Mick Hartley

Jack Omer-Jackaman, in a long read at Fathom, on the obscene jubilation of the anti-Zionst left at the October 7th pogrom:

Every radical generation has its Kronstadt, said the American sociologist Daniel Bell – has, in other words, that revelatory moment when, at least for some, the intellectual evasions and moral contortions of the party line become both unavoidable and untenable. Bell was old enough that his Kronstadt was Kronstadt. For others, the Moscow Trials, Molotov-Ribbentrop, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland etc. etc. did the trick. Plenty more refused to acknowledge a Kronstadt moment and went to their graves refusing to concede that there was so much as a flaw, let alone evil, in the great liberation.

My own Kronstadt – from an era when the Soviet god that failed had been replaced with a new deity in the form of decolonisation – was less an event than an idea, or rather the exposure of a dogma posing as an idea. I remember it with crystal clarity: the moment I read Judith Butler’s demand that we understand ‘Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left.’

I knew two things at that moment. First, that decolonisation and the campaigns for global justice had not themselves been delegitimised by such insanity, any more than the horrors of the Soviet Union had delegitimised socialism. Second, that while, like Jean Améry, I would be always of the left, I could henceforth play no part in any left that agreed with Butler, and that the rest of my life would in some way be spent engaged in an acrimonious dialogue with it.

Any more I have to give, from here on out will, in large part, be devoted to ensuring that the ‘this is what liberation looks like’ response to 7 October becomes this generation’s Kronstadt. […]

The road to this squalid reaction to 7 October has been a long one, with many a disastrous turn leading the far left into ever more dangerous and bankrupt territory. It is what happens when dogma becomes more fashionable than critical thought; when radicalism trumps reason; when the antidote to Orientalism is taken to be Occidentalism; when the counter to cultural imperialism is moral relativism; when it is ‘better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron’; when Foucault decides, for us all, that Iranian women and Iranian democrats can go to hell – the Ayatollah is, after all, just too damned exciting.

Yes, the present swamp was fed by myriad fetid tributaries. So too does it inevitably become more and more contaminated. Generations raised on blather masquerading as profundity and on nihilism masquerading as radical chic. This next generation has far exceeded Butler in both irrationality and the explicitness of its contempt for Israeli life.