Re: <nettime> the silence on the rising fascism

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Joseph Rabie asked a real question:

"Might the amount of global passion relative to this conflict occur because
it involves Jews? In a revival of antisemitism that Jews suffered in Europe
and elsewhere? This is what Israelis believe when they hear that sinister
slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. Where does
that leave them, apart from in the sea?"

From all reports this fear affects the entire population of Israel, faced
not only with Hamas but with broader threats from surrounding countries.
How could anyone fail to understand it? That's why I felt such revulsion
when leftists in Chicago demonstrated with images of paragliders. If either
side could win, if victory could be justice, then I could be "for" one side
or the other. But no one wins at this point. And wider war is on the
horizon.

The conflict involves the US directly, and all the Western alliance
countries. To answer you, Joe, I think the global passion comes from this
kind of deep involvement, and not only from antisemitism. IDF jets, bombs
and weapons are largely made in and partially paid for by the US, whose
military support for Israel over the decades has been particularly cynical.
The exercise of vastly superior power, coupled with the arrogant sense of
invulnerability it brings, has generated hatred for Americans as well as
Israelis. Why did a US president have to embrace the fascist Netanyahu?
Biden acted out the emotional lie at the basis of an antiquated ideology
dating back to the Cold War and Hiroshima. If the fantasmatic sense of
invulnerability is maintained, the wars will go on in the place of
desperately needed transformations, and we will all end up in the rising
seas of climate change.

The primary lesson coming out of Germany today is that the culture of
memory has turned into a justification for the current global hierarchy and
its many forms of violence, both abroad and at home. It's true as far as I
can see. "Nie wieder" has become a kind of frozen monument whose
philosophical basis is the absolute singularity of the Shoah: we are told
again and again that nothing else compares. But every act of rationalized
violence does bear comparison to what happened in Germany, and the society
in which I live has committed those acts again and again. We should
definitely remember the Shoah, as a clear and present danger within every
nation state, not as an absolute exception.

I am now reading a very searching book called "Haunting Legacies: Violent
Histories and Transgenerational Trauma," by Gabriele Schwab, who is a
German emigrée to the United States. It focuses on the trauma of
perpetrator societies confronted with the unspeakable horror of their own
collective acts. The main idea, borrowed from the psychoanalysts Abraham
and Torok, is that the memories of these acts become encrypted within the
individual psyche, entombing the humanity of the perpetrator societies and
distorting their thoughts and behaviors. There are some passages that
relate directly to our conversation:

"People have always silenced violent histories. Some histories, collective
and personal, are so violent we would not be able to live our daily lives
if we did not at least temporarily silence them. A certain amount of
[psychic] splitting is conducive to survival. Too much silence, however,
becomes haunting. Abraham and Torok link the formation of the crypt with
silencing, secrecy, and the phantomatic return of the past. While the
secret is intrapsychic and indicates an internal psychic splitting, it can
be collectively deployed and shared by a people or a nation. The collective
or communal silencing of violent histories leads to a transgenerational
transmission of trauma and the specter of an involuntary repetition of
cycles of violence."

Schwab follows Hannah Arendt to locate the origins of the Shoah in
imperialism:

"When European men massacred the indigenous people, Arendt argues, they did
so without allowing themselves to become aware of the fact that they had
committed murder. Like Conrad's character Kurtz, many of these adventurers
went insane. They had buried and silenced their guilt; they had buried and
silenced their humanity. But their deeds came back to haunt them in a
vicious cycle of repetition. Arendt identifies two main political devices
for imperialist rule: race and bureaucracy: 'Race... was an escape into an
irresponsibility where nothing human could any longer exist, and
bureaucracy was the result of a responsibility that no man can bear for his
fellow-man and no people for another people' (207). The genocide of
indigenous peoples under colonial and imperial rule was silenced in a
defensive discourse of progressing civilization, but it returned with a
vengeance. Race and bureaucracy were the two main devices used under
fascism during the haunting return to the heart of Europe of the violence
against other human beings developed under colonial and imperial rule."

