“CERTAIN IDEAS ARE SO ABSURD...”

Those conformists (sometimes known as “academics”) who provide all the cultural, intellectual, and linguistic justifications for murder — once again employing their talents in the service of ignorance and brutality — all too closely resemble those who, now a century ago, helped to shatter and scatter all the best of our inherited liberalism. It is only these self-appointed advisers and superiors (aspiring peasants, all) who could so relentlessly and unreservedly offer up word-for-word plagiarisms from the unintelligible pulp fictions of the greatest of all living cynics and nihilists.

“WHO, ME?”

A Vancouver PhD and college consultant, Natalie Knight, found it in herself to stand before a crowd of thousands, her words echoing through the heart of downtown, and celebrate “the amazing, brilliant offensive waged on October 7th.” As she and her comrades cheered and danced to all the very good deeds of Hamas, local Jewish organizations and so many others called for Knight's firing. But, of course, the PhD only reiterated her assessment, in writing, that the indiscriminate massacre of anyone and everyone outside of Gaza (regardless of nationality, ethnicity, race, creed, sex, or age) by thousands of livestreaming sadists can only be seen as a “just resistance” and one that she will not shy away from defending. (And one need not be an assistant professor teaching Aristotelian logic to deduce, thereby, that all of this mayhem is just the sort of thing she and all those gathered and applauding wish upon you and your grandparents and children, and any other members of any classes or races or groups to whom they are willing to ascribe culpability for any real or imagined form of oppression...)

Around the same time, Cornell history professor, Russel Rickford, was busy gifting the world his evaluation that the actions of Hamas (breaking through the “Apartheid wall” [sic] and dismembering and decapitating corpses with garden tools while sharing it with their friends and family back home, live and in 4K) meant Gazans:

...[W]ere able to breathe for the first time in years. It was exhilarating. It was energizing. And if they weren’t exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, by this shifting of the balance of power, then they would not be human. I was exhilarated.

Of course, folks called for censure and his removal. And of course the professor, as if channelling bin Laden or the Ayatollah, only doubled down in the form of an apology letter and in an interview with the school’s paper. Using all the language and rhetoric of Hamas, he spoke of “the injustice and hypocrisy of Western support in celebration of Israeli war crimes…” and noted “Israeli apartheid” and of Gaza being an “open-air prison”, all while equating Hamas with the government of Israel.

And while Israel was still attempting to identify bodies and missing persons, many of whom were foreign nationals, Yale anthropology professor, Zareena Grewal, aspiring saint, shared her own scholarly wisdom on social media. She offered declarations such as “It’s been such an extraordinary day!” and “Settlers are not civilians, this is not hard”. She saw the murder, torture, and kidnap of women, children, and elders and responded “My heart is in my throat. Prayers for Palestinians. Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity. #FreePalestine”. And in the days that followed, Grewal continued to share tweets justifying and celebrating other Hamas actions, like the kidnapping of young women from music festivals. Hurrah!

A tenured professor from Columbia University, Joseph Massad, felt the need to be far more verbose. Massad published an article referring to kidnapping, torture, rape, burning people alive, and other savagery as “awesome”, “remarkable”, “astounding”, and “incredible”. Comparing the attacks on Israeli towns and villages to the European resistance to Nazi occupation, Massad wrote, in part:

No less astonishing was the Palestinian resistance’s takeover of several Israeli settler-colonies near the Gaza boundary and even as far away as 22 kms, as in the case of Ofakim.

Perhaps the major achievement of the resistance in the temporary takeover of these settler-colonies is the death blow to any confidence that Israeli colonists had in their military and its ability to protect them.

Reports promptly emerged that thousands of Israelis were fleeing through the desert on foot to escape the rockets and gunfire, with many still hiding inside settlements more than 24 hours into the resistance offensive.

Those who had not already fled were being evacuated by the army from more than two dozen colonies near Gaza.

In the interest of safeguarding their lives and their children’s future, the colonists’ flight from these settlements may prove to be a permanent exodus. They may have finally realized that living on land stolen from another people will never make them safe.

But these lunatic discourses should surprise no one. Some of us can recall when gender and queer theorist and intellectual superhero, Judith Butler, back in 2006, referred to— (Are you ready? I don’t think you’re ready for this. Make sure you’re sitting down. Put down your phone. Spit out your gum...) —both Hezbollah and Hamas as “social movements that are progressive … that are part of the global Left”. You see, it is true that some ideas truly are so absurd only an intellectual could hold or share them. And who else but Butler could assert the progressive Leftist credentials of the Fascist queer-bashing militant Islamists of Gaza and Lebanon? Certainly not Steven Pinker and not Neil deGrasse Tyson. And if you think that was a one-off or a slip of the tongue or something the world has wrongly decontextualized, you will be heartened to know this genius redoubled their efforts in light of recent events. Arguing in the London Review of Books, Butler explained how the latest Hamas attacks must be seen in the context of the "horrors of the last seventy years".

