innocentic system is a literalization of the metaphysical vision of the history of ideas--that’s interesting, but it doesn’t really say anything in and of itself. so let’s go a little deeper. if engels doesn’t think philosophers, are accessing a nebulous immaterial well of absolute truth, what does he think--well, he cites hegelian dialectics, a system he and marx develop into material dialectics and historical materialism. what the fuck are hegelian dialectics--well there’s a lot of really long fucking books that answer that, but let me just quote engels here:

In his system — and herein is its great merit — for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and developmen

hegel posits the history of mankind as the history of ideas evolving in concert with one another--the ideas of, say, the enlightenment weren’t just waiting in the aether during the age of feudalism, fully formed until some singular genius could grasp them--instead they are the product of the ideas before them interacting through the process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. this is dialectics--the idea that progress broadly takes the form of contradicting forces generating a novel force through their interaction.

now, engels identifies one key flaw in hegel, which is that he’s still idealist--he is putting the ideas first in this historical model, positing them as drivers of history rather than products of it. engels then goes on to lay out the fundamentals of historical materialism, which is the application of dialectics to a material view of history--when engels says “all past history [...] was the history of class struggles”, this is what he means, that historical development is the process of the creation and resolution of contradictions between modes of production and exchange (how stuff gets made and who gets it and why).

[i take someone elses double gulp soda out of their hand and slurp it loudly, ignoring their obvious outrage]

okay that’s all cool but what does this have to do with beloved crpg disco elysium (2019)? well, for a start it takes a very distinctively historical materialist worldview when it comes to its own history--the history of revachol is very much the history of class struggle, from the revolution to the strike--and the idea that the elements from which future society will arise are already present with current society is a recurring theme:

the future is change--society is in motion, contradictions must resolve, the world is dialectic--and the moralists are in opposition to this, desperate to maintain the status quo, to maintain contradictions perfectly suspended forever. from the dialectic point of view, moralism in disco elysium is the quest for no future at all:

as engels explains, a dialectic view of history means that you need to understand the past if you want to understand the present, because the present is born from elements of the past:

From this point of view, the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment seat of mature philosophic reason and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man himself.

for the moralists, the past is something to be forgotten, cast aside for an eternal unchanging present. which is interesting because in disco elysium there happens to be a global world-threatening force which is forgetting the past: the god damn pale. the pale is the accumulation of all human history into something flat and meaningless, the detachment of history from its context--the pale is the future, past, and present not as dialectical continuum of cause and effect but as meaningless incoherent chatter. the pale is the moralist’s view of history made real global force--

--and it has the potential to destroy everything--

and this is what moralism is. engels says of metaphysical philosophy:

In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the woods for the trees.

by understanding the world in repose, as a dead thing, moralism is killing it. by discarding the past it is creating a debt that can’t be repaid. and what brings this all together is this bit of information from the game’s concept art:

innocences create the fucking pale. what they’re doing, their immanentized personificaton of the kingdom-of-reason model of history, is destroying the future. very literally, the non-dialectic view of the status quo--the quest for the right ideas to ensure endless stagnant stillness--is killing the world. the man who killed dolores dei was right:

we were supposed to come up with this ourselves. so--all that done--what’s the point of this post? what do i think any of this proves, other than that i and the DE writers are fancy communists who read books? well, my read on it at least: the pale is the destruction of history for a purpose--because if we do not understand history, we will think we cannot change it. we will wait for the great people to do it for us--we will wait for them to invent a future to live in and we will wait until we die. we are supposed to come up with this ourselves. as engels says:

The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day-by-day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties — this possibility is now, for the first time, here, but it is here.

liberalism tells us that the future is unknowable, untouchable, that all we can do is wait for it to arrive. socialism--and disco elysium--tell us that the future is here, now, that everything we need to build it ourselves is already in the world. the second hardest part of that is realizing it--the hardest part is doing it.

[i am dragged bodily out of the theater by my ankles, frantically snatching snacks out of other people’s hands as i go. for the road]

[whencyclopedia]

Roger Williams

Roger Williams (l. 1603-1683 CE) was a Puritan separatist minister best known for his conflict with both the Plymouth Colony and Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1633-1635 CE, resulting in his banishment and founding of the colony of Providence, Rhode Island. Williams believed that the clergy of both Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were corrupt in continuing to adhere to the concept of one's deeds as an important aspect of spiritual salvation rather than acknowledging the biblical precept that only God's grace grants salvation (Romans 8:32, Ephesians 2:8). Further, he claimed, these churches were still aligned with the basic policies of the Anglican Church they had supposedly rejected.

Williams is also well-known as an advocate for the separation of church and state (claiming that politics poisoned religious practice and belief), complete religious freedom, the abolition of slavery in the colonies of North America, and respect for Native Americans. One of his criticisms of the colonies of New England was that they felt free to take land from the Native Americans without payment. When he founded Providence, he paid the Narragansett tribe a fair price for the land.

Providence became the first successful liberal colony in New England which was not informed by Puritan ideals and theology. Anyone of any religion or ethnicity was welcome to settle there as long as they recognized the fundamental human right of what Williams called the "liberty of conscience" – the freedom to express one's self - especially in religious matters, without fear of persecution or reprisal. Providence was scorned by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, especially, as populated by riffraff, lunatics, and heretics but became one of the fastest-growing settlements in the region under Williams' vision and guidance. In the modern day, parks, schools, and memorials around Rhode Island are named in his honor.

Early Life & Migration

Roger Williams was born, probably in London, England, in 1603 CE, the son of a merchant, James Williams, and wife Alice. Records of his early life were lost in the Great Fire of London in 1666 CE. As a young man, he was educated first at Charterhouse School and then Cambridge University's Pembroke College where he mastered a number of languages including Dutch, French, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. He was intensely interested in religious matters from a young age and studied to become an Anglican cleric. At Cambridge, however, he was drawn to Puritan theology and practice which would later set him at odds with the Anglican Church.

The Anglican Church, although founded in opposition to Catholicism, still retained a number of Catholic aspects in its organization, worship service, and beliefs. The Puritans were Anglicans who objected to any Catholic influences or observances in the Church and wished to 'purify' it, bringing it in line with the simple practices and beliefs of the first Christian community as depicted in the biblical Book of Acts. The more radical Puritans were known as separatists – those who felt the Anglican Church was wholly corrupted by Catholic influences and separated themselves from it completely – and, in time, Williams aligned himself with this theology and belief.

During his years at Cambridge, Williams was apprenticed to the famous jurist Sir Edward Coke (l. 1552-1634 CE), an independent and courageous thinker whose insistence on the concept of equality before the law brought him into conflict with the monarchy. Coke's unwavering stand for justice, as well as his practice of regularly speaking out against policies or even laws he considered unjust or inequitable, significantly influenced Williams' outlook and later actions.