All of this applies to America's 500-year history. We are a remarkably
violent society, founded on genocide and almost constantly at war for the
past eighty years. Based on thousands of years of history, many would argue
that war is an intrinsic part, not of any single society, but of
civilization. So what meaning could one then withdraw from the ideas that
Gabriele Schwab presents?

Humanity is something that no one simply has by nature. Humanity is
something that one must strive for, recover, repair, remake in every
generation. There are no "just wars" - that is a self-serving and dangerous
illusion. The only dignity is to break the silence in one's own self, and
use the tragic consciousness of unjust violence and murder most foul as a
force for ceasefire and negotiation.

I used to think I wasn't involved in the Middle East, that it wasn't my
problem. How wrong I was, and how much humanity I sacrificed.

Ceasefire now, Brian

On Mon, Dec 25, 2023 at 11:43 AM Joseph Rabie via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:

> Perhaps the worst silence in this tragedy is of those who still dream of
> reaching out to the other side in the hope of future coexistence, that
> ongoing events render ever less likely on either side. In Israel, the act
> of openly expressing sympathy and grief for the people in Gaza is rare. A
> rabbi leading a prayer for the victims of the 7th October in the religious
> suburb of Bnei Brak was almost lynched when he dared add a prayer for
> Gaza’s victims. One can only imagine how a Palestinian who expresses
> sympathy with Israel’s victims will be treated by members of Hamas.
>
> Ted mentioned the massive demonstrations that took place against
> Netanyahu’s attempt at judicial state capture, that have been put on hold
> since the war started. Those demonstrations had their silence too: the
> Palestinian question was deliberately excluded, because of its divisive
> nature within the population. Yet, on occasion people could be seen with
> banners and teeshirts declaring “No democracy with occupation”. Those who
> organized the demonstrations stepped in immediately after October 7th to
> set up logistics to bring relief to the victims, when Netanyahu and his
> crony government remained mute. Many Israelis await the end of the conflict
> to march on Jerusalem for a reckoning.
>
> What disturbs me about this question of silence as applied to the current
> conflict is that it appears  to be more rhetorical than real. The conflict
> is being echoed on the streets, in the press, in a cacophony on social
> media where the supporters of either side make their hatred of the other
> amply known.
>
> When it comes to the deafening silence that presides over so many
> conflicts - Darfour 300,000 fatalities, Boko Haram 60,000, Eastern Congo
> 70,000, Rohingya 25,000, Yemen 200,000, Tigray 500,000 - where are the
> voices of protest? Not to mention the oppression of the Ouïghours. Not many
> articles in the press, few (if any) demonstrations on the streets or
> upheavals and controversies on campuses. Possibly written about on Nettime.
> I seem to remember a piece about Syria.
>
> One might say that there is a degree of hypocrisy in this, particularly on
> the part of progressives who pride themselves on their solidarity with the
> downtrodden and persecuted. Maybe it is because those other subjects are
> off the radar, being that they do not slot into the colonialist and
> capitalist narrative that creates an unjust selection of causes, leaving
> the less visible or fashionable ones out in the cold. Indeed, silenced.
>
> Thankfully, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict gets the visibility it
> deserves. But then it fits totally into the colonialist narrative (as it
> should). But is there perhaps another, less avowable reason? Saying what I
> am about to feels as if I am on a tightrope and am about to put my foot in
> it.
>
> Might the amount of global passion relative to this conflict occur because
> it involves Jews? In a revival of antisemitism that Jews suffered in Europe
> and elsewhere? This is what Israelis believe when they hear that sinister
> slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. Where does
> that leave them, apart from in the sea? When those who go beyond a
> condemnation of Israel’s behavior, to denying the right of Israel to exist
> at all, by simplistically equating Zionism with the colonialist endeavors
> of the 19th century. For Israelis and Jews, denial of statehood, the right
> all peoples should dispose of, can be no other than antisemitic.
>
> Indeed, those people who chant it, how do they plan for the Israelis to be
> disposed of? Hamas certainly makes no secret of their intentions.
>
> May the New Year surprise us with peace. One can always make a wish -
> Joe.
>
>
> >