To some, of course, Butler’s analysis is received as a sophisticated acceptance of complexity, acknowledging all of the terrible wrongs on all sides of this conflict. Perhaps the first thing to notice is that many of the same folks likely to embrace Butler’s words here are the same ones who couldn’t help to share everything they detected to be so obviously insane with a certain former president’s assessment that there were “very fine people on both sides” of a certain protest (which is not actually what he said.) I fail to see the distinction between these cases and feel those folks have some work ahead of them explaining their highly suspicious stance. And then it has to be pointed out that Butler had the opportunity to bring us some interesting fact-finding and analysis; but what they did was nothing of the sort. From their popular and terrible framing, Butler goes on and on, just as Trump so loves to, about things they simply must know are untrue. They demand that, for just one example, Israeli politicians said horrible things that every one of us can look up and find, if we didn’t know already, they did not say. They attribute the worst possible interpretation, despite knowing the context did not support it. And they still forwarded this, in publication and with no editor's notes, even when there were immediate additional clarifications on the Israeli end and with all of it so clearly on the record. (And, well, you don’t have to read my thesis to know this sort of laughably indefensible assertion is no deviation but perfectly in line with so much work from so many academic elites.)

Butler then pairs these sufficient and glaring misrepresentations with so many others. They positively load their essay with every irrational provocation, such as “apartheid”, “occupation”, “settler-colonial rule”, and “open-air prison”, as if those words have no meaning or precedence or are best understood as something close to their antithesis. Butler submits all of this as if all their celebrated scholarship and wordsmithing came from nowhere and has amounted to nothing, unable to stir within themself anything better than the tired slogans Hamas placed in the mouths of Islamofascist Mickey Mouse and friends for the children of Gaza (and, so it seems, their Ivy League counterparts; teachers and students alike, who, encircled by unread textbooks, share pirated episodes from al-Aqsa TV and clips of disembowelled children on their next-gen tablets while sucking organic latex pacifiers and mango Juul, as they swim in the dutifully studious haze of methylphenidate and, oh, just a hint of 3,4-methyl​enedioxy​methamphetamine...)

But Butler goes so far beyond all that, insisting upon the West’s institutionally imposed ignorance and lack of empathy toward the hardships and brutality visited upon Palestinians. (Doubtless a dastardly dividend unfairly won by the filthy and plotting Israel lobby. *Insert image of Harry Potter goblins wringing their hands above marionettes in the likeness of Joe Biden and António Guterres*) They offer this while knowing that all the papers and stations and outlets of the West, from Hamburg to San Francisco and on, are outdone in their graphic coverage of every real and fictional act of harm only by the Goebelsian propagandists of Gaza City, Beirut, and Tehran. Apparently Butler is convinced we are living in medieval times and that all of Israel’s (and America’s) terrible misdeeds and horrific accidents are available only to those living where the bombs land or, otherwise, to those with Chomsky’s credentials and academic journal access.

Sadly, none of this is unusual or new. The above nonsense and confusion mirrors so nicely how so many brilliant 20th century thinkers, all enriching our language and bringing so much to the world, people like Heidegger and Sartre, Foucault and Said, nevertheless had trouble seeing or acknowledging what was so wrong with Stalin and Hitler and the Ayatollah of Iran.

SO WHAT’S UP WITH THE INVITATION TO VIOLENCE AND ABSENCE OF REVULSION?

The language and justification for this celebration of torture and murder of civilians comes from somewhere. If you didn’t do a social science degree and haven’t spent time backing fanatical militant movements, you are forgiven for not knowing the name Frantz Fanon. Fanon is positively beloved within modern academia and is often found among names such as Foucault, Freire, Gramsci, and Said. Even if you know none of those names you will most certainly have come across the concepts of decolonization and lived experience: ideas presently saturating all of our institutions and public life — both of which are traced back to Fanon.

Intellectuals and revolutionaries alike love to focus on Fanon’s most famous work, titled The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre). Therein, these interpreters of and commentators on modern life (and those who would set fire to it all, of course) prefer to highlight the man’s worst ideas in the first section of this work, titled On Violence. In his writing (or to be fair, his wife’s), Fanon, the Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist from Martinique, speaks, as any good Marxist must, directly to the peasants, as he calls them. There he is so often interpreted as endorsing any and all forms of violence, so long as that violence is perpetrated by the peasant class, or Lumpenproletariat, and especially if that violence can be translated as directed at the ruling class in some manner. Their favourite sentences include: “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” If they read any other work of Fanon's it is Black Skin, White Masks (Peau Noire, Masques Blanc). There they highlight the lines “violence … frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; mak[ing] him fearless and restor[ing] his self-respect”. And with that those professors of anthropology and communication and political science of today, just like the bomb-making, kidnapping, and murderous Leftists of the 1970s, all rejoice in what they see as Fanon’s assertion that decolonization is, by definition, a violent process and a necessity imposed by the colonizer himself. Glory! Cosmic justification!