The Anglican Church had replaced the pope with the English monarch as its head and so any criticism of the Church was considered treason against the crown. Throughout the reign of James I of England (1603-1625 CE), Puritans who voiced dissent were persecuted, fined, and jailed, some even executed, and under Charles I of England (r. 1625-1649 CE), these persecutions continued. Recognizing that England was no longer safe for an outspoken Puritan separatist, Williams left with his wife Mary in 1630 CE.

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[tanadrin]

the episode on Cold War Liberalism of Know Your Enemy is dense in a delightful way, and Samuel Moyn has a lot to say about the evolution of liberalism as an idea that I think is really interesting. His basic contention is that, essentially, the Cold War ruined liberalism, and the thing we think of when we think of liberalism nowadays is, in many ways, a shadow of its former self. Bullet points of bits I found interesting:

Earlier liberals engaged productively with thinkers like Marx; there was a strand of ambition and an idea of a gradual process of perfection that led to some of liberalism's greatest accomplishments, like the welfare state. Even out-and-out leftist figures like Marx could admire aspects of liberalism that were emancipatory (albeit within strict limits that had to be overcome).

During the Cold War, liberals became enamored of a theory of totalitarianism that didn't differentiate much between the right and the left, and shrank from its earlier ambitions, becoming--through vehicles like neoliberalism--less and less distinguishable from various flavors of conservatism. This eventually led liberals to turn away from liberalism's formerly successful achievements, including against the robust welfare states that had done so much in the middle of the century.

It's not like pre-Cold War liberalism wasn't bound up with ideas about laissez-faire economics (and even imperialism), long before neoliberalism arrived on the scene. Nevertheless, some of the earliest liberals still had promising ambitions: Moyn cites "perfectionism" ("perfection" here being understood more in the sense of "a process of improvement" rather than "a final unchanging state"), which he contrasts against (in more recent theory and practice) "tolerationism." Tolerationism sees liberalism as sort of merely the thing that lets people get along and which prevents bloodshed; figures like Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill weren't merely tolerationists in this sense; they weren't aiming for a world in which people merely muddled along, but had the ambition to achieve the highest life for humanity, and thought that you could create institutions that promoted this, via (or perhaps while also) promoting public and private freedom. In other words, perfectionism is a kind of positive (almost utopian) vision for liberalism to aspire to, but one which contemporary liberalism lacks. In this way liberalism was also both explicitly emancipatory and progressive, in a wauy which, again, Moyn contends present-day liberalism is not, having set its sights considerably lower.

Our instinctive sense of what liberalism consists of nowadays--something beleagered, timid, and not especially aspirational--is a product of the Cold War. The traumas of the world wars and the tensions of the Cold War seemed to produce what you might call a trauma response against ambitious and utopian ideas within liberal thought, albeit one that (like a lot of trauma responses) was reactive and self-limiting rather than a fully rational course-correction--call this allergy to real ideological commitment the "liberalism of fear," after Judith Shklar's work of that name. Although even Shklar was distasteful of neoliberals, who, she argued, abandoned the principles of the Enlightenment simply because the Soviets tried to claim them as well.

Cold War liberals seemed to take the Soviet Union at its word that they were the sole inheritors of the Enlightenment, the ideas of the French Revolution, and even of reason, science, and history; they contended themselves with something much more minimalist and timid, without the emancipatory element that was crucial to Enlightenment thought and abandoning useful lessons learned from writers like Marx.

European Catholics declare the Cold War long before liberals join in. Liberalism had helped to create socialism after all; there were once real points of ideological consonance between the two and many liberals were interested in the early days in seeing how the Soviet experiment would turn out. These writers coin the idea of totalitarianism as a thing uniting both the communists and Nazis. But they are perfectly fine with places like interwar Austria. They don't like the Nazis because of the pagan overtones, but these are not liberals!

Popper's contribution to this project is to decanonize and demonize historicism. He associates Hegel and Marx with his "very cramped understanding of what historicism is," i.e., a commitment to lawlike inevitable processes in history. But while attempting to cast that rather narrow idea into disrepute, he tars a much broader swathe of ideas with his brush--including (if I understand this part correctly) the thoughtful and deliberate engagement with the place of one's ideology and political aims in a larger historical context. Liberals sort of give up any claim on history because of Popper, which Moyn thinks has been particularly disastrous especially since the end of the Cold War. Liberals do not give people much to believe in anymore, either because history is over or because justice is sitting there at the end of the moral rainbow and we'll get there eventually if we just wait and vote Democrat without engaging in major criticism of structures of power.

There's an interesting point in this part about how nowadays nobody believes in positive teleologies anymore--"progress" on a grand scale--but only negative ones ("the slingshot to the atom bomb," to paraphrase Adorno).

The irony of course is that at the beginning of the Cold War, while liberals were as a group abandoning the whole idea of emancipatory politics, they were (for a short time) engaged in building some of the most triumphantly emancipatory institutions in the history of liberalism, in the form of strong welfare states. Rawls comes along and creates a robust theory of the welfare state in 1971, but only once the dismantling of these institutions has begun.

Only halfway through the episode so far, but it's a lot to chew on. It certainly resonates with my own frustrations with liberal politics, where liberals keep wringing their hands about the rise of far-right populism, and then going "I know what the answer is! It's a minor tweak to the tax code!" Like parties across the center-right/center-left spectrum are terrified of actually articulating any kind of coherent political vision, so of course the people who do that (even if their vision is a Hieronymous Bosch-style grotesque of the world) are going to have the advantage.

[hiiragi7]

hi whenever you see this-- just wanted to stop by and drop a note for you. you're extremely articulate and resilient and i appreciate your voice in this digital space so very much.

i'm a fully perisex afab individual. i identify as male and female bigender and do not claim transmasculinity as an effect of my identity. nonetheless i've always sought masculinizing bottom surgery and have called myself both a man and a woman to my peers, and moving through the world in this way is not an experience i can relate to common binary trans experiences. it was really isolating and it continues to be isolating, i felt like because there wasn't really an established discourse on multigender identities that i somehow had to find a way to fit my experiences into the transfeminine/transmasculine discussion and mostly cobbled together concepts from theorists under that umbrella to piece together the ways in which i was ostracized from my peers and queer spaces. the decision i made to seriously read into intersex issues and the ideas being put out by intersex thinkers was an incredibly liberating experience for me. intersex perspectives have completely overturned not just the way i understood gender, but my perception of my own self. everyday intersex people are thrown under the bus, ignored, dismissed, tokenized and objectified by the queer community at large in ways you absolutely do not deserve, and i want this ask to hopefully remind you that your work is not in vain, there are people who care, and the value of your experiences are not to be understated. ever. i stand forever in solidarity with my intersex siblings. you guys deserve to hit people with hammers 💖

Thank you ❤️ I really appreciate this. Here's a cat in a box on a skateboard.

