"CONDEMN HAMAS! AND SUPPORT GENOCIDE JOE BIDEN THE MASS BABY KILLER!"

Reflections on the moral depravity of the Western progressive liberal soc dem intellectual and and media class

I just want to write a post in response to the incredibly pathetic pseudo-intellectual navel-gazing moralism that overtook the Western academic “left” over the past month. “We have to condemn Hamas, they are far right nationalist blood and soil Nazi fascists, we have to condemn! We can’t make another step or utter another word without first condemning! Condemn! Condemn!” Eric Levitz, Joshua Leifer, Naomi Klein and Judith Butler were but a few of those who came out with these oh so thoughtful and reflective and deep and emotionally resonant calls for condemnation of Hamas, so bravely and defiantly standing up to the all-powerful pro-Hamas “tankies” that are clearly hegemonic not just in the Western left broadly, but in Western politics generally. They dominate every institution, they have politicians everywhere coming out of the woodwork praising Hamas as a brave anti-imperialist resistance force. It’s ubiquitous, so we must stand against it bravely, alongside Naomi, Joshua, Judith and Eric!

Do you see what a joke this is, and how the entire set up for it, the entire stage upon which this performatively morally hectoring and browbeating outrage is being acted out ostentatiously, is but a contrived narcissistic display of their own proclaimed moral purity, which is entirely aligned with every single power faction in the Western world, including literally every single left politician?

But I don’t just want to rehash in detail the strategic-tactical answer to this grotesque performance art that has no objective material, and as a consequence zero actual moral content. The sole purpose of it is to literally virtue signal as a means of maintaining one’s social status, like with the “I condemn Saddam”, “I condemn Putin”, “I condemn Assad”, “I condemn Azov Nazis…oh no wait actually I love them we have to send them advanced weaponry”. “Look at us good pseudo-radicals, we are condemning Hamas and denouncing those evil “tankies” who refuse to do so!” Naomi Klein, Eric Levitz and Judith Butler have no say over what Hamas does or doesn’t do. They have no control over them. But they are in part responsible, but in the opposite way, namely by being citizens of a country whose political regime has actively committed massacres and genocide against Palestinians for nearing a century now. That is the beginning and end of any moral action they can take. Anything beyond that, denouncing the evils of people and groups that your own regime has already branded a terrorist organization and has locked up in a concentration camp is the very opposite of morality, it is the height of immorality. You are helping to launder that regime’s actions, which includes the actions taken by Israel which are totally dependent on it. Look at how Netanyahu is constantly on the line to Washington to check if this or that move can be made. Lots of “agency” happening there, just to mention again that analytically empty, incoherent and nefarious pseudo-concept I dismantled here and here and Butler spent her “Hamas must be condemned!” essay semi-coherently playing around with for the amusement of Ivy and Oxbridge critical theory postgrads.

A lesson in basic morality

Here again a lesson in basic morality: “We should give much more attention to one priest we've killed than to a hundred priests they've killed. It's a very simple ethical point: you're responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions, not for somebody else's actions.”

And Gabriel Winant has expressed this better than I could here (I despise Dissent Mag and Michael Walzer and the whole soc dem pseudo-radical social imperialist cretins aligned with it for reasons mentioned here, here and in this piece, so I’m linking to an archived version of it). It is also worth reading this piece on this rhetoric in the West having no real content and hence the endless whimpering moralizing over it by these pseudo-left hacks is nothing but status-maintaining self-preservation and advancement (that last part is my analysis).

There is another excellent response to this moral browbeating and hectoring by Yanis Varoufakis that I will post below. But first I just want to make an observation about the supposed moral purity of these progressive humanitarian social democrat Warrenite Bernie AOC loving Ivy Oxbridge audience having intellectuals. These are very serious people. This is the American and British left, and they have their counterparts across the Western world, France, Germany. Just think of it, there’s a French John Ganz out there! It’s almost too horrific to imagine.

These people, who pretend to not have any dirty hands, who pretend to be morally clean and blameless and so Saintly and Virtuous that when confronted with the lessons in basic morality and how it is played out in actual material reality, they scoff and go: “Eww, how dare you bring strategy and tactics and material conditions and social context into this? Oh so you can’t just be human, you can’t just accept empathy on its own terms. Well then you’re just pure evil, you’ve bitten the bullet that leads to Nazism and Stalinism, the concentration camps and Gulags!”

