Znetwork had two good essays that I read today. One was about the intellectual poverty of antisemitism: "Why Antisemitism Obscures the Real Architecture of Power" by Vuk Bačanovic.
One of the most repellent forms of that old-new popular thinking—now once again spreading with mounting intensity across Western societies since the genocidal devastation of Gaza and the American-Israeli escalation toward Iran—is the stale, mildew-ridden yet ever-ready conclusion: that, finally, the dehumanization of the Jews has been vindicated. That the racist phantasmagoria of Jews as a “cancer of humanity” was merely awaiting its historical confirmation. Ah yes – Hitler, it seems, “knew something after all”: because Zionists, because AIPAC, because Netanyahu, because lobbies—because of that wonderfully crude analytical apparatus that explains history as if it were He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, with a single eternal villain scheming from Snake Mountain against the pious people of Eternia.
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And here we arrive at the question that spoils the sport for all professional hunters of the “eternal culprit”: why are other accomplices across the vast spectrum of wars, massacres, sanctions, blockades, and mass deaths somehow always deemed “less evil” than the “evil Jews”? Why are Anglo-American imperial elites – Protestant or secular, it makes no difference – and their allies in various petro-monarchies, including Wahhabi–Kharijite ideological apparatuses, so readily portrayed as misguided marionettes of grotesque Jewish caricatures lifted from Nazi propaganda, rather than as fully conscious, fully responsible accomplices in joint criminal enterprises stretching from Libya, through Iraq, to Syria, Gaza, and Iran?
So, is it therefore impossible to be evil if you are not a Jew? Are Washington, D.C., London, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi in fact historic courts of virtue and humanism—merely bewitched by wicked counsellors, like King Théoden in The Lord of the Rings? Otherwise, would they—as a kind of global alliance of beauty queens—ceaselessly labour for peace and human understanding, if only “the Jew” were not whispering in their ear that today, of all days, is perfect for yet another humanitarian catastrophe and genocide?
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That is why the antisemitic “explanation” of the world is not only morally repugnant, but analytically foolish and politically harmful: it does not expose the existing system—it rescues it. It is especially useful to the system entrenched in Israel, which in fact thrives on the premise that antisemitism is the natural condition of non-Jews, a premise designed to render every new enterprise of Netanyahu’s killers intelligible, even inevitable. Instead of focusing on the nature and structure of capital, the state, lobbies, military-industrial complexes, petro-monarchies, imperialism, and comprador elites, it reduces everything to an ancient, fetid metaphysics of blood and soil—of a handful of uniquely evil people without whom the world, supposedly, would be better.
Only it would not.
Of course, Netanyahu and other zionist leaders celebrate how Israel's atrocities reinforce the existing prejudices of the already antisemitic and inculcate antisemitism in confused people who are now seeing this behaviour for the first time. Which is not to say that a maniac like Netanyahu doesn't himself believe that antisemitism is the core of every non-Jewish person at that same time that he manipulates and creates that hatred. He's like Adolph Hitler; stating his desire to go to war against all his enemies, starting those wars, and then whining that the Jews started them.
The other article was from last July: "The Problem is Not Palestinian Culture - Rebutting Modern Right-wing Colonial Propaganda" by Roman Kozhevnikov. I most enjoyed this because two days ago I started reading a substack article by some writer whose name I forget, I gave up reading it in disgust, knowing that all the talking points were garbage ... maybe he or she is a paid opinion writer or maybe they're just some anonymous shlub like me. Regardless, it was all the crapola so eloquently destroyed in this article.
Pro-Israel propagandists want to control the narrative about the Arab-Muslim world and we hear their narratives more often than academic consensus on the matter. Palestinians are accused of low economic productivity to justify their colonization and to whitewash its adverse effects on them. Arab-Muslim values are slandered to present them as the cause of Palestinian problems. However, Palestinians—and other Arabs—were developing their economies rapidly throughout numerous periods of growth and their values guided and inspired them.
The likes of Caroline Glick paint Israeli occupation as bringing economic growth to the occupied territories, but these claims became outdated in the 1980s, whereupon short-lived West Bank economic growth—brought by Palestinians working abroad—changed to the decades of struggling, caused by Israel’s strangling economic policies. Now that international aid no longer constitutes such a large share of Israel’s GDP, Israel’s economic growth slowed down to less than half its former pace. Meanwhile, the World Bank estimated that the depressed West Bank economy might’ve grown 7.5% per year, if only Israel ceased its damaging policies.
I just thought I'd share.
