Dov and Willy talking – perspectives from the left on political violence, history, colonialism, imperialism, racism, antisemitism, social media and the importance of critical thinking and debate
Participants:
Willy Maley
Dov Osheroff
Moderator:
Mark White
Anti-fascism: Descendants of Spanish Civil War Veterans on their fathers and identity politics
Panel discussion with Janette Higgins, Willy Maley, Dov Osheroff
Our Fathers Fought Franco (Edinburgh: Luath, 2023), edited by Willy Maley
by Lisa Croft, Willy Maley, Jennie Renton and Tam Watters
https://www.luath.co.uk/product/our-fathers-fought-franco
Dreams and Nightmares: Abe Osheroff documentary:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0Xsf-H5cl94
Fighting for Democracy, the true story of Jim Higgins (1907-1982) published in 2020., edited by Janette Higgins
The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
The End of Jewish Modernity, Enzo Traverso
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn
‘Their Song Is Over’ (and other familiar refrains):
Irish Revolutions, Gyrations and Ululations from Lenin to Lennon, Willy Maley
Books, articles and essays by Willy Maley
https://www.gla.ac.uk/services/library/view/author/12587.type.include
I’m speaking today with two extraordinary individuals, Willy Maley, professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow and Dov Osheroff, lifelong scholar, activist, critical thinker and carpenter from Berkeley, California. Besides being brilliant minds, Dov and Willy share something else which is also relevant to this discussion.
They grew up in families with a long and profound commitment to political activism and to political debate. And last but not least, both of their fathers were volunteers in the Spanish Civil War and literally put their lives on the line to fight against fascism. We’re going to touch on a broad
Range of topics that have long been relevant to the left and starting with a basic question about political violence and whether the ends justify the means. Who decides? Who decides whether a cause is morally just and if political violence is justified? And who has the position of absolute truth
To say what’s morally justified and what isn’t? Does it seem like these are more questions of social psychology and identity than of some kind of ethical and moral absolute question or something like that? Just like people justify, they justify what they need to justify to do what they’re going to do
Or what they want to do or what they see as their interests. So this seems super obvious to me whether that’s, you know, some old school like super hard Bolshevik supporting, you know, Stalinist type from the forties or something that’s you know. And so it’s either denial
Or just, you know, or some kind of rationalization or some maybe there’s probably a few other categories of ways of making that work. The main one being denial. It never happened. That’s not true, right? There’s no gulags. Until that doesn’t work anymore, until there’s too much evidence
Or too many people who come and say, well, I saw I actually was in the gulag and I brought these photos or whatever it is, I’m not beat up on the poor Soviets or the Bolsheviks or whoever. But and then it’s like, okay, we got to switch it up
And then there’s some other and then another system of rationalization is deployed like minimalization or some contextualization. Like, well, those people we had to do that. What do you expect? Or mistakes were made or rogue elements? That’s another popular one. That’s like the US military likes to do that.
Oh, you know, that was that was that unit ran amuck, you know, in Vietnam, the My Lai massacre, that was just a few bad, bad apples. They had too much heroin that day. We don’t know what happened to them. I feel like I should. I mean, that’s better anyway.
So that seems like that. Like that. That’s. And then that would be that would tie in with questions of identity, like communal identity and the and the limits of that. Like how big of a group can you be part of And still have a feeling like still
Maybe it has something to do with like primate psychology or something maybe even predates us, but maybe our closest ancestors or other creatures that are like us that at some point the group’s no longer a group, then it’s a different group. Like maybe the way that chimps handle their disputes and their units
And their boundaries that they have and their the violence that occurs at those boundaries. And and that’s why I was getting all pissy about the universe. Was it universalism? Universalism? Yeah, because to me, the racism, racism, the racism of universalism,
I was like, Wow, that seems so backwards because I didn’t have any idea what it was. It was a very specific context and the word was deployed, but I didn’t know that because to me it seemed obvious a long, long time ago that either people could develop.
Either was possible for us as human beings to develop a universalism, not a doctrinaire controlling, you know, hegemonic, universal ism of the right way to be a human, but of a sense of empathy and compassion for basically for everybody. As much as that sounds ridiculous
And therefore some tolerance and respect and concern for every anyone everyone, regardless of you know, and therefore not well, we are at odds because my group and, you know, my you know, my my interests and the people I share them with are opposed to yours. And therefore we’re going to,
You know, diminish your humanity. And like, let’s say, as Israel might be doing today, you know, working very hard or maybe for some people it’s easy to to not see these other people as fellow humans, which is required to do what the IDF is doing. This is psychologically required.