[dailyanarchistposts]

For Chris Marquis, a gifted writer, a courageous reporter and a generous friend whose loss has left a hole in my heart.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. —Blaise Pascal

Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt

By Umberto Eco

In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical forms of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counterrevolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but is was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of the faiths indulgently accepted by the Roman pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages—in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little-known religions of Asia.

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice;” such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and although they seem to say different or incompatible things, they all are nevertheless alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth already has been spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine, who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge—that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.</strong> Both Fascists and Nazis worshipped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon blood and earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake.</strong> Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Hermann Goering’s fondness for a phrase from a Hanns Johst play (“When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “egg-heads,” “effete snobs,” and “universities are nests of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

4. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the United States, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.</strong> When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such “final solutions” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak.</strong> Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people in the world, the members or the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler.

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero.</strong> In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Spanish Falangists was Viva la Muerte (“Long Live Death!”). In nonfascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.</strong> This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say.</strong> In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view—one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People. Because of its qualitative populism, Ur-Fascism must be against “rotten” parliamentary governments. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the official language of what he called Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: “If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.” Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

[givemearmstopraywith]

do you have any suggestions for material that approaches theology with marxist thought? i Have gone through liberation/womanist theology stuff but none that so explicitly called itself marxist

you might enjoy critical theory if you're not already familiar. none of these writers are theologians or even theists, but they are strongly influenced by marxism and i find they fill in the gaps of theology where i wish for more marxism. they radically reshaped my theology even as they are highly critical of institutional christianity and i strongly recommend them.

dialectic of enlightenment: critical theory and the messianic light by jacob klapwijick (good introductory primer)

negative dialectics by theodor adorno

"the dogma of christ" by erich fromm

max horkheimer's "theism and theism" and "religion and philosophy"

herbert marcuse's an essay on liberation

everyone i haven't directly linked can be found in this book.

you've mentioned you went through some womanist/liberation theology: the thing with both theologies is that, particularly for catholic theologians writing in the 1980s, there was a real danger to explicit marxism. marxism is atheistic: anyone utilizing marxist rhetoric or calling themselves marxist jeopardized their safety and inclusion, especially during the reagan administration, so liberation theologians like guiterrez were actively either shunned or discouraged from being "too marxist." i won't recommend their work again, but i strongly encourage you to reread them after engaging in some critical theory- my experience of liberation theology was radically changed by doing this, since liberation theology finds its origins in critical theory. additionally, you might be interested in:

the long loneliness by dorothy day

in the vale of tears: on marxism and theology by roland boer

class struggle in the new testament by robert j miles

christian socialism: an informal history by john cort

all things in common: the economic practices of the early christians by roman a. montero

prophetic encounters: religion and the american radical tradition by dan mckanan

speak truth to power a quaker search for an alternative to violence by bernard rustin

the life and work of camilo torres restrepo, dorothy day, benard rustin, and simone weil

i like this article a lot too

this is a bit all over the place, but it might be helpful for starting off- and again, i encourage you to reconsider liberation theologians, especially gustavo gutierrez, marcella althaus-reid, and james h cone. they are easily the most important thinkers for liberation theology and all of them are driven deeply and intrinsically by marxism even if they don't write explicitly about it. you might also like sallie mcfague: i recommend the body of god: an ecological theology and life abundant: rethinking theology and economy for a planet in peril.

[fitzrove]

Rambling about Hass in Elisabeth for a REALLY long time. TL;DR - yeah, it is necessary as a song...

Because of the costumes and staging people often just see it as "the antisemitism song", which it is, strongly, but I think sometimes the wider context presented therein is ignored. Really, the song shows how antisemitism and hatred are fuelling and entangled with other movements!!

The nationalists in that song come from various groups and social classes, and identify as their enemies:

Socialists

Pacifists

Jewish writers

Jewish women

"Those who are not like us"

Crown prince Rudolf (because of his - historically strong - friendships and other positive associations with Jews)

The Habsburgs as a whole

Elisabeth and her Heinrich Heine (= a Jewish poet) monument project (which also attracted such strong criticism from German nationalists [Austrian Germans who were nationalists, not "Germans" in the modern sense] historically)

Hungary

The "barons" - so the nobility

The "slavic state"

The ongoing "betrayal of the people"

And to contrast, they identify as good:

Strength ("the strong wins, the weak fails", and also "strong leaders") and "purity"

"Unity"

Glory/splendour ("pracht")

Christian values

"Unified Germany", an alliance with Prussia and even an Anschluss (the joining of Austria and other "ethnically German" [so-called] lands to the German Reich. Hmm does anyone remember who also strove for and eventually implemented this... /s)

The conservative Wilhelm II as emperor (again, they want to join Austria into the German Reich)

So like. There is a glorification of all things "German" and of conservative values (religion) and reactionary power politics ("weakness" was and is by similar groups now considered to be a major flaw of liberalism and a liberal world order - in the song, pacifism and socialism are also connected to it), as exemplified by Wilhelm II's Germany specifically. To contrast, racial enemies ("non-Germans") threatening "racial purity" must be eliminated, with violence if necessary. And the Habsburg monarchy, being a multinational empire, is described as immoral and weak because of it being multinational (and the position of Slavs and Hungarians in politics and imperial administration).

The themes of "betraying the people" (Volksverrat) are especially interesting because the enemies of the nationalists as listed in the song, Jewish women, pacifists and socialists, were also the people blamed for German defeat in WW1 (the "stab in the back" at the home front myth). It's overall 19th and 20th century anti-establishment fascist imagery.

Ajdkkf I don't think I'm clearly making my argument but the song's key functions are:

To dispel the myth of the late 19th century being "the good old days", the glory days of Austria before the world wars somehow magically came to happen and ruined it. In fact, the songs shows that the developments leading to the world wars stem from politics and mass movements of hatred that developed alongside and gave power to & drew power from nationalism in the 19th century

To show the audience exactly what Rudolf is talking about in "Die Schatten werden Länger (reprise)". What is the "evil that is developing"? It's not Rudolf's personal petty wish for more power, or his angst about not being emperor yet, or some generic amorphous disdain for how FJ is reigning; it's not the lack of Hungarian independence either, for god's sake. I will die on this hill, if you cut Hass or replace it with conspiracy or whatever you can cut Rudolf as well, Elisabeth as a show is (in my opinion) a good portrayal of him precisely because it depicts him as a political thinker (in contrast to many depictions and post-Mayerling accounts which diminish that and just talk about Mayerling and his "immorality" - a talking point devised by the nationalists and antisemitists who hated him lol, liberal politics were connected to lack of morality) and someone who, unlike most of his contemporaries, saw that antisemitism, emphasis on "power" and realist power politics, exclusionary/hateful rhetoric and excess nationalism would lead to ruin. AND Hass also shows that he was hated by the German nationalists for this! As was his mother, for her sympathy to Heine...

