Here is something that can be said with great confidence. It is racist – antisemitic, if you prefer – to hold Jews, individually or collectively, accountable for Israel’s crimes. Jews are not responsible for Israel’s war crimes, even if the Israeli state presumes to implicate Jews in its crimes by falsely declaring it represents all Jews in the world.
Very obviously, it is not the fault of Jews that Israel commits war crimes, or that Israel uses Jews collectively as a political shield, exploiting sensitivities about the historical suffering of Jews at the hands of non-Jews to immunise itself from international opprobrium.
But here is something that can be said with equal certainty. Israel’s apologists – whether Jews or non-Jews – cannot deny all responsibility for Israel’s war crimes when they actively aid and abet Israel in committing those crimes, or when they seek to demonise and silence Israel’s critics so that those war crimes can be pursued in a more favourable political climate.
Such apologists – which sadly seems to include many of the community organisations in Britain claiming to represent Jews – want to have their cake and eat it.
They cannot defend Israel uncritically as it commits war crimes or seek legislative changes to assist Israel in committing those war crimes – whether it be Israel’s latest pummelling of civilians in Gaza, or its executions of unarmed Palestinians protesting 15 years of Israel’s blockade of the coastal enclave – and accuse anyone who criticises them for doing so of being an antisemite.
But this is exactly what has been going on. And it is only getting worse.
Upsurge in antisemitism?
As a ceasefire was implemented late last week, bringing a temporary let-up in the bombing of Gaza by Israel, pro-Israel Jewish groups in the UK were once again warning of an upsurge of antisemitism they attributed to a rapid growth in the number of protests against Israel.
These groups have the usual powerful allies echoing their claims. British prime minister Boris Johnson met community leaders in Downing Street on Thursday pledging, as Jewish News reported, “to continue to support the community in the face of rising antisemitism attacks”.
Those Jewish leaders included Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, a supporter of Johnson who played a part in helping him win the 2019 election by renewing the evidence-free antisemitism smears against the Labour party days before voting. It also included the Campaign Against Antisemitism, which was founded specifically to whitewash Israel’s crimes during its 2014 bombardment of Gaza and has ever since been vilifying all Palestinian solidarity activism as antisemitism.
In attendance too was the Jewish Leadership Council, an umbrella organisation for Britain’s main Jewish community groups. In an article in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper on this supposed rise in antisemitism in the UK, the JLC’s vice-president, Daniel Korski, set out the ridiculous, self-serving narrative these community groups are trying to peddle, with seemingly ever greater success among the political and media elite.
Popular outrage over Gaza
Korski expressed grave concern about the proliferation of demonstrations in the UK designed to halt Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. During 11 days of attacks, more than 260 Palestinians were killed, including at least 66 children. Israel’s precision air strikes targeted more than a dozen hospitals, including the only Covid clinic in Gaza, dozens of schools, several media centres, and left tens of thousands of Palestinians homeless.
The sense of popular outrage at the Israeli onslaught was only heightened by the fact that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had clearly engineered a confrontation with Hamas at the outset to serve his immediate personal interests: preventing Israeli opposition parties from uniting to oust him from power.
In his naked personal calculations, Palestinian civilians were sacrificed to help Netanyahu hold on to power and improve his chances of evading jail as he stands trial on corruption charges.
But for Korski and the other community leaders attending the meeting with Johnson, the passionate demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinians are their main evidence for a rise in antisemitism.
‘Free Palestine’ chants
These community organisations cite a few incidents that undoubtedly qualify as antisemitism – some serious, some less so. They include shouting “Free Palestine” at individuals because they are identifiable as Jews, something presumably happening mostly to the religious ultra-Orthodox.
But these Jewish leaders’ chief concern, they make clear, is the growing public support for Palestinians in the face of intensifying Israeli aggression.
Quoting David Rich, of the Community Security Trust, another Jewish organisation hosted by Johnson, the Haaretz newspaper reports that “what has really shaken the Jewish community … ‘is that demos are being held all over the country every day about this issue’ [Israel’s bombardment of Gaza].”