Oh ok, I see. You have clean hands. The same hands that demand people support Joe Biden, and Obama, and Clinton, and Gore, and every Democrat, and Blair, and every Labourite (except Corbyn, he’s a gross anti-Semite radical anti-imperialist tankie, we can’t have that! Let’s vote for the Lib Dems and “moderate Tories” and Greens and throw the election intentionally, which is exactly what they did as detailed here, and I still have to write a piece on how these vile cretins laundered the anti-Semitism witch-hunt against him by lending it pseudo-radical “left” credibility).

The whitewashing of baby killer Genocide Joe Biden by the paragons of moral virtue

So Hamas is pure evil and Nazism incarnate, they have come straight out of the depths of hell, but Joe Biden, who has over his long career of being a genocidal war criminal killed at least 5 million people, and that’s being very conservative and ignores the at least tens of millions of lives he destroyed through displacement and social death and the economic terror campaigns called “sanctions” which kill countless. It’s 5 million killed directly through the wars he as a politician gave his support to and helped enact just in this century alone, including every single US-NATO war that decimated entire nations from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine, and of course the massacres of Palestinians.

“Wait!” cries out Naomi Klein. “There is a crucial difference you’re ignoring!” Ok, and what is that, Naomi? “Daddy Biden didn’t intentionally kill them! He didn’t intentionally do it! It was collateral damage!”

Ah, and now we’ve come to the place where every one of these cretins always end up: pure unbridled liberal imperialism, with a thin veneer of radical social democracy. Just give me a little Medicare for all as a treat alongside the mass murder required to maintain US imperial hegemony across the globe.

No but Naomi, Eric, all of you, you just gave the game away. Weren’t you the ones who pointed out the moral depravity of the collateral damage propaganda? Weren’t you the ones who said that all crimes that proceed from war are the consequence of the act of war, and can’t just be hidden away and erased as some secondary or tertiary thing, separate and distinct from it? But you did, when your task was to produce content to make the Republicans look like, the Bush admin, and so it was safe and you had the go-ahead to publish all this stuff, which you then conveniently put into the cupboard and hid away once Obama was elected because it’s kind of difficult making those kinds of arguments about moral purity and then suddenly throw it to the side come election time. Because then you’ve done the very thing you are now screaming in horror is never allowed to be done: you made a strategic-political calculation in your moral system, and adjusted it accordingly. You did not maintain a single principle and apply it in every case all social and political context be damned, as you now hector and browbeat others to do on the issue of “condemning Hamas”. You did the opposite, and you will do it again this coming year.

I want to share again a great exchange Chomsky had with Sam Harris, who fundamentally has the same commitment to US imperial hegemony as these pseudo-radicals do (they’re both staunch Biden supporters). Harris made this point about how there is a key difference between intentionally mass killing people, and unintentionally doing so. The US empire is in the latter camp, ergo one can still be morally virtuous and pure while supporting it. But those evil brown people like Osama Bin Laden, they’re in the former camp, they do it intentionally, ergo they are pure evil and have to be treated as such. Basically, it’s the current argument about Hamas being re-done now by pseudo-radicals who back then claimed to be horrified by Harris’ incoherent genocide-apologia, which is what it effectively is, as Chomsky pointed out. Anyone with basic functioning cognitive abilities, though we can no longer include Biden in that though he had them at the time the worst of these crimes were committed, knows that when you, say, launch an invasion of a sovereign country halfway across the world, it is going to lead to a lot of death and destruction. As that death and destruction unfolds and you keep supporting the war, you are morally committed to and hence responsible for it every step of the way. Virtuous intentions, which everyone proclaims, including the Nazis and Netanyahu, have no bearing at all on this truism. In fact, the lack of concern for this death and destruction, the millions killed and tens of millions of lives destroyed, reveals the morality at play here, namely the morality of genocide. Destroying the lives of Iraqis, Afghans, Syrians, Yemenis, Libyans and so many others had for Joe Biden the same moral significance as stepping on ants. Just totally meaningless. Who cares.

And by supporting him, in a country where you do have the ability to exert at least some influence on what happens, especially as a class—the liberal-progressive-soc dem intellectual and media class—you adopt his moral culpability for all these crimes. The astonishing thing is that you do so under no duress. You do it willingly and happily, with glee. You then demand others to do the same. “You have to support Biden! The fate of the earth depends on it! There is no other choice!”

So why does this logic of morality-as-tactics and strategy, determined by your interpretation of cold hard material, social and political facts, the whole “lesser evilism” framework I thoroughly dismantled here and here and will devote a separate piece to I hope soon, why does this suffice for you to excuse soaking your hands in blood, blood that is infinitely deeper than anything a Hamas supporter can even imagine coming close to—but it’s the height of immorality and evil for others?