To connect genuine popular dissatisfaction (from Milch - Hass is a reprise of Milch in terms of rhythm and the call-and-response structure where Lucheni talks to the crowd) with inequality, the lack of democracy and the excesses of royalty... to the rise and presentation of fascism as a "solution"

To show that 19th century nationalism was, in many ways, exclusionary, antisemitic, racist and "war-mongering", and that this rhetoric is old - not somehow magically appearing for WW2 and then disappearing again - and will time and again rise... and that it's everyone's responsibility to recognise it for what it is when it happens, if we are to have a reasonable, decent world to live in.

The framing of Hass sometimes confuses people I will never recover from that one post cancelling Elisabeth das musical for being antisemitic because Hass exists ajiddfkdllfgl what's next, it's pro-suicide and homophobic because a character technically dies from being gay? but to me it's rather clear that it's unsympathetic lol, with the whole doomsday atmosphere (no music, just footsteps/marching and drums and screaming, it's meant to be threatening), the way the ensemble harshly criticises the most sympathetically portrayed characters we have seen so far (Elisabeth and Rudolf) for things that seem petty and harmless (having Jewish friends), and the extremely direct comparison drawn to N*zism (to indicate what such a movement would develop to) in many stagings. I don't know how to say this but somehow I've always assumed that "H*tler and n*zism = evil" is EXTREMELY common knowledge and it mystifies me when people like. Think it should have been stated more clearly in the show. Like, the show is working off the assumption that you know what it is and that it's bad because of the millions and millions of people they killed............. this is EXTREMELY common knowledge in Europe, not least in Germany and Austria lol.

So um yeah akwkldlf, sorry for the ramble, I just feel like the song can be poorly understood and criticised on shaky ground sometimes. I mean, I am not Jewish and not equipped to talk about whether it's triggering or traumatising to watch especially with lived or family experience of antisemitic violence... But I think for non-Jewish people there is a huge responsibility to be aware and vigilant of antisemitism, historically and in the present, and sometimes it needs to be hammered home for people to understand...

By that last point I also somewhat mean... I think you don't "get" to be triggered by it if you're not Jewish but perhaps otherwise affected by politics of hatred. Of course I'm not emotions police lol, but many Jewish people have intergenerational trauma AND have to live with extremely similar antisemitic rhetoric and culture to this day, so there I understand criticisms - and there is also a discussion to be had about how and to what extent it is ok to use and display Jewish suffering as a device to educate non-Jewish people.

But anyway, to my original point. This is something I've seen people say and I just... if you're queer and it makes you uncomfortable to see Hass because modern n*zis hate you and it's traumatic, I mean, it's valid to feel uncomfortable and you can choose not to watch it personally to avoid being triggered, but you don't get to call for it to be erased from the show for "problematic content" or for "escapism" or to make you feel better. It is there because the destruction of the 19th century world, and Rudolf's and Elisabeth's suffering, is intrinsically tied to the rise of such hateful politics and without that being shown there is no show. You don't get to make it something it's not, this show is not ONLY an epic gothic romance with imaginary boyfriend, it's a commentary on past, present and future politics in that it shows the dangers of conservatism, antisemitism, racism and illiberalism. Calling for or supporting censorship, or state emphasis on militarism/"destroying the enemy", or advocating hatred, violence or oppression against any group based on ethnicity, religion, race, political views, etc. are all political stances held by and propagated by various people today in various political contexts. And you are not immune to antisemitism or reactionary nationalism if you're queer or whatever, so you have the constant responsibility to think critically about your worldview and your politics!!

[churchblogmatics-blog]

A DEFINITIVE but nonexhaustive list of theologians/Christian thinkers and associated brat status

Athanasius - literally impossible to imagine Christianity without his contributions, unquestionably brat

Augustine - smarter than all hell, the confessions is essential reading, his corpus is a succinct compendium of theological orthodoxy, you know he's brat

Anselm of Canterbury - satisfaction theory is actually more plausible to me than penal substitution, the ontological argument is pure lunacy but is the kind of magical thinking that I'm sad to see disappear once people started systematizing "logic" and "reason" after the enlightenment. Brat.

Thomas Aquinas - I'm kind of more inclined to platonism than aristotlianism but he's brat for this excerpt of the summa alone: “If some are occasionally begotten from demons, it is not from the seed of such demons, nor from their assumed bodies, but from the seed of men taken for the purpose; as when the demon assumes first the form of a woman, and afterward of a man.” In this case, the offspring would be fully human, “so that the person born is not the child of a demon but of a man” (ST I:51:3 ad 6)." Like c'mon that's so funny but also probably saved some childrens' lives if their parents didn't want to 'fess up to having an affair.

Thomas Á Kempis - I wish I could cultivate the humility of spirit he writes about in The Imitation of Christ! This guy knows what's up! Brat!

Martin Luther - Do you know how antisemitic you have to be in order to be remembered as antisemitic even if graded on a curve relative to his cultural context? Even his principled refusal to lean into double predestination despite it's logical coherence & consubstantiative view of the sacrament of the Eucharist won't save him from being pronounced decidedly un-brat.

John Calvin - way better than his devotees, more legitimate human compassionate distress at double predestination than the vastly inferior ulrich zwingli - brat.

Ulrich Zwingli - goes without saying - un-brat.

John Woolman - went hard in the paint to fight the transatlantic slave trade his whole life. Y'all could only DREAM of walking in humble submission before God in service of your fellow man like this. Brat.

Friedrich Schleiermacher - oh so Christianity is all about absolute dependence? That's what it is? Conjuring up feelings of absolute dependence? Get real! Not brat.

Soren Kierkegaard - Absolutely goated. Love to read a guy excoriating Christian nationalism. He's so brat for that.

Karl Barth - this page is called the Church Blogmatics so you already know what I'm thinking on this one. His doctrine of election makes me able to sleep at night and his understanding of theology as a living, breathing science makes me want to engage with it. Brat.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - the absolute height of liberal theology and redeems it as something potentially profitable imo - brat.