Revealingly, it seems that when Jewish community leaders watch TV screens showing demonstrators chant “Free Palestine”, they feel it as a personal attack – as though they themselves are being accosted in the street.
One doesn’t need to be a Freudian analyst to wonder whether this reveals something troubling about their inner emotional life: they identify so completely with Israel that even when someone calls for Palestinians to have equal rights with Israelis they perceive it as a collective attack on Jews, as antisemitism.
Exception for Israel
Then Korski gets to the crux of the argument: “As Jews we are proud of our heritage and at the same time in no way responsible for the actions of a government thousands of miles away, no matter our feelings or connection to it.”
But the logic of that position is simply untenable. You cannot tie your identity intimately to a state that systematically commits war crimes, you cannot vilify demonstrations against those war crimes as antisemitism, you cannot use your position as a “Jewish community leader” to make such allegations more credible, and you cannot exploit your influence with world leaders to try to silence protests against Israel and then say you are “in no way responsible” for the actions of that government.
If you use your position to prevent Israel from being subjected to scrutiny over allegations of war crimes, if you seek to manipulate the public discourse with claims of antisemitism to create a more favourable environment in which those war crimes can be committed, then some of the blame for those war crimes rubs off on you.
That is how responsibility works in every other sphere of life. What Israel’s apologists are demanding is an exception for Israel and for themselves.
Lobby with the UK’s ear
In another revealing observation seeking to justify claims of an upsurge in antisemitism, Korski adds: “We don’t see the same kind of outpouring of emotion when it comes to the Rohingya or the Uighurs or Syria, and it makes a lot of Jews feel this is about them [as Jews].”
But there are many reasons why there aren’t equally large demonstrations in the UK against the suffering of the Rohingya and the Uighurs – reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with antisemitism.
The oppressors of the Rohingya and the Uighurs, unlike Israel, are not being generously armed by the British government or given diplomatic cover by Britain or being given preferential trade agreements by Britain.
But equally importantly, the states oppressing the Rohingya and Uighurs – unlike Israel – don’t have active, well-funded lobbies in the UK, with the ear of the prime minister. China and Myanmar – unlike Israel – don’t have UK lobbies successfully labelling criticism of them as racism. Unlike Israel, they don’t have lobbies that openly seek to influence elections to protect them from criticism. Unlike Israel, they don’t have lobbies that work with Britain to introduce measures to assist them in carrying out their oppression.
The president of the Board of Deputies, Marie van der Zyl, for example, pressed Johnson at the meeting this week to classify all branches of Hamas, not just its military wing, as a terrorist organisation. That is Israel’s wet dream. Such a decision would make it even less likely that Britain would be in a position to officially distance itself from Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, where Hamas runs the government, and even more likely it would join Israel in declaring Gaza’s schools, hospitals and government departments all legitimate targets for Israeli air strikes.
Pure projection
If you are lobbying to get special favours for Israel, particularly favours to help it commit war crimes, you don’t also get to wash your hands of those war crimes. You are directly implicated in them.
David Hirsch, an academic at the University of London who has been closely connected to efforts to weaponise antisemitism against critics of Israel, especially in the Labour party under its previous leader Jeremy Corbyn, also tries to play this trick.
He tells Haaretz that antisemitism is supposedly “getting worse” because Palestinian solidarity activists have been giving up on a two-state solution. “There used to be a struggle in Palestine solidarity between a politics of peace – two states living side by side – and a politics of denouncing one side as essentially evil and hoping for its total defeat.”
But what Hirsch is doing is pure projection: he is suggesting Palestinian solidarity activists are “antisemites” – his idea of evil – because they have been forced by Israel to abandon their long-favoured cause of a two-state solution. That is only because successive Israeli governments have refused to negotiate any kind of peace deal with the most moderate Palestinian leadership imaginable under Mahmoud Abbas – one that has eagerly telegraphed its desire to collaborate with Israel, even calling “security coordination” with the Israeli army “sacred”.
A two-state solution is dead because Israel made it dead not because Palestinian solidarity activists are more extreme or more antisemitic.
