Mick Hartley

Karl-Marcus Gauss at Fathom – ‘Reactionary Anti-Imperialism’ as the new Totalitarian Temptation, from Foucault to 7 October:

When Iranian protests grew into a mass movement in 1978, the philosopher Michel Foucault decided to fly from Paris to Teheran. He wanted to understand what enabled the insurgents to sweep away the heavily armed regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi and to deprive the American imperialists of one of their most powerful vassals. In previous years, Foucault had published influential studies developing the thesis that the European Enlightenment’s development of bourgeois discipline had its way paved institutionally in prisons, while a true ‘dungeon system’ was tested in clinics, until it had finally subjugated the entire society. The Iranian revolution fascinated him, precisely because it was not a revolution based on a western, eastern, bourgeois or Bolshevik model, but had instead brought something new into the world. He called it ‘political spirituality’ and he meant by this the unity of anti-imperialist struggle and Shiite martyrdom. In short, the atheist, critic of bourgeois states and theoretician of anti-colonialism had discovered Islamism.

Foucault wrote enthusiastic articles about this new form of revolution in the French press and was invited to an audience with Ayatollah Khomeini, who was still living in exile in Paris. He was apparently neither willing nor able to apply to the developing theocracy of Iran the same critical instruments which he had used for his analysis of bourgeois civil society and which had led him to reject it. Even later he didn’t say a word about the fact that the Islamists had hijacked the revolution—had persecuted its opponents with bloody trials and imposed a patriarchal coercive rule on Iranian women, while instituting antisemitism as a state doctrine. He only got really angry when some feminist Iranian women in exile in France called him out about his turning a blind eye to the disenfranchisement of women. Then he told them that they were doing nothing other than fomenting Western prejudices against Islam with their criticism, and that they had not understood what the historical moment demanded: to put their own concerns aside in favour of the unique chance to finally free the earth from the damnation of capitalism and its European legacy….

Even the fact that homosexuality became punishable by death in the mullahs’ state did not cause Michel Foucault (who was permitted to live out his homosexuality freely under the supposedly coercive bourgeois regime of the west) to renounce his enthusiasm for ‘political spirituality.’ Since then, countless people have emulated his steadfast refusal to measure himself ideologically against something as banal as reality. Instead, they follow the changing fashions of pseudo-revolutionary attitudes. Even if sometimes it remains just an attitude, the matter is anything but harmless, as can be seen from the cheers that followed Hamas’s terrorist attack on 7 October 2023….

A few weeks before the Hamas massacre, I was asked what was the easiest way to fuel antisemitism. Today I would have to answer: by massacring as many Jews as possible. Nothing has fuelled hatred of Jews more than the worst attack on Jews since the Shoah, and because the attack was carried out against Jews, the rapists and murderers can only be called ‘resistance fighters’ motivated by a ‘holy Hatred’ against foreign Jewish rule in Palestine. ‘Heilige Hass’ (holy hatred) is, by the way, a motif that literally comes from Julius Streicher’s Nazi magazine Der Stürmer and which has been taken over in anti-colonial discourse. There are forms of ignorance that are entirely culpable. One of these is when Israel haters, who see themselves as left-wing, simply refuse to acknowledge the political foundations of Hamas….

Forty-five years after Foucault abandoned his intellectual and moral standards to support ‘political spirituality,’ the most sensitive youth in the West are forming an alliance with one of the most brutal terrorist representatives of ‘political spirituality.’ There are some new things that the anti-Zionists put forward between Berkeley and Berlin—such as the rigorous rejection of the Enlightenment legacy, which is denounced in self-loathing as a weapon of white supremacy; but the core of their accusation is ancient….

It is not without reason that these days many people sometimes complain that the political debate is no longer about knowledge, but rather only about demonstrating a loyal commitment to one side or the other. However, I must note: antisemitism did not come into the world through Jewish misbehaviour, and it will not disappear from it through Jewish good behaviour. Of course, Hamas cannot achieve its openly declared goal of wiping out Israel [at least not alone]; but on the day of the massacre it had already achieved things that millions and millions wanted. It is therefore necessary to offer protection and security to Jews who are threatened everywhere, through personal courage, social initiatives and government laws. And, especially if you feel politically connected to the left like I do, to support the state of Israel and its right to self-defence.