STUPID, HEARTLESS, WRONG

Of course many readers take on what appears to be Fanon’s narrow, backward-looking focus. Doing so leaves some with a picture of the world reduced and distorted as much by its essentializing of dubious political borders as by the obsession with national or racial identity and, of course, the grand and permissive class struggle of Marxism. And with all that they look around seeking to impose more than their learned rejection of any kind of diversity or individuality or place-based reality: they also gladly bludgeon to death any hope for creativity or imagination along with any possibility for escape from the past or, thus, the arrival of anything like a liveable future.

In their selective misreading, with its glaring omissions and rejections, these “scholars” and “activists” so commonly disregard or downplay the same Fanon, a humanist, who writes about how choosing violence of the sort described is no kind of emancipation but only exchanges one form of barbarism for another. They prefer a simplistic and brutal reading while failing to accept his evaluation that the colonized “native” must understand that they are active agents, always able to choose to accept or reject the violence inherent to colonialism; that we are all revealed to ourselves through the other and, just like the other, we choose our character through our actions. They fail to notice Fanon's essential acknowledgement that he has "One duty alone: That of not renouncing my freedom through my choices." And they never cite the Fanon who would be so powerful at this particular moment, insisting everyone "must turn their backs on the inhuman voices which were those of their respective ancestors in order that authentic communication be possible." And with that they most certainly leave out his "final prayer" which was: "O my body, make of me always a man who questions!"

And in their contextless context, of course, our favourite academics love to leave out the most essential fact about Fanon: that of his being a psychiatrist. They neglect that he was always seeking to diagnose, prevent, and eliminate deleterious human habits and conditions — not to amplify and proliferate those. And therein they miss the bit where, in practice, Fanon never sought to liberate his patients from their prison-like conditions by convincing them to reject authority or cast away the rules imposed upon them. And he no more released his patients from their French psychiatric wards himself than he snuck them knives and guns while advocating bloodshed toward some self-determined, self-liberated end. Instead, Fanon had those under his care to keep a journal, to produce plays, and to publish newspapers. (But, a man of this time, he was also happy to administer drugs and shock therapy, too.)

SETTING AND CONTEXT

As they persist, like Butler, these award-winning scholars and department heads — who explain away murder and mayhem by celebrating only the worst ideas of dead men, who made war long ago in places they were not from and that no longer exist — tell us that it is ourselves who are disregarding all critical context. Propping up fabrications in context’s place, they would also have us volunteer to refuse to notice, well, everything else that matters here. Everything else that matters: it is no more 1603 than it is 1952; Gaza is not Colonial Algeria nor the Dutch East Indies; Israel is not anything like France nor the Netherlands; Israelis do not find themselves in some alien land, nor are they getting rich on the gold and oil, furs and spice they steal only through the brutal exploitation of native labour; nor are Israelis anything like the pieds-noirs, those settlers with a metropol a world away awaiting their return — in fact, as we all know, the birth of Israel was the return. And, alas, our friendly scholars so conveniently ignore, too, the truth about the colonies: that most often, once freed, the decolonized immediately used their liberty not to relieve or uplift but instead to reinvent the ancestral labels justifying all the hatred, dehumanization, expulsion, and cold-blooded murder we humans are, and everywhere always were, so prone toward.

And along with all of this, what of the other very real and pressing context we're all being asked to continually ignore? Well, it is November, after all. And how much more hollow will the always-meaningless "never again" and "lest we forget" ring this year? Unimaginably so! Lest we notice and remember, the now-weekly gatherings will (with chants and taunts and banners high, as clear as can possibly be) once again call for nothing less than ethnic cleansing. Deaf to their own words, millions martialed in every once-Allied city (by professors of history and sociology, no less, and all in the name of "justice" and "on the right-side-of-history", and all stating their vehement opposition to “any form of violence or collective punishment or anti-Semitism”) will direct their banging and barking toward the ears of their Jewish neighbours — every one of whom is so very far from Israel. And, just one more time, those words will land, like so much broken glass, in the hearts of so many (even in their schools and workplaces and homes) as indistinguishable and unmistakable, surely, as “Deutschland für die deutschen!” or "Juden verboten!"