[just-orbiting-you]

discussion of the army status quo, bts as artists, consumerism, streaming vs. critical fan engagement

this ended up being a rant, i just needed to get this out, but be forewarned of the topics listed.

building off the post i put up about the division among jikookers the huge divide in army is still ever present. this fandom is so divided and has just become people screaming at each other, reporting and blocking. there’s no capacity for conversation and constructive discourse. some of these fans are so volatile i’m appalled. at this point i just wonder why these people are fans of bts, because what about their actions, music, and celebrity personas allows them to feel connected to the members. why are these people fans?

because we should be fans of their music first. i see having biases and “shipping” as a side to appreciating and supporting their art as artists. through that, i stand with their messages they have promoted through their art over the course of their career. bts inspire me to become a better thinker, person, and artist. personally right now, i am not expecting them to be their celebrity selves while others may think otherwise, but i will not condemn or stand for the condemnation of their call for hybe and bts’ action.

the emphasis on streaming, the decline of artmy and fandom creation, the infighting and refusal to come together, the accusing of others from a lot of solo rhetoric, i just cannot take it and i’m nervous for the future of bts and their fan relationship.

no fan is perfect - i have seen accounts of proclaimed ot7, shippers, solos, biased ot7, all of which spout rhetoric i can take issue with. i’m not perfect either. and i don’t want to abandon this for lack of a better word “army space” since i do still love and care for the members. but how long can this go on for?

army has an agenda - but only when they want to. we can only come together when the members are in dire straits. why do we wait on bts’ beck and call? why can’t we operate independently and do work on their behalf? why can’t we speak up about social justice, liberation and other issues, when bts are away from their public platforms? why can’t we comprehend being critical of company higherups and attempts to reach the members with education is not direct hate to the members that needs yoongi scandal levels of mobilization? why can’t we actually mobilize to take down anti accounts like we did for yoongi? why can’t we make donations to reputable charities in the name of bts like we used to???

and again, i have spoken about this before, but k-pop and bts’ previous level of output (plus the accelerated output of the solo era) has brainwashed fans into capitalist compliancy. people foam at the mouth if they don’t buy the newest album. people scream at you if you don’t stream. this is exactly what these companies want you to do and exactly how they want you to think. hybe is sitting on a big pile of money right now from all their means of profits, yet we give them that power with our money.

i want to make clear that i understand the historical significance of streaming in regard to boosting bts’ popularity and creating a reputation of loyalty and monetary support for their fans, when they were the underdog group. but,

over the years, i think the ways in which bts want us to support them is reading their lyrics, understanding their messaging, seeing their hard work and artistic processes and showing up for them when necessary. of course they’re thankful when we support them monetarily, but did namjoon make RPWP so it could be streamed to death? no. did jimin make FACE so it could hit BB hot100? no. did yoongi make amygdala and polar night so they could get #1 digital song sales? NO. those are some of his most deeply personal songs. they made those albums out of their lived experiences, processing their most vulnerable times. this is their art. and as time has gone on, i miss the appreciation and praise for their artistry. they deserve that regard for their work. you can say that charting them is the ultimate way to show your support, but i disagree. streaming just lines hybe’s pockets. engaging in critical conversation with other fans and supporting projects like minimoni music and suchwita and listening to their words closely promote healthy fan engagement. mindless streaming of their work is not engaging. mindless streaming of the last, amygdala is something that should not be expected of people, these song are difficult to listen to!!!! if it isn’t for for people, then they need to reread the lyrics. outside of a hybe monetary boycott, i do believe streaming and analysis in tandem is not a bad thing. but we need that deliberate fan engagement. we are nothing without it.

especially the infighting and refusal of common ground, plus demonization of fandom creation overtime is truly toxic fan engagement distracting us and souring the environment overall.

i think solo era has brought on a lot of these issues as everyone was sorted into their own factions based on bias and a lot of ot7s showed their true colors. but i worry for what bts’ reaction will be when they witness the wreckage of this fandom. and even calling on hybe to do something about weverse army and weverse as a platform has not been resolved. maybe i personally just need time away, who knows.

[theculturedmarxist]

If you talk to an ordinary American, or, in my experience, if you talk to an average Israeli, for that matter, they don’t know anything about who the Palestinians are. They don’t know where they come from, they don’t know how they live, what they believe, and they don’t want to. Right? Because that just complicates things… – historian Sam Biagetti.

Last month, The New York Times conducted a series of interviews with a number of American Jewish families and the way they have been dealing with what the paper calls a “generational divide over Israel.”

The Times notes a trend that has been developing for a long time—younger American Jews becoming markedly more critical of, sometimes downright hostile to, Israel than their elders. The piece looks at “more than a dozen young people…[who] described feeling estranged from the version of Jewish identity they were raised with, which was often anchored in pro-Israel education.”

One such person is Louisa Kornblatt. She is the daughter of liberal Jewish parents, who grew up experiencing the cruelties of anti-Semitism in suburban New Jersey. Her grandmother “had fled Austria in 1938, just as the Nazis were taking over.” Partly as a result of this legacy, Louisa Kornblatt “shared her parents’ belief that the safety of Jewish people depended on a Jewish state” as a child.

However, her views began to shift once “she started attending a graduate program in social work at U.C. Berkeley in 2017.” As she recalls it, “classmates and friends challenged her thinking,” with some telling her that she was “on the wrong side of history.”

While in graduate school, “she read Audre Lorde, Mariame Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and other Black feminist thinkers,” who further made her re-think ingrained assumptions. Eventually, “Kornblatt came to feel that her emotional ties to Jewish statehood undermined her vision for ‘collective liberation.’”

“Over the last year, she became increasingly involved in pro-Palestine activism, including through Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist activist group, and the If Not Now movement.” She now goes so far as to assert, “I don’t think the state of Israel should ever have been established,” because “It’s based on this idea of Jewish supremacy. And I’m not on board with that.”

Also interviewed are the parents of Jackson Schwartz, a senior at Columbia University whose education there has significantly altered his outlook on Israel:

“The parents of Mr. Schwartz…said they listen to him with open minds when he tells them about documentaries he has seen or things he has learned from professors like Rashid Khalidi, a prominent Palestinian intellectual who is a professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia. Dan Schwartz said his son helped him understand the Palestinian perspective on Israel’s founding, which was accompanied by a huge displacement of population that Palestinians call the Nakba, using the Arabic word for catastrophe.”

“It wasn’t until Jackson went to Columbia and took classes that I ever heard the word Nakba,” Dan Schwartz said.

These interviews are hugely instructive for two reasons. For one thing, they demonstrate very clearly why power centers are so critical of higher education, especially in the humanities: They are afraid young people might actually—horror of horrors—learn something, particularly something that challenges the status quo.

American culture overflows with accusations from parents that their kids went off to college only to be “indoctrinated.” But at least in these instances, the opposite is what happened—far from being brainwashed, the kids read books and learned history, and were forced to think hard about the implications. In other words, higher education did exactly what it is supposed to do—forced students to encounter and engage with perspectives and thinkers they otherwise never would have.

