Worse than Nonsense: Post-Modernism and
the Scourge of Orientalist Ideology
By
treating the likes of Edward Said as reservoirs of unchallenged morality, the
left had become complicit in the oppression of others. The old lessons of the
USSR and the French Revolution, the danger of handing unlimited moral authority
to outraged fanatics with an agenda, had not been learned. Instead class made
way for race. The elites who had claimed to speak for the workers in France and
Russia were dismissed. The new elites were wealthy prep school grads like
Edward Said who claimed to speak for a non-existent people in an imaginary
country based on three vacations he had taken there.[1]
It is difficult to write about events that are
in process and thus are changing in their configuration all the time. There is a need therefore, as much as
possible, to be able to stand back just a little, enough so as to begin to gain
perspective.
What kinds of perspective?
To begin with, there is a need to find the
historical context, the reasons why and how the current crisis came into being:
who were the parties involved, and why
are some of the original players no longer in evidence but only there through
the traces they have left of their actions and ideas.
Then, there is the need for a perspective that
studies the discourses used and the panoply of imagery that seem to constitute
the crisis itself, whereas close scrutiny of the words and pictures shown
reveal not only that these are manufactured, manipulated and imported from
other times and places, but that they have been deliberately been constructed
for the purposes of confusion and obfuscation. Therefore one must become highly sensitive to
the neologisms, the cant, and the clichés at work in what purports to be news.
The perspective of logic calls for an
examination of the coherence of the texts and videos shown: does one idea or
one action follow on from what proceeds? Are there contradictions between what
you see and hear and what introductory remarks or voice-overs tell you is there? Who ate claimed to be the authority for the
sources? Watch out for incomplete passive voices—it is said that, or worse, so-and-so
was killed, where no acting subject is ever given; and times when complex
events are reduced to single, simple acts, as when “ceasefire ends”, not that
one side or the other deliberately did something to violate the terms of the
agreement. False or exaggerated analogies
also show up, and illogical or unsafe extrapolations and conclusions: single,
random instances taken as general proofs:
“Unnamed sources” or “a spokesman for” or “witnesses claim”.
Some analysts have been able to parse video
clips and been able to compare frame by frame sequencing, checked angles of
shadows, particular sounds of rifles, rockets, drones and voices from
afar. Why do certain settings keep
reappearing, or the same adults carrying a variety of corpses at different
times of the day, or the same bloodied body of a child shown in front of a
variety of buildings and moaned over by three or four female persons called
“his mother”?
While all sides in a conflict tend to use
propaganda for their own purposes—to win sympathy, to prove culpability on the
other-side—be sure that you know what is going on. Why do Gazans, for instance, revel in the
sufferings of others and boast of their own martyrdom, while the Israelis seek
to show themselves as concerned, careful, caring people and display acts of
charity and mercy?
The Alchemical Soup of Fanatical Islam
What you can see
is a biochemical high from a combination of the bonding hormone oxytocin and
the dominance hormone testosterone. Much
more than cocaine or alcohol, these natural drugs lift mood, induce optimism
and energize action on the part of the group.[2]
Though there has been (so far as I know) no
chemical analysis of the hormone levels in ISIS or other terror-fanaticists
before during and after murderous rampages of savage proportions, it is likely
that Ian Roberston’s statement above is true, so far as it goes; and, to be
sure, he does not explain the entire phenomenon as a consequence of
stress-induced hormonal triggers, but only offers a description of what the
physiological dimensions of group action on a population of individuals made
susceptible to these triggers based on personal developmental history,
ideological indoctrination, and specific adult events that strip away
inhibitions to violence and cruelty.
Nancy Hartvelt Kobrin’s studies of Chechyan and other Jihadi
mass-murderers has shown that they have profound difficulties in socialized
bonding with society after broken or malfunctioning relationships with their
mothers and fathers. Psychohistorians have long known, too, that children
abused often by their caregivers and abandoned or neglected by circumstances
throughout infancy and through adolescence become highly susceptible to
suggestion and entry into trance-like states, particularly those which involves
shared hypnotic dreams, nightmares and other hallucinations. More than specific
instances of psychotic behaviour resulting in suicide shootings, the group
phenomena seen recently in ISIS collective killings by hanging, stoning,
crucifixion and beheading, and the zombie-like collective gathering of Gazans
to serve as human-shields, the reinforced collective lying about what they have
seen and experienced during the war with Israel, and the willingness of many
young children to service as suicide agents demonstrate sociopahic conditioning
throughout much of a relatively confined population.
Yet this does not explain the persistent
propensity of western media, intellectuals and academics to identify with
fanatical murders and to hate with a self-blinding fury the people of Israel
and Jews around the world, at the very least to believe in and to purvey
vicious and insidious lies contrary to their own intellectual skills and
personal experiences—as demonstrated by a few journalists who have m their
sanity when removed from the heart of the crisis.