What kind of sick, grotesque, depraved game are you playing here? The only conclusion one can draw is that you adopt the view that some people, some blood that is spilled, isn’t worth as much as others. Biden’s victims, numbering in the millions, aren’t as valuable as those killed by Hamas who were civilians and number in total, over the entirety of Hamas’ existence, less than 10.000. Yes, that includes those killed last week. Less than ten thousand. I repeat it again, I just have to: Hamas has killed less than ten thousand Israeli civilians for the entire duration of its existence, over four decades. I am actually being overly cautious by saying it is ten thousand, it’s closer to six or even five thousand, having looked at some numbers that are reported.

Now you may say that is evil. Those are real people. But there is one condition: You can only do so if you yourself do not invoke any moralism-as-tactics and strategy in other contexts, especially in the one that affects you directly as a citizen of the West. Now, if there is a leftist anti-imperialist who opposes Biden, every Democrat, every genocidal mass murdering politician in the West, and they come to me and say, I think you should also condemn Hamas, then I will take them seriously. These are the few true pacifists, who do not bend their morality independent of context, and you can say truly believe that every life lost is worth as much as another. The people who fall in this category tend to be religiously motivated, rather than by any political ideology, so it’s quite rare to find them. But I respect them, they are morally consistent, and the world needs more of them.

But you are not among them, Eric Levitz, Naomi Klein, Joshua Leifer, Judith Butler. You are the exact opposite of them, in that you believe that lives lost due to the actions of politicians in your home countries are worth infinitely less than the lives lost by those designated as Official Enemies by Western regimes. You excuse the former without even the pretense of having any moral compunctions about doing so, while you endlessly cry crocodile tears over the latter, and demand that no one dare even express the faintest hint of support for those who committed it without any concern for the material, social and political context in question. With your blood-soaked hands you pretend you’re clean, and there is no more grotesque and depraved sight than that deception, than vice masquerading as virtue.

The supreme morality of the Palestinian liberation struggle, including the brave and heroic Hamas fighters

And what is that context, what is the morality-as-tactics and strategy in the case of Hamas? Yanis Varoufakis made the best case for that here:

I pretty much entirely agree with Yanis. I am not of the pacifist persuasion who stick to morality as principle independently of context, and unlike the Naomi Kleins and Eric Levitzes, I don’t pretend to so as to present myself as pure and holy. I am fundamentally a materialist in the Marxist sense, and believe morality is an outgrowth of particular material and social conditions, and any refusal to contend with that fact means rendering oneself politically dead and useless.

If you ignore the context, and just see an act like what Hamas did last week in a vacuum, then yes, of course it is easy to come up with a basic moral condemnation. But that is denying reality, because it didn’t happen in a vacuum. Nothing does. We don’t live in Disney fantasy stories. We live in reality. The reality is a genocidal occupation regime, backed by the most powerful military and economic forces on earth, has been engaged in a constant assault against a people for now nearing a century. Killing them, caging them, torturing them, raping them, affecting every aspect of their lives from the second they wake up to the moment they go to sleep. This is the reality that when you deny it, you aren not being moral, you are displaying the most sadistic immorality, because you are intentionally cutting away and erasing the very things that led up to this or that action taking place.

As with words, it is the context that gives actions meaning. A lot of the claims about some of the acts committed by the Hamas fighters have been put into serious question, from the mass rapes to the 40 beheaded babies. And stories have come out of people being treated well by Hamas fighters. Yes, I know, you find this shocking, but take it up with those who talked about how they were treated.

All this is meaningless however, as it obscures, and is intended to obscure, the context in which Hamas did what it did, namely an attempt, with the scarce resources available to them, to break free from the concentration camp they along with 2.1 million Palestinians (half of whom are children) have been caged in. If Hamas had Leopard tanks, Javelins, advanced weaponry, a standing army, a developed economic base, control over its own borders, an air force, this would not have happened even in the event of a war between the two sides. Using makeshift paragliders and stumbling upon a rave in the desert near your concentration camp is not something that happens to standing armies with resources and technology and advanced weaponry and their disposal. Incidentally, this makes all the aforementioned “collateral damage” committed by the US and Israeli militaries infinitely worse than any civilian deaths caused by Hamas, which by material necessity are constrained to engage in the kinds of armed resistance that they do.

And to be clear, armed resistance against occupation is a right guaranteed under international law. Yes, including to Palestinians and other brown and black people. I’m sorry, it’s not just the blonde white Azov Nazis that you adore so much. Everyone has that right. The question for serious people who aren’t out to morally hector an imagined powerful influential “tankie left” as they themselves whitewash rivers of blood caused by their favorite political leaders, is what does the exercise of that right look like in practice given the material means available?