In calling to “Free Palestine”, activists are not demanding Israel’s “total defeat” – unless Hirsch and Jewish community organisations themselves believe that Palestinians cannot be free from Israeli oppression and occupation until Israel suffers such a “total defeat”. Hirsch’s claim tells us nothing about Palestinian solidarity activists, but it does tell us a lot about what is really motivating these Jewish community organisations.
It is these pro-Israel lobbyists, it seems, more than Palestinian solidarity activists, who cannot imagine Palestinians living in dignity under Israeli rule. Is that because they understand only too well what Israel and its political ideology of Zionism truly represent, and that what is required of Palestinians for “peace” is absolute and permanent submission?
Better informed
Similarly, Rich, of the Community Security Trust, says of Palestinian solidarity activists: “Even the moderates have become extremists.” What does this extremism – again presented by Jewish groups as antisemitism – consist of? “Now the movement [in solidarity with Palestinians] is dominated by the view that Israel is an apartheid, genocidal, settler-colonialist state.”
Or in other words, these pro-Israel Jewish groups claim there has been a surge in antisemitism because Palestinian solidarity activists are being influenced and educated by human rights organisations, like Human Rights Watch and Israel’s B’Tselem. Both recently wrote reports classifying Israel as an apartheid state, in the occupied territories and inside Israel’s recognised borders. Activists are not becoming more extreme, they are becoming better informed.
And in making the case for a supposed surge in antisemitism, Rich offers another inadvertently revealing insight. He says Jewish children are suffering from online “abuse” – antisemitism – because they find it increasingly hard to participate on social media.
“Teenagers are much quicker to join social movements; we’ve just had Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, #MeToo – now Jewish kids find all their friends are joining this [Palestinian solidarity] movement where they don’t feel welcome or they are singled out because they’re Jewish.”
Fancifully, Rich is arguing that Jewish children raised in Zionist families and communities that have taught them either explicitly or implicitly that Jews in Israel have superior rights to Palestinians are being discriminated against because their unexamined ideas of Jewish supremacy do not fit with a pro-Palestinian movement predicated on equality.
This is as preposterous as it would have been, during the Jim Crow era, for white supremacist Americans to have complained of racism because their children were being made to feel out of place in civil rights forums.
Such assertions would be laughable were they not so dangerous.
Demonised as antisemites
Zionist supporters of Israel are trying to turn logic and the world upside down. They are inverting reality. They are projecting their own racist, zero-sum assumptions about Israel on to Palestinian solidarity activists, those who support equal rights for Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East.
As they did with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition, these Jewish groups are twisting the meaning of antisemitism, skewing it from a fear or hatred of Jews to any criticism of Israel that makes pro-Israel Jews feel uncomfortable.
As we watch these arguments being amplified uncritically by leading politicians and journalists, remember too that it was the only major politician to have demurred from this nonsensical narrative, Jeremy Corbyn, who became the main target – and victim – of these antisemitism smears.
Now these pro-Israel Jewish groups want to treat us all like Corbyn, demonising us as antisemites unless we fall silent even as Israel once again brutalises Palestinians.
This essay first appeared on Jonathan Cook’s blog: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
Writing furiously at his typewriter, cigarette in his mouth and the legendary Joan Baez by his side or in the background, a prolific young Dylan tapped into the spirit of a burgeoning counter-culture with his folk-inspired work. Performed with harmonica rack, active acoustic guitar and a distinctive voice defined by a croaky pathos, songs like “Blowin’ In the Wind,” “Masters of War,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” expressed topical concerns, underscored generational schisms and arguably made manifest reconfigured archetypes residing in the “collective unconscious,” to frame the impact in terms of Carl Jung’s psychoanalytic theory. Epitomized by Dylan’s contributions, art of that era appeared to swim in archetypal ideas, present in some form throughout history and with which the emergent culture reinterpreted and became awash.
Exploring all the above decades later as a teenager around the late 90s and early 2000s got me into Dylan’s work. What in retrospect probably turned me into a dedicated, longtime Dylan fan, however, has more to do with the way this one-time, would-be Woody Guthrie reincarnate turned rock idol managed to articulate the depths and contours of the human condition throughout his oeuvre.