Are they merely variations on what Goldhagen
denominated Hitler’s “willing executioners”, that is, German-speaking persons
long imbued with a culture of anti-Semitism, both religious and racial, so
that, rather than the denials uttered immediately after the close of World War
Two that they neither knew what was happening nor had any opportunity to
prevent the Holocaust, they had been—as contemporary photographs, newspaper
articles, private correspondence, diaries and similar documentation—not coerced
or physically threatened into cooperation, but eagerly took part in the
round-ups, humiliations and execution of Jews. Because of the extended period
during which the Final Solution was in progress and the systematic methods
used, it would be difficult to speak in terms of spontaneous triggers of
hormonal rage—as say, one can do in terms of the Rwandan genocide or the mass
killings in Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
Moreover, aside from a few days, at best, of western journalists
misunderstanding the nature of the ethnic cleansing going on in the one
instance, or the large-scale incarcerations and cruel killings of the other,
there is no indication that intellectuals or academics either rationalized away
these outbursts of genocidal activity or sought to identify themselves with the
parties or governments involved.
Moreover, working in collusion, reinforcing one
another’s false narratives and engaging in toxic conversations that invert real
facts, project on the other the criminality of the guilty parties, and
congratulate one another on the virtues of victimhood, the Hamasniks and the
so-called journalists who work closely with the terrorist-gang that purports to
be a government in Gaza, the current group delusion of a genocidal Israel and a
murderous Jewish ideology have very few precedents in history. Though as a few writers and artists could see
in the 1930s and into the 1940s, such as André Suarès, their colleagues and
friends were completely taken in either by Soviet propaganda or Nazi vaunts of
a Brave New Order to save Europe and the World.
And when they pointed this out to them in public, that Lenin and then
Stalin were, like Hitler and Mussolini, dangerous dictators who spouted forth
disgusting, more than merely errant, nonsense, Suarès and his few supporters in
France, especially through their own essays in cultural reviews and weekly newspapers,
were vilified and their own access to publishing houses and magazine editors
cut. This is similar to those speakers
who attempt stand up for Israel in universities, lecture halls, community
centres, television interviews other venues of supposedly free discussion: they
are mocked, shouted down, and ejected physically (or as is sometimes said:
disinvited).
Because these so-called journalists,
intellectuals and academics believe so deeply in their own—that is, the adopted
and adapted arguments and illusions (or delusions) of the anti-Jewish regimes
that have no other goal than the destruction of Israel (to wipe it off the map)
and to kill all Jews everywhere and anywhere in the world—they reduce the image
of Zionism and of Judaism to caricature and stereotype. They mock (in denial) Israel’s claims that
its retaliation against Hamas rocket launched into Israel are preceded by
warnings, by careful monitoring of who may be in the target zone, and by
aborting raids when it would involve too many innocent, civilian
casualties. They disregard the fact that
the government in Jerusalem does not blockade food, medicine, and other
essentials into Gaza, though it does prevent materials that would be used to
construct tunnels or build weaponry. They gloss over (at best) the fact that
the IDF hunts down individuals who actually do break the rules of war or
perform acts of gratuitous cruelty, just the government tracks down individuals
who murder Palestinians or appropriate land illegally.
If Israel is not perfect in every fine point, these
opponents of Zionism proclaim, then it does not deserve to exist as a Jewish
state, they say; and some, with a religious bent, take this further to say that
Jews are hypocrites and desecrators of their own Law. These detractors (some call them self-loathing
Jews) try to drive a wedge between different modes of Judaism, such as
Ashkenazi (deemed arrogant manipulators of Talmudic logic through pilpul),
Sephardi (overly proud of their Spanish-Portuguese nobility and bigotterd
against those they deem inferior), West European Jews (German and Central
European Yekkers) against East Europeans (Litvacks and Galizianas), new
migrants and native-born Sabras, or in
religious terms between Ultra-Orthodox, Modern Orthodox, Conservative, Liberal,
Reform and then different schools of Hasidus—and not least between modern
secular Israelis and more traditional and spiritual believers.
[1] Daniel Greenfield, “Edward Said: Oppressed Fraud” Frontpage Mag (20 August 2014) online at
http://www/frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/edward-said-oppressed-fraud#U_T_rUVQqs.facebook
[2] Ian H. Robertson, “ISIS Savagery Explained”. Psychology Today (18 August 2014) online at http;//www.
psychologytoday.com/blog/the-einner-effect/201408/isis-savagery-explained. The essay is based on the author’s book The
Winner Effect: Exploring the Neuroscience of Success and Failure.
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