In reality, most parents (and certainly media outlets) who complain of indoctrination are actually worried about education—that is, that their children will develop more nuanced, critical and informed views of the world after engaging with unfamiliar viewpoints. Such aggrieved elders don’t see it this way, of course, largely because they themselves never shook off the propaganda of their youth. Indeed, they likely are not even capable of perceiving it as such. But that is what it is.

The interviews from the Times piece also demonstrate what Sam Biagetti refers to in the quote that sits atop this article: the phenomenon of older Americans who profess attachment to (and presumably knowledge of) Israel, displaying aggressive—no, fanatic—ignorance about basic Israeli/Middle East history.

That Mr. Schwartz had never heard of the Nakba until his son learned about it from Rashid Khalidi speaks volumes about the way young people in this country are “taught” about Israel, as well as how much their parents actually “know” about it. It is the equivalent of a German father professing fierce attachment to the German nation-state, but never hearing the word “Holocaust” until his child tells him about it after learning the history from a Jewish professor.

The new documentary Israelism explores this issue of younger Jewish people raised to reflexively identify with Israel and to view it as a “Jewish Disneyland,” but who changed their minds (and behavior) upon encountering the brutal realities of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

It is a powerful film, one that takes a look at the too-often ignored indoctrination regarding Israel taking place in many Jewish day schools, the way younger people are starting to de-program themselves from it, and where they go from there.

Directed by first-time filmmakers Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen, Israelism largely follows two protagonists whose experiences mirror those of the filmmakers.

The first protagonist, Eitan (whose last name is never revealed), grew up in a conservative Jewish home in Atlanta. Typical of such an upbringing, he was steeped in pro-Israel PR.

He recounts that “Israel was a central part of everything we did in school.” His high school routinely sent delegations to AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, also known as the “Israel lobby”) conferences.

Outside of school, the PR continued. He describes going to Jewish summer camp, where each year the staff included a group of Israeli counselors, brought in “to connect American Jews to Israeli culture.”

This included having the children playing games designed to simulate being in the Israeli military, including the use of actual Israeli military commands.

The film intersperses interviews of its protagonists with interviews of prominent individuals who promote this Israeli PR.

For instance, Rabbi Bennett Miller, the then-National Chair of the Association of Reform Zionists of America, asks with a laugh, “does [my] average congregant understand that I’m teaching them to become Zionists? Probably not, but it is part of my madness, so to speak.”

Enamored with what he saw as the glory of military service, Eitan told his parents that he was going to join the Israeli military rather than go to college. He had always thought of Israel as “my country,” and learned from numerous childhood visits there that he “fit in” better in Israel than in the United States.

During basic training with the IDF, he was trained as a “heavy machine gunnist” [sic] with an emphasis on urban warfare. After seven months of this, he was deployed to the West Bank. His life in the IDF involved operating the various checkpoints which comprise the apartheid system, as well as patrolling Palestinian villages on foot in full gear with a bulletproof vests. He recounts that on such patrols, the mission of his unit was to make their presence felt, in order “to let them know that we were watching.”

His encounter with the occupation changed him forever. “Even though Israel was a central part of everything we did in school,” he recalls, “we never really discussed the Palestinians. It was presented to us that Israel was basically an empty wasteland when the Jews arrived. ‘There were some Arabs there,’ they said, but there was no organized people; they had really treated the land poorly. Yeah, there are Palestinians, [but] they just want to kill us all…” Furthermore, “It was always presented to us that the Arabs only know terrorism.”

His role as an occupier made him see things rather differently. He witnessed IDF soldiers needlessly abusing captives, who were blindfolded and handcuffed, thrown to the ground, kicked and beaten. He despairs that he “didn’t even speak up,” something he is visibly still struggling with. And, he says, “that’s just one of many stories that I have from my time in the West Bank. It took many years to really come to terms with my part in it. Only after I got out of the army did I begin to realize that the stuff that I did [from] day to day, just working in checkpoints, patrolling villages—that in itself was immoral.”

After great difficulty, Eitan has begun to publicly speak out about his experiences, though he notes that it took a long time, and that on his first attempt, he was not able to make it through without crying excessively. Since then, he has gotten better, and continues to pursue this necessary work.

Israelism’s second protagonist is Simone Zimmerman. Zimmerman’s grandfather settled in Israel; he and his immediate family were some of her only relatives to escape the Holocaust. Zimmerman herself was raised in a staunchly pro-Israel household, attending Hebrew school from kindergarten through high school. While in high school she lived in Israel for a period as part of an exchange program, which was just one of many visits.

These organized stays in Israel routinely involved her and her friends dressing up in Israeli army uniforms and pretending to be in the IDF. She participated in Jewish youth groups and summer camps which, like Eitan, immersed her in a steady diet of pro-Israel propaganda. Summing up her childhood experience, Zimmerman explains that “Israel was just treated like a core part of being a Jew. So, you did prayers, and you did Israel.”

Like Eitan, she was familiar with AIPAC: “AIPAC is just the thing that you do. Like, going to the AIPAC conference is just sort of seen as a community event.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, almost ten percent of her high school graduating class ended up joining the Israeli army, and many of her summer camp and youth group friends did as well. This is the power of effective propaganda instilled from a young age, Zimmerman observes. “The indoctrination is so severe, it’s almost hard to have a conversation about it. It’s heartbreaking.”

Israelism contains footage of this indoctrination in action inside Hebrew schools.

Scenes of teachers excitedly asking classes of young children, “do you want to go to Israel too?” and the children screaming back, “YEAH!!!” are reminiscent of the similarly nauseating kinds of religious indoctrination made famous in an earlier era by films like Jesus Camp.

Some of these scenes can be glimpsed in the trailer for the film. Older students are seen reading copies of Alan Dershowitz’s book The Case for Israel, which was famously exposed as a fraud by Norman Finkelstein years ago. Zimmerman herself gets to look at some of her old worksheets and art projects from her elementary school days, all of which in some way revolved around the Israeli state.

Other than enlisting in the IDF, Zimmerman had been told that the other major way to be “a good supporter of the Jewish people” was to become an “Israel advocate.” Choosing the latter path, Zimmerman became involved with Hillel, the largest Jewish campus organization in the world, when she began attending the University of California at Berkeley. Hillel, too, worked very hard to instill pro-Israel beliefs in her. She describes being trained in how to rebut “the ‘lies’ that other people [were] saying” about Israel.

The film explores the nature of Hillel’s work fostering pro-Israel activism at college campuses across the country. Tom Barkan, a former IDF soldier and “Israel fellow” at the University of Connecticut’s Hillel chapter, says, “name a university in America, we probably have a person there.” Barkan’s mission is to turn Jewish college students into either Israel advocates or military recruits. While he warns eager students that joining the IDF will not be easy, he wistfully tells them that it will be “the most meaningful experience that you ever go through.”