Not for nothing did the Swedish Academy award Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. Not surprisingly did Dylan decide not to attend the award banquet, instead opting to furnish a banquet speech comparing himself to Shakespeare.
“I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist,” Dylan wrote in the speech delivered by Azita Raji, then US Ambassador to Sweden. “The thought that he was writing literature couldn’t have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I’m sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: ‘Who’re the right actors for these roles?’ ‘How should this be staged?’ ‘Do I really want to set this in Denmark?’ His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. ‘Is the financing in place?’ ‘Are there enough good seats for my patrons?’ ‘Where am I going to get a human skull?’ I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare’s mind was the question ‘Is this literature?’”
For his part, Dylan noted, he’s often been focused on “life’s mundane matters,” and the details of making art – like whether a song is in the right key, if the studio sound is right, etc., leaving little time or energy to reflect on whether his work ought to be considered literature.
But a closer look at Dylan’s lyricism reveals the power of his poetry (and music more generally) to do what great literature always does, distilling down the omnipresent themes characterizing human struggle and strife, and in so doing offering us prophetic “shelter from the storm,” to borrow the title of a famous Dylan track discussed below.
Dylan recorded a lengthy, lesser-known poem commemorating Guthrie in 1963 that does just that, affirming both human need – as well as grounds – for hope.
And where do you look for this hope that you’re seeking? / Where do you look for this lamp that’s a burnin’? / Where do you look for this oil well gushing? / Where do you look for this candle that’s glowin’? / Where do you look for this hope that you know is there and out there somewhere? / And your feet can only walk down two kinds of roads / Your eyes can only look through two kinds of windows / Your nose can only smell two kinds of hallways / You can touch, and twist and turn two kinds of doorknobs / You can either go to the church of your choice or you go to Brooklyn State Hospital / You find God in the church of your choice / You find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital / I know it’s only my opinion, I may be right or wrong / You find ‘em both in Grand Canyon, sundown
By the end of his seven-minute spoken word tribute, Dylan all but deified Guthrie with his juxtaposition, but in so doing, he also opened up the nature of the divine.
He did this elsewhere in the synesthesia-invoking “Chimes of Freedom,” from “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” an album released the following year. That track conjures up both apocalyptic and revolutionary experiences borne out in what we might envision as “messianic time,” an historical conjuncture which for secular, socialist-humanist theorist Erich Fromm entailed integrating newfound self-awareness and transcending our estrangement from each other that followed the evolution of consciousness. Human’s, the historical narrative goes, underwent transformative expansion in critical self-awareness, akin to the proverbial “fall” when our ancestors ate the forbidden fruit and gained new knowledge, to borrow the biblical language Dylan has often deployed with heady effect.
The imagery in the song is predicated upon the rapturous chimes that Dylan describes and simultaneously echoes on a microcosmic level, prefiguring (perhaps) the feeling of freedom conveyed by the music.
As he put it,
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
The plural pronoun “we” appears significant here, as it can imply shared struggle and solidarity while also suggesting intimate union against the unfreedom of estrangement.
The observers alluded to in the song gaze upon the chords of freedom as we all listen to Dylan recount (in the past tense) a liberatory future hitherto unrealized.
The song strikes me as illustrative of the sort of art described by social theorist Herbert Marcuse. In Marcuse’s view, art ought to remain alienated from established society insofar as the aesthetic dimension can offer sensuous experience of an awe-inspiring world that does not (yet) exist but perhaps could be – a latent world capable of being catalyzed by newfound sensibilities and apperception elicited by art itself, and through its appreciation. That beautiful, heretofore nonexistent world represented through art also offers an indictment of existing reality by point of contrast. In such artwork, “the aesthetic dimension assumes political value,” Marcuse claimed, “especially in the lyrics and music of Bob Dylan.” For Marcuse, it is in the artistic “transformation of reality into illusion, and only in it,” where we find “the subversive truth of art.” Moreover, Dylan’s use of the past tense in “Chimes of Freedom” harkens back to the Marxian theory of “recollection,” which Marcuse took as tantamount to art that recognizes and maybe even excites “a repressed quality” in human beings. “Beauty returns, the ‘soul’ returns,” as Marcuse explained.