The Viet Cong is likely to have killed civilians as part of its resistance struggle against the US-backed fascist puppet regime, though of course nowhere near the amount killed, tortured, raped by the US and its puppets (including many babies). This was one of the main reasons cited by progressive liberal social democrat Cold Warriors to oppose them, they were “authoritarian Stalinists with no concern for civilians.” But who today among the pseudo-radical left claims to oppose the Vietnamese resistance, and says they were morally evil monsters like they are currently doing with Hamas?

Oh right, they won. And they became normalized. And so there’s zero risk involved in expressing support for them now, because it no longer matters. It no longer carries any political significance, ergo the hysterical pretend morality plays no longer serve any purpose. In fact, we can even talk now about the horrific acts committed by the genocidal US imperialist regime at the time, because hey, who cares, it’s no longer a live political matter anyway. Plenty of space to virtue signal and morally grandstand over that now, like AOC did recently with the Chile coup on her tour to South America in a pathetic attempt to launder herself as some radical anti-imperialist.

The operation conducted by Hamas, like that of any other group resisting foreign occupation, is not justified because when you put it under a moral magnifying glass it passes with flying colors. That’s deranged, and again it’s an act that all these cretins never perform for the actions conducted by their own regimes which do not take place under the circumstances of occupation, but of being an occupier, an invader, an aggressor. No, the operation is justified by its nature as an act of resistance to an occupation.

Listen to the words of the founders of Hamas in this thread, then listen to the words of Nelson Mandela as he spoke in Gaza, and then also the basic overview of the history of the genocidal Israeli occupation regime’s mass killings, maiming, rape, torture and caging of Palestinians from its inception to the present-day and how Hamas has been very willing to seek peace but has been continuously rebuffed in this thread, and this thread, and this one.

And here again is the full Chomsky-Harris exchange, and I will finish by quoting the most relevant parts:

I am sorry you are unwilling to retract your false claim that I “ignore the moral significance of intentions.” Of course I did, as you know.  Also, I gave the appropriate answer, which applies accurately to you in the al-Shifa case, the very case in question.

If you had read further before launching your accusations, the usual procedure in work intended to be serious, you would have discovered that I also reviewed the substantial evidence about the very sincere intentions of Japanese fascists while they were devastating China, Hitler in the Sudetenland and Poland, etc.  There is at least as much reason to suppose that they were sincere as Clinton was when he bombed al-Shifa.  Much more so in fact.  Therefore, if you believe what you are saying, you should be justifying their actions as well.  I also reviewed other cases, pointing out that professing benign intentions is the norm for those who carry out atrocities and crimes, perhaps sincerely – and surely more plausibly than in this case.  And that only the most abject apologists justify the actions on the grounds that perpetrators are adopting the normal stance of criminals.

I am also sorry that you evade the fact that your charge of “moral equivalence” was flatly false, as you know.

And in particular, I am sorry to see your total refusal to respond to the question raised at the outset of the piece you quoted.  The scenario you describe here is, I’m afraid, so ludicrous as to be embarrassing.  It hasn’t even the remotest relation to Clinton’s decision to bomb al-Shifa – not because they had suddenly discovered anything remotely like what you fantasize here, or for that matter any credible evidence at all, and by sheer coincidence, immediately after the Embassy bombings for which it was retaliation, as widely acknowledged.  That is truly scandalous.

And of course they knew that there would be major casualties.  They are not imbeciles, but rather adopt a stance that is arguably even more immoral than purposeful killing, which at least recognizes the human status of the victims, not just killing ants while walking down the street, who cares?

In fact, as you would know if you deigned to read before launching accusations, they were informed at once by Kenneth Roth of HRW about the impending humanitarian catastrophe, already underway.  And of course they had far more information available than HRW did.

Your own moral stance is revealed even further by your complete lack of concern about the apparently huge casualties and the refusal even to investigate them.

As for Clinton and associates being “genuine humanitarians,” perhaps that explains why they were imposing sanctions on Iraq so murderous that both of the highly respected international diplomats who administered the “Oil for food” program resigned in protest because they regarded them as “genocidal,” condemning Clinton for blocking testimony at the UN Security Council.  Or why he poured arms into Turkey as it was carrying out a horrendous attack on its Kurdish population, one of the worst crimes of the ‘90s.  Or why he shifted Turkey from leading recipient of arms worldwide (Israel-Egypt excepted) to Colombia, as soon as the Turkish atrocities achieved their goal and while Colombia was leading the hemisphere by far in atrocious human rights violations.  Or why he authorized the Texaco Oil Company to provide oil to the murderous Haitian junta in violation of sanctions.  And on, and on, as you could learn if you bothered to read before launching accusations and professing to talk about “ethics” and “morality.”