Former Jewish day school teacher Jacqui Schulefand works with Barkan in her role as Director of Engagement and Programs at UConn’s Hillel branch. Her love for the State of Israel is inseparable from her identity as a Jewish person, which she proudly explains. “Can you separate Israel and Judaism? I don’t know—I can’t. You know, some people I think can. To me, it’s the same. Yeah, you can’t separate it. Israel is Judaism and Judaism is Israel. And that is who I am, and that is my identity. And I think every single thing that I experienced along my life has melded into that, like there was never, you know, a divide for me.”

Schulefand describes joining the Israeli armed forces as “the greatest gift you can give,” and notes that “we actually have had quite a few of our former students join the IDF—amazing!” But her demeanor sours when she is asked about criticisms of the country. In a tone combining incomprehension with a hint of disgust, she laments that “somehow, ‘pro-Palestinian’ has become ‘pro-social justice.’”

It was this sort of pro-Israel advocacy network that organized Simone Zimmerman and other students to oppose what they perceived to be “anti-Semitic” activities such as student government legislation favoring the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israeli occupation, and other measures critical of Israel.

To prepare for such confrontations, she was handed talking points that told her what to say—accuse critics of being anti-Semitic, of having a double standard, of making Jewish students feel unsafe, etc. Describing her feelings about BDS and the Palestinian cause at the time, Zimmerman says that “I just knew that it was this bad thing that I had to fight.” She remembers literally reading off the cards when it came time for her to make the case for Israel.

However, such work inevitably brought her into contact with people who challenged her views. She encountered terms like apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and illegal occupation. “I thought I knew so much about Israel, but I didn’t really know what anybody was talking about when they were talking about all these things,” she said.

Growing up, she was barely taught anything about Palestinians, much like Eitan: “The idea that there were native inhabitants who lived there [when settlers began to arrive] was not even part of my frame of reference.”[1] To the extent that her upbringing provided her with any conception of what a Palestinian was, it was that a Palestinian was someone “who kills Jews, or wants to kill Jews.” But now she was dealing with actual Palestinian students and their non-Palestinian allies, who told her things she found alarming.

Zimmerman went back to Hillel, embarrassed that she and the other pro-Israel advocates were not doing a good job refuting the information they had been confronted with. When Zimmerman asked what the proper responses were to specific criticisms directed at Israel—other than shouting “double standard” or “anti-Semitic”—no one provided her with any. “That was really disturbing for me,” she says. She was flabbergasted that “there are these people called Palestinians who think that Israel wields all this power over their lives and don’t have rights, don’t have water. What is this? How do I respond to it?” “How is it that I am the best the Jewish community has to offer—I’ve been to all the trainings, all the summer camps—and I don’t know what the settlements are, or what the occupation is?”

This anguish led Zimmerman to see the occupation for herself, the summer after her freshman year. This was her first time “crossing the line” into the West Bank. The film movingly details her experiences there. She listened to Palestinian families describe routine instances of being beaten by the IDF, and the harsh realities of life under military rule.

She befriends Sami Awad, Executive Director of the Holy Land Trust, who works to give Americans tours of the territory. An American citizen born in the U.S., Awad describes encounters with American kids who have joined the IDF, people “who just moved here to be part of an army to play cowboys and Indians.” He remarks on the absurdity that “Somebody…comes here from New York or from Chicago, and [claims] that this land is theirs.”

Awad’s family was originally from Jerusalem. His grandfather was shot by an Israeli sniper in 1948, and the rest of his family were evicted by Israeli forces soon after during the Nakba. They have never been allowed to return, and have lived under occupation ever since. Nevertheless, Awad is an extraordinarily empathetic person, having made a career out of trying to teach Westerners what life is like in the West Bank, in the hopes that they will use what they learn to effect positive change. He recounts visiting Auschwitz, and says that the experience gave him an insight into “inherited trauma” and how it shapes the conflict today. In the film he comes across as optimistic:

“I really believe that there is an emerging awakening within the American Jewish community…From American Jews, coming here, and listening to us, and hearing us, and seeing our humanity, and understanding that we are not just out sitting in bunkers, planning the next attack against Israelis, that we do have a desire to live in peace, and to have our freedom, and to walk in our streets, and to eat in our restaurants, and like we – I mean it’s crazy that I have to say this, that we are real human beings that just want to survive and live, like all other people in this world.”

Zimmerman also meets Baha Hilo, an English speaker who works as a tour guide with To Be There, another group that helps people understand the reality that Israel imposes on the West Bank. His family was expelled from Jaffa in 1948 during the Nakba. They were forced to settle in Bethlehem, sadly believing that they would eventually be able to return to their homes.

Hilo discusses his frustration that Israelis get to live under civil law, whereas Palestinians like him must live under the humiliating military law of the occupation: “When an American goes to the West Bank, he has more rights there than I have had my entire life!” The film takes care to note that Americans play a major role in such realities: “Of the roughly 450,000 [illegal] Israeli settlers living in the occupied West Bank, 60,000 are American Jews.” Some readers may recall the famous viral video of an Israeli named Yakub unashamedly stealing Palestinian homes while conveying a breathtaking sense of entitlement.

Hilo laments that, “From the day you are born, you live day in and day out without experiencing a day of freedom.” His astonishment at the audacity of Israelis, particularly those who are also Americans, mirrors Awad’s: “What makes an 18-year-old American kid who was given [a] ten days’ trip for free in Palestine, what makes him want to come in and sacrifice his life? Why would a foreigner think it’s ok to have superior rights to the rights of the indigenous population? Because somebody told them it’s [their] home.”

While happy to make such friends, Zimmerman nonetheless says of her time there, “I don’t think I realized the extent to which what I would come to see on the ground would really shock me and horrify me.” This experience often changes people. The filmmaker Rebecca Pierce is interviewed on her own visits to the West Bank, and her reaction is in line with Zimmerman’s. Pierce had always been opposed to using the word “apartheid,” but once she saw the reality of the situation, she changed her mind immediately.

The protagonist of With God on Our Side (a 2010 documentary critical of Christian Zionism), a young man named Christopher, had a similar reaction, specifically at the behavior he witnessed from the Israeli settlers. Each year a group of them converges on the Arab section of Old Jerusalem to celebrate Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem in 1967. Christopher witnessed the festivities, which featured a massive crowd of settlers wrapped in Israeli flags, shouting “death to Arabs” repeatedly as they danced through the streets.