In lyrics lamenting incarceration antithetical to the human soul within the verse spelled out above, and elsewhere conjuring emancipatory bells with lines like, “Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed / For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse / An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe,” Dylan is able to “let suffering speak,” as Cornel West would put it, and as Theodor Adorno before him termed a precondition for truth.
The song “Chimes of Freedom” also acknowledges the individual anguish of those “lonesome-hearted lovers,” and the “we” within the narration also ostensibly carries connotations of erotic union intimated elsewhere in Dylan’s oeuvre. The “we” can either position you closer to the artist within the confines of the track, or it can elicit images of you and a significant other witnessing the zenith of this storm “blowing from Paradise,” to borrow the words of another Frankfurt School theorist, Walter Benjamin (who used the phrase to refer to what “we call progress”).
One reading of Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm,” released on the celebrated album, “Blood on the Tracks,” a little more than a decade after the aforementioned “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” has the artist materializing divinity once again, in feminine form. As he explained,
Suddenly I turned around and she was standin’ there
With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair
She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns
‘Come in,’ she said, ‘I’ll give you shelter from the storm’
One could surmise from this that Eros and the realization of the desire it produces are inseparable from salvation. Put in another register, “the personal is political,” to quote the poignant phrase from the second-wave feminist movement that gained traction a few years before that song’s release. Granted, entering into and creating history entails separation. “Now,” as Dylan’s lyrics continue, “there’s a wall between us, something’ there’s been lost / I took too much for granted, got my signals crossed,” which could describe the individual predilections responsible for severing many romantic connections. It could just as easily refer to our innate-yet-cultivated proclivities that have served to sever our connection with source – or, put less opaquely, it could allude to our alienating disassociation from the rest of the organic world of which we are a unique part.
Recollecting once again as part of a message of solace, Dylan continued: “Just to think that it all began on a long-forgotten morn / ‘Come in,’ she said, ‘I’ll give you shelter from the storm.’”
Shortly thereafter, he poses a rhetorical question in the song about the abject suffering endemic to human existence (and exacerbated by existing institutions), before reminding us of the recurring, revelatory riposte.
I’ve heard newborn babies wailin’ like a mournin’ dove
And old men with broken teeth stranded without love
Do I understand your question, man, is it hopeless and forlorn?
‘Come in,’ she said, ‘I’ll give you shelter from the storm’
Using geographical metaphor to convey our condition of estrangement, he proceeds to state he’s “livin’ in a foreign country,” yet he’s “bound to cross the line.” What is more, Dylan articulates that artful tension described by Marcuse, the dialectic between the beautiful ideal and the real expressed through the aesthetic domain, by asserting: “Beauty walks a razor’s edge, someday I’ll make it mine.” And he ends the song with another reference to the recuperation of our divine sensibilities, reflecting, “If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born / ‘Come in,’ she said, ‘I’ll give you shelter from the storm.’”
And after eight decades on earth, he maintains those same sensibilities. Employing simile in “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” a song from his 2020 album, “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” Dylan sings, “My heart’s like a river – a river that sings / It just takes me a while to realize things.” The obvious message? Realization of true potential can sometimes take a while, though it is often worth the wait.
“I’ll see you at sunrise – I’ll see you at dawn,” he went on to say, “I’ll lay down beside you, when everyone is gone.” The line is not unlike a lyric from the late Leonard Cohen, one of the few songwriters on Dylan’s level who died at age 82 in November 2016, shortly after the release of his final album. In “Dance Me to the End of Love” – a love song reportedly and paradoxically inspired by the Holocaust – Cohen crooned, “Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone / Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon.”
Dylan ends that fourth track on his last album with more terrestrial references, a hope expressed in relation to “the gods” (plural) and an affirmation of belief punctuated by a decisive refrain, the ultimate form of embodied mutual aid.