> > Le 25 déc. 2023 à 03:04, Keith Sanborn via nettime-l <
> nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> a écrit :
> >
> > 
> > In my for once humble opinion, silence has many meanings according to
> context. As has been pointed out, there is the silence of the powerful and
> the silencing of those who protest, who touch historical nerves. There is
> also a silence of the normally vocal to make a space for listening amidst
> the disinformation wars which vocalize simplistic conflicts in order to
> muddy the waters. There is also the silence of the fearful and the
> confused, the perplexed, and the thoughtful. Many Israelis and those
> outside are in the latter position: burdened by history and conscious of
> the moral evil of what goes on in Gaza in their name. They are all too
> aware of their own silent complicity in the slow genocide which has now
> reached an accelerated pace. And the massacres perpetrated by Hamas can
> only touch the nerves of inherited trauma. The three hostages gunned
> down—silenced—by the IDF can only amplify their realization that the
> reaction to Hamas has reached a murderous pitch, if they choose to ignore
> the murders of Palestinians. Ordinary Palestinians experience being
> silenced by the destruction of the means of communication with the outside
> world and by an abject struggle for daily survival. “It’s complicated,” can
> indeed be a simple fear of taking a moral stand. Silence = Death, as we
> know all too well, and yet obfuscation is as bad or worse than silence, as
> it is disinformation that serves murderers as much as silence. The
> inheritance of trauma serves as no justification for mass murder.
> >
> > Merry Christmas
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >>> On Dec 22, 2023, at 8:00 AM, Geoffrey Goodell via nettime-l <
> nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:
> >>> On Fri, 22 Dec 2023 at 10:47:49PM +1100, paul van der walt via
> nettime-l wrote:
> >>> The way i understand it, Ted is remarking that in our situation, (some
> number of) people are participating in a discussion on a mailing list, and
> some (many more, by definition almost, given the subscriber count) are
> lurking / listening / thinking their thoughts / sending everything to spam,
> but not replying in public to the postings.  He's saying that the gesture
> of labelling this phenomenon as an (my words) "active / deliberate silence"
> is firstly a specific framing (one of many, as he argues), and secondly a
> nostalgic one, in that it stands in comparison to collective manifestations
> out in the streets, with people shouting, as an example (among many).  I
> think the claim is that instead of choosing this one framing, of labelling
> this state of affairs as "silence", we are invited to reflect on how else
> to respond to our contemporary context.
> >>>
> >>> Apologies Ted if i'm flat-footing your (eloquent, IMHO) framing and
> argument.
> >>>
> >>> For what it's worth i can see where Ted is coming from, and to me it
> does make sense.  I'll remain neutral on the substance of it as well as the
> implications that has for our various (potentially deontological) roles in
> discourse.
> >>
> >> I would say that the reason for the silence is much more quotidian than
> that.  The choice to be silent or not is really only a fair choice for
> those of us with the privilege to respond at close to zero marginal cost.
> >>
> >> For the less privileged among us who have day jobs or similarly taxing
> responsibilities that require a time commitment, the time needed to
> formulate a thoughtful response constitutes a prohibitive cost.  For such
> persons, the choice is between responding with a superficial message and
> not responding at all.  From this perspective, the fact that there is not a
> flood of superficial messages is a sign of respect for the community and
> the value it places on thoughtful consideration.
> >>
> >> However, although this might explain the silence in communities such as
> nettime, I am not sure that this explains the silence in the world at
> large.  Perhaps there really is a dearth of privileged people who are
> unwilling to speak out against a system that has benefited them, a
> frightening thought indeed.
> >>
> >> Best wishes --
> >>
> >> Geoff
> >>
> >> --
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> > --
> > # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
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> > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> > # more info: https://www.nettime.org
> > # contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org
>
> --
> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> # more info: https://www.nettime.org
> # contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org
>
-- 
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org