I’ve seen apologetics for atrocities before, but rarely at this level – not to speak of the refusal to withdraw false charges, a minor fault in comparison.

Since you profess to be concerned about “God-intoxicated sociopaths,” perhaps you can refer me to your condemnation of the perpetrator of by far the worst crime of this millennium because God had instructed him that he must smite the enemy.

No point wasting time on your unwillingness to respond to my request that you “reciprocate by referring me to what I have written citing your published views.  If there is anything I’ve written that is remotely as erroneous as this – putting aside moral judgments – I’ll be happy to correct it.”

Plainly there is no point pretending to have a rational discussion.  But I do think you would do your readers a favor if you presented your tale about why Clinton bombed al-Shifa and his grand humanitarianism.  That is surely the least you can do, given your refusal to withdraw what you know to be completely false charges and a display of moral and ethical righteousness.

Your primary charge is that I neglected to ask “very basic questions” about intentions.  As we have now established, I asked and responded to exactly those basic questions in this case and in other cases, while you have completely failed to address “the basic questions” about the significance of professed intentions (about actual intentions we can only guess).  There are two important questions about these: (1) how seriously do we take them? (2) on moral grounds, how do we rank (a) intention to kill as compared with (b) knowledge that of course you will kill but you don’t care, like stepping on ants when you walk.

As for (1), I have been discussing it for 50 years, explaining in detail why, as we all agree, such professed intentions carry little if any weight, and in fact are quite uninformative, since they are almost entirely predictable, even in the case of the worst monsters, and I have also provided evidence that they may be quite sincere, even in the case of these monsters, but we of course dismiss them nonetheless.  In contrast, it seems that you have never discussed (1).

As for (2), I posed the question, the one serious moral question that arises in the case at issue, and though I didn’t give a definite answer I suggested what I think: that one might argue that on moral grounds, (b) is even more depraved than (a).  Again, it seems that you have never even considered (2), let alone discussed it.

To summarize, then, you issue instructions about moral issues that you have never even considered to people who have considered and discussed these issues for many decades, including the very case you cite.  And when this is explained to you in detail, you have nothing to say except to repeat your initial stance.

As if that’s enough, you evaded the question asked in the passage you cite, and when I asked for a response, you did give a response – or so I assumed.

To be crystal clear, either that response was irrelevant to the question, or you intended it to seriously, that is, to be relevant to Clinton’s bombing of al-Shifa.  I assumed the latter.  In that case, it follows at once, as I wrote, that the claim is ludicrous and embarrassing.  You now say that it was only a “thought experiment.” That leaves us where we were.  Either it is irrelevant, or it is ludicrous and embarrassing, or else you are refusing to answer the question.  All of that is straightforward enough so that I need not spell it out any further.

Let’s turn finally to your interpretation of al-Shifa: Clinton “did not want or intend to kill anyone at all, necessarily. He simply wanted to destroy what he believed to be a chemical weapons factory. But he did wind up killing innocent people, and we don’t really know how he felt about it.”

I’m sure you are right that Clinton did not want or intend to kill anyone at all.  That was exactly my point.  Rather, assuming that he was minimally sane, he certainly knew that he would kill a great many people but he simply didn’t care: case (2) above, the one serious moral issue, which I had discussed (contrary to your charge) and you never have.

As for the rest, you may, if you like, believe that when Clinton bombed Afghanistan and Sudan in immediate reaction to the Embassy bombings (and in retaliation, it is naturally assumed), he had credible information that he was bombing a chemical factory – which also was, as publicly known, the major pharmaceutical factory in Sudan (which, of course, could not replenish supplies), and he judged that the evidence was strong enough to overlook the human consequences.  But, oddly, he was never able to produce a particle of credible evidence, as was widely reported.  And when informed immediately (by HRW) that a humanitarian catastrophe was already beginning he ignored it, as he ignored the subsequent evidence about the scale of the casualties (as you incidentally did too).

On your assumptions, he’s quite clearly a moral monster, and there’s no need to comment further on people who seek to justify these crimes – your crimes and mine, as citizens of a free society where we can influence policy.

It seems to me clear what your response should be on elementary moral grounds.  I’m not holding my breath.