From the plains and the prairies – from the mountains to the sea
I hope that the gods go easy with me
I knew you’d say yes – I’m saying it too
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you
It might be that in those radical acts of giving that we come closest to whatever one takes “God” to mean. “Giving,” as Erich Fromm wrote in, “The Art of Loving,” “is the highest expression of potency.” Although giving in this manner implies vulnerability, it also engenders an “experience of heightened vitality and potency,” a joyous affair, as “in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.” Fromm specifically cites “the sphere of sex” as an example. “The culmination of the male sexual function lies in the act of giving; the man gives himself, his sexual organ, to the woman,” he wrote. “At the moment of orgasm he gives his semen to her.” And woman “gives herself too; she opens the gates to her feminine center; in the act of receiving, she gives.” The “premise” of erotic love, for Fromm, requires that I “love from the essence of my being—and experience the other person in the essence” of the other’s being. If we humans share one essence, as Fromm intimates, love is the expression of that. But that love “is not just a strong feeling—it is a decision, it is a judgment it is a promise,” as Fromm wrote and Dylan averred.
Indeed, Dylan’s poetry put to music has long put forward a prophetic promise. As Fromm explained in “You Shall Be As Gods,” the prophet in the Hebrew tradition “sees the future” not via visions of predetermined events, but rather “because he sees the forces operating now and the consequences of these forces unless they are changed.” And as Dylan informed listeners, admittedly a little tongue-in-cheek, in the single, “False Prophet,” off of the album released last year, he’s “the enemy of treason, the enemy of strife,” he’s “the enemy of the unlived meaningless life,” adding: “I ain’t no false prophet – I just know what I know / I go where only the lonely can go.” But it is arguably only by going to that lonely place, by having “traveled the long road of despair,” and having “met no other traveler there” – as he sang in “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself to You” – that one can emerge ready to realize the inherent value in another. To truly become one with another human being without extinguishing the dignity that resides within each of us, prior solitary despair can be rather generative.
It is that realization that might redeem human history. In Fromm’s heterodox reading of the Old Testament and its tradition, “messianic time” can mark an epoch of “return,” invoking the Judaic notion of “baal teshuvah,” referring to the sinner who repents and becomes “the master of the return.”
Although Dylan’s gospel music in the late 1970s and early 1980s mostly came across to me as preachy and proselytizing, his whole body of work is peppered with symbolic Biblical references and anticipation of a messianic age.
“Don’t have the inclination to look back on any mistake / Like Cain, I now behold this chain of events that I must break,” he sang in “Every Grain of Sand,” in accord with what Fromm describes as the Talmudic insistence on a complete absence of guilt during the “messianic time,” and in tune with a prophetic intention of rupturing what Walter Benjamin called “homogenous, empty time.”
Dylan’s art might not create heaven on earth, but in providing us a little respite from our weariness, some shelter from the proverbial storm, his music has proven durable enough to sustain us through our individual and collective peaks and valleys. I for one can’t wait to see what else he might deliver on the other side of 80.
James Anderson is an adjunct professor working in Southern California. He is from Illinois but now tries each semester to cobble together classes to teach at various SoCal colleges and universities. He has recently taught classes in the Communication Studies Department at Riverside City College and in the Media and Cultural Studies Department at the University of California, Riverside. He also taught a class at the California Rehabilitation Center during the fall 2019 semester as part of the Norco College prison education program. He has worked as a freelance writer for several outlets.
Jason Stanley in the book titled ‘How fascism works: The politics of us and them’ describes fascist politics as characterized by ten aspects. The different headings under which it is discussed include: The mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectual, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and order, sexual anxiety, sodom and gomorrah and arbeit macht frei.
The mythic past:
Fascist politics seeks to build on the idea of a mythical past, which it claims was destroyed with the advent of liberal cosmopolitanism or universal values such as equality. The mythical past which was glorious was characterized by uniformity – religious, racial, cultural, linguistic or all of it. It calls for returning back to this state of glory and uniformity. In the process of glorifying the imagined past – it justifies a patriarchal, authoritarian and hierarchical ideology in accordance with what it calls natural law. The fascist leaders call for replacing history and rewriting history in lines of glorious past.