A large group identified an Arab journalist, surrounded him, began chanting at him and flipping him off, to the point where the police had to be called. Christopher was visibly shocked at all this, glumly remarking that he “felt ashamed to be there.” This same celebration is also seen in Israelism, and the Israeli chants are as deranged as ever: “An Arab is a son of a bitch! A Jew is a precious soul!” “Death to the leftists!”

Zimmerman’s experiences led her to become a co-founder of the If Not Now movement, a grassroots Jewish organization which works to end U.S. support for Israel. They have engaged in activism targeting the ADL (more on them in a moment), AIPAC, the headquarters of Birthright Israel, and other organizations which directly contribute to the perpetuation of Israel’s occupation. “We decided to bring the crisis of American Jewish support for Israel to the doorsteps of Jewish institutions to force that conversation in public,” Zimmerman says.

Israelism contains powerful scenes of younger Jewish people engaging in this work. Many come from similar backgrounds as Eitan and Simone. Consider Avner Gvaryahu. Born and raised in Israel, Gvaryahu also joined the IDF. His combat experience ultimately turned him against the occupation. His whole life in Israel, he had never been inside a Palestinian home, but was now being tasked with “barg[ing] into one in the middle of the night.”

By the end of his service, he had routinely taken over Palestinian homes and used them as military facilities. No warrants were needed, and no notice was ever given to the families who were living there. He reflects back “with shame” on how violently he often acted toward the residents in such situations. Gvaryahu is now the Executive Director of Breaking the Silence, an organization of IDF veterans committed to peace.

“There are a lot of Jewish young people who see a Jewish establishment that is racist, that is nationalistic,” Zimmerman explains. Jeremy Ben-Ami, the President of J Street, agrees. “They’re really, really angry about the way they were educated, and the way they were indoctrinated about these issues, and justifiably so.”

While such courageous individuals often receive quite a bit of hatred from their own community (Zimmerman says, “The word I used to hear a lot was ‘self-hating Jew.’ Like, the only way a Jewish person could possibly care about the humanity of Palestinians is if you hate yourself”), their numbers are growing, and one hopes that this will continue. Israelism was released a few months before the terrorist attacks of October 7th and Israel’s genocidal response, events which make the film timely and important.

Since October 7th, we have seen many of the tactics and talking points used to justify Israel’s crimes that the film depicts return with a vengeance. Chief among them is the by-now ubiquitous claim that calling out Israeli atrocities is somehow anti-Semitic.

Zimmerman is anguished that “so many of the purported leaders of our community have been trying to equate the idea of Palestinian rights itself with anti-Semitism.”

This applies to no one more than Abraham “Abe” Foxman, who until his recent retirement was the long-time head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization masquerading as a civil rights group but which is really a pro-Israeli government outfit which has long sought to redefine anti-Semitism to include “criticisms of Israel.”

These efforts have borne fruit—“The Trump administration issued an executive order adopting” this definition of anti-Semitism “for the purposes of enforcing federal civil rights law,” Michelle Goldberg notes in The New York Times. Foxman says in the film that “it hurts me for a Jewish kid to stand up there and say ‘justice for the Palestinians,’ and not [say] ‘justice for Israelis’; it troubles me, hurts me, bothers me. It means we failed. We failed in educating, in explaining, et cetera.” Many Israel supporters seem to share Foxman’s horror that Jewish people sometimes care about the well-being of people other than themselves.

Israelism explores this deliberate conflation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. Sarah Anne Minkin, of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, is deeply bothered that “The way we talk about anti-Semitism isn’t about protecting Jews, it’s about protecting Israel. How dangerous is that, at this moment with the rise of anti-Semitism?”

Indeed, the film contains footage of the infamous Unite the Right rally featuring hordes of white supremacists marching through Charlottesville, Virginia, with torches, screaming “Jews. Will not. Replace us!” over and over, as well as news footage of the aftermath of the Tree of Life Synagogue mass shooting.

One of the chief tasks of Israeli propagandists has been to conflate such acts with anti-Zionist sentiment. Genuine anti-Semitism of the Charlottesville variety is (obviously) a product of the far right—recall that President Donald Trump famously referred to “very fine people on both sides” of that incident, an unmistakable wink and nod to such fascist groups.

People who comprise such groups, the type who paint swastikas on Jewish homes, are not the same as peace activists marching to end the Israeli occupation. This should not be difficult to understand. But the Israel PR machine has done a marvelous job confusing otherwise intelligent people on this issue.

Also quoted in the film is Ted Cruz, who like Trump is a regular speaker at AIPAC events, and who like many Republicans pitches his political rhetoric to appeal to the very reactionaries who espouse genuinely anti-Semitic sentiments. This does not stop him from having the audacity to refer to criticisms of Israel as anti-Semitic, shamelessly insisting that “the left has a long history of anti-Semitism.”

The American right wing has been hard at work lately, trying to convince gullible people that the rise of actual anti-Semitic incidents is the result of critics of Israel. The New York Times’s Michelle Goldberg reports that “Chris Rufo, the right-wing activist who whipped up nationwide campaigns against critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, told me he’s part of a group at the conservative Manhattan Institute workshopping new policy proposals targeting what it sees as campus antisemitism.”

Such efforts apparently convince many liberal-leaning people to agree with UConn Hillel’s Jacqui Schulefand, who as noted above believes that “Israel is Judaism and Judaism is Israel.”

If you believe this, it is understandable how you might come to see criticizing a government’s policies, or the political ideology (Zionism) undergirding them, as anti-Semitic. I do not often profess gratitude for President Biden (indeed, I am really hoping the “Genocide Joe” label sticks), but it was nice to see him publicly state that “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist. And I’m a Zionist.” This pronouncement clarifies something that the Israel Lobby likes to obscure—that Zionism is a political ideology, like “conservatism,” “socialism” or “libertarianism.”

As such, critiquing it is not racist or anti-Semitic, even if the criticism is inaccurate.

It is always important to consider the ways in which assumptions held uncritically can lead one astray, especially assumptions ingrained from a young age, before people possess the capacity to sufficiently question what they are being told. Israelism is a powerful, thought-provoking film that does this spectacularly. And it does so for a topic that does not get as much attention as it should. Discussions of Christian propaganda are fairly common (again, think of Jesus Camp, or even With God on Our Side), as are denunciations of the kind of Islamic fundamentalist propaganda that comes out of places like Saudi Arabia.

It is almost too easy to go after the Mormons or the Scientologists. But the indoctrination taking place in many Jewish schools gets comparatively little attention. I have written previously of my admiration for people, like Naomi Klein, who frankly discuss the troubling fact that Israeli PR defined much of their early schooling. It is important to have an entire film devoted to the subject. People might not like what they see, but they need to see it.

Israelism is streaming here until January 31st.