Propaganda:
Fascist politics relies on propaganda. Propaganda is used under the garb of virtuous ideals behind objectionable ends. The end could be racial, religious, ethnic dominance and supremacy. It uses the idea of freedom and democracy to create spaces for misogynist, racial or communal forces. Once in power they are put to end as they feel that they are the greatest to have arrived. It is concerned with bringing back traditional order. It attempts at destroying rule of law and replacing it with dictats of individual leaders or party bosses. In the name of rooting out corruption of culture, fascist politics attacks and diminishes institutions that might check their power. The fascists reject enlightenment ideals and claim that they want to replace it with natural law.
Anti-Intellectual:
Fascist politics undermines public discourse through attacking and devaluing education, expertise and language. Intelligent debate requires all the three. Fascist politics believes that there is only one legitimate viewpoint, that of the dominant nation. Liberal education is seen as a threat and sought to be replaced with education which glorifies the mythical past. Universities are the centers of dissent and intellectual discourse and it is seen as coming in the way of creating a glorious nation. Hence universities come under attack by fascists. Perspectives which run counter to fascist notions are attacked. It removes the requirement for sophisticated debate.
Unreality:
Fascist politics does not believe in a reasoned debate. It relies on lying and invoking sense of fear and anger. The information spaces are captured and reality is manipulated. Conspiracy theories are floated and form an integral part of its politics and used to create divide of ‘us’ vs ‘them’. It discredits free media as it does not provide space for conspiracy theories. Propaganda on conspiracies is based on imagination and through its repetition it is sought to be made real. Through propagating conspiracy theories, it seeks to create and widen divides.
Hierarchy:
Contrary to ideas of liberal citizenship and equality before law, fascist ideology imposes hierarchies of power and dominance inconsistent with values of equality. It aims to organize society hierarchically. In its principles, equality goes against natural law. In the name of bringing natural law, it seeks to create hierarchy – men over women, members of chosen few of nation over other groups. To create the hierarchy, it uses the language of ‘deserving and undeserving’, ‘hardworking and lazy’ to create distinction between the two. It exploits the anxieties of dominant groups and point’s minority groups as posing threat to their existence. The beneficiaries of traditional hierarchy are convinced that liberal equality is a source of their victimization. This myth is propagated to an extent that those benefiting from hierarchy come to believe in the myth of their superiority. It justifies inequality contrary to ideas of equality which emerged from enlightenment.
Victimhood:
In fascist politics, equality and discrimination are both mixed with each other. Equality of the minority groups is seen as discrimination against the dominant groups. Representation of minority groups is seen as threatening by the dominant groups. Dominant groups are depicted as victims of growing equality, whereby they need to share citizenship and power with minorities. There are movements of both oppressors and oppressed, one justifying inequality and the other fighting for equality. Fascist agenda tries to build on the feeling of loss of dominant status and aggrieved victimhood among dominant groups and use it to create dominance over minority groups. Majority are made to feel victims.
Law and Order:
Fascist politics creates a divide of chosen few who are lawful and those who are not as lawless. The minority groups are sought to be seen as a threat to law and order. The other is categorized as ‘criminals’ with permanent character traits that are frightening to most and they position themselves as protectors. The criminalized group is portrayed as a threat to the fascist nation and a threat to its purity. Rape by lawless is pointed as a thing which can pollute the purity of the dominant group. Hence it calls for protecting the nation’s manhood through maintaining purity.
Sexual Anxiety:
Fascist propaganda sexualizes the threat from the other to the manhood of the nation. The other is represented as those who corrupt the blood of a pure nation through an ‘inferior blood’. It could be racial, religious or sexual minorities. It appeals to patriarchal masculinity. Fascist politics heightens male economic anxiety into fear that one’s family is under existential threat by those who reject structure and traditions. It uses the weapon of threat of sexual assault by the minorities. Through politics of sexual anxiety, it tries to point that equality and freedom can be threats to the dominant majority.
Sodom and Gomorrah:
Cities in fascist imagination are seen as places of corrupted culture and rural areas as places which protect purity. They preserve pure blood by preventing intermixing by outside. Hardworking rural people are depicted as supporting lazy urban dwellers. Urban centers as locations of religious and racial diversity, diversity of customs and lifestyles are rejected. Urban centers are seen as a threat to fascist ideology. Minorities in cities are depicted as parasites who live off the hard work of rural populations. Laziness of minorities in cities is to be cured according to them by pushing them to hard labor. Hard labor could according to fascists purify lazy race.
Arbeti Macht Frei:
In times of crises, fascist politics reserves support for members who according to it represents ‘us’ and not ‘them’. The justification given is that the other is ‘lazy’, lack work ethic and cannot be trusted with state funds as they seek to live off state largesse. The ones lazy are depicted as reaping without sowing. It calls for preventing redistributing wealth of hardworking citizens to ‘undeserving’ minorities outside dominant ethnic or religious community. The ideal of hard work is weaponized against minority populations. It seeks to cultivate stereotypes to propagate its myth of persons belonging to certain races, classes or ethnic groups as being lazy.
The book provides a typology to understand fascism with examples from democratic and authoritarian societies, both from history and contemporary examples. The typology drawn in the book also helps to understand Indian version of fascism.
T Navin is a writer and works with an NGO
The year 1984 saw two major catastrophes in the world’s so called largest democracy; first a brutal massacre of one single community, and then the biggest industrial disaster of its time, thus turning George Orwell’s imaginative year of totalitarianism into reality.
In the first week of November, 1984 thousands of Sikhs were slaughtered across India after the assassination of then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. Then in December, a gas leak at the Union Carbide pesticide plant that left many dead.
Not only were these incidents preventable, but the government remained complicit in both cases.
37 years later, two journalists who tried to make the Indian establishment answerable for these calamities have died due to COVID 19 complications.
Jarnail Singh passed away on May 14, and Rajkumar Keswani died exactly a week later, on May 21, 2021.
Singh had burst into the limelight for throwing a shoe at India’s then home minister, P. Chidambaram during a press conference in 2009.
He had protested after one of India’s most powerful politicians refused to answer repeated questions about attempts to shield those involved in the Sikh massacre of 1984.
At the time of the incident, Singh worked for the Dainik Bhaskar daily paper. Interestingly, Kewani lately worked with the same publication.
Keswani was a whistle-blower, who had forewarned about the accident through his writings much before the gas leak in Bhopal. Unlike Singh, who later went into politics after being sacked from his job, Keswani continued to work as a journalist. Singh was only 48, while Kewsani died at the age of 71.
That the Indian government was responsible for the tragedies which shaped the future of these two men is well documented.
In New Delhi alone, close to 3,000 Sikhs were murdered by the mobs led by the slain leader’s Congress party, with the help of police.
Gandhi’s bodyguards were seeking revenge for the army invasion on the Golden Temple Complex, the holiest Sikh shrine, in June of that year.
The ill-conceived military operation was ordered to deal with a handful of armed militants inside the place of worship. The invasion left many pilgrims dead, and important historical buildings were heavily damaged.
Chidambaram, a minister in the Congress-led government, expressed his satisfaction in 2009 over the “clean chit” given to party leaders involved in the massacre.
Keswani has been writing consistently about the gas leak that killed more than 3,000 people in Bhopal.
His articles on safety lapses at the Union Carbide plant were first published in 1982 for a different newspaper, two years before the tragedy. The one warning about potential disaster was written in June 1984 for another publication, six months before the deadly gas leaked out during the intervening night of December 2-3, 1984.
The Congress government back then had compromised public safety, in spite of warnings about the plant being located near residential areas. Much as in the case of Sikh massacre, it helped the top company officials involved to go unpunished.
The victims of both episodes have been fighting for justice and closure, despite the fact that in the highly polarized environment, an attempt was made to cover up the Bhopal case by falsely blaming it on the Sikhs.
The untimely deaths of Singh and Keswani during these difficult times. when bigotry and corporate control have grown under India’s right-wing Hindu nationalist regime. is a huge loss not only to journalism, but to humanity at large.
Gurpreet Singh is a journalist
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.