I mean, people are losing their people that don’t feel that way are losing their minds, you know, like the Israelis who are honest and and have some empathy and also, you know, have a reality based understanding of what’s happening in a historical context. They are suffering mental, psychological distress.
I just heard Gideon Lévy, just like he’s not doing well. And that guy’s a veteran. He’s like, this is like really getting hard to me. You know, just to sort of stay. I don’t know what even how to talk about what that difficulty is, but I’ve experienced it
Myself and, you know, in this context here in the States. So that seems like that seems like I mean, I don’t know if I can wrap that up, but like it as long as there are interests that are completely separate as opposed to like, well,
Like my interest is that I want to have shelter and and food to eat. I don’t want to be hungry or exposed to the elements, and I want that for everyone else. That’s an interest everyone could share because I’m pretty sure everybody in the world feels that way.
Like, I don’t think there’s anybody advocating to not have shelter and food to eat for themselves. And so but then it would start to break down when it’s like, well, I want to have access to a certain level of luxury and resource consumption, which is obviously cannot be spread across
Seven or 8 billion people I’ll sort of trail off there. I don’t think that’s trailing off, and I think you’ve mentioned so many things about representation, responsibility, resources. I mean, in 1991, apparently there’s a bumper plate that was reported in the English press or the British press
There was a bumper plate in Alabama or somewhere about Saddam Hussein, and it said, kick his ass, get the gas. And I think in some ways that was putting it very plainly, because the great game as it used to be called around resources.
The British were digging for oil and looking for oil in Nigeria in 1911. And also I think there’s I think there’s a history of pursuit of natural resources, and all kinds of excuses are made in pursuit of those natural resources, gas and oil and so on.
That mean painting, a painting and portraying particular people in particular ways in order to get those those resources, those natural resources. So I think in a way that is a kind of material and economic base there, I would also see that history can help.
And I would give an example of that by saying Germany last week decided it was going to support the Israeli case in The Hague to the International Court of Justice and then the Namibian president came out and reminded Germany of its genocide in Namibia in 1904 to 1908.
And I think that’s very useful because I believe in history. You know, history doesn’t give us all the answers. But Marx said something. He said many things. But one thing that I always remember from my teenage years, early teens, was a nation that enslaves another can never itself be free.
And Marx said that about the English revolution failing because of the massacre of the Irish, which was not what the Levellers and Diggers had in mind when they wanted the freedom in England was you go and kill a lot of foreigners and give their land to your soldiers.
So that wasn’t a that wasn’t a good model, but that a nation that enslaves another can never itself be free applies right across the board. So there’s the tale of no justice, no peace, No, I feel very encouraged by a lot of things there have been so many Israeli citizens,
Young Jewish Americans, rabbis, you know, all kinds of people coming out. And I’m just talking about the Jewish community because there is still a Jewish left. And the Jewish left has a made a fantastic contribution to labor politics, left-wing politics, the Spanish Civil War and so on.
So I would try not to be disheartened. You see various things – all these, you know, Jews for Palestine and so on. Jews for Justice was the organization over here. So I think there’s more to feel good about. I when people say things like the world is standing by and doing nothing,
I would say to them, look at the United Nations. Obviously it’s dysfunctional in all kinds of ways. But the majority of nations within the United Nations, the Palestinian authorities are nonvoting, the entity. But if you look at all the nations, the majority of nations in the world
Support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the majority. NNow, I could say something that won’t work. I could say why don’t the majority of nations suspend those nations that are opposed to a ceasefire either that are countenancing genocide for a period of time until such time as the you know, it’s like saying
You do it in baseball, don’t you send them… and put them on the bench for a while and then the rest of it. But of course, there’s vetoes. Some people are more equal than others. It’s not really a democracy, the United Nations.
But the fact is the majority of nations by a vast majority minus a few, the players, if you like, and their clients I would also say we can speak about Israel, it’s the government in Israel and it’s backed by the United States.
And I think without talking about that and talking about how the United States is arming Israel and there’s actually now inquiries into how much weapons have been given, but also how much weapons they have stored there. So I think it’s complicated and I think a lot more people,
First of all, so I think there’s a lot more disaffection, with this current Israeli government there ever was, that’s my sense. Just now. And social media, I don’t do an awful lot of social media stuff as I told you before, I’m on what used to be called Twitter
I had eight friends and I had to block somebody and hadn’t tweeted. So I’m not the most active person, but I do see what’s out there and I’m aware of the fact that a lot of people, for example, Pathe newsreels, I mean, I know it sounds old hat, a lot of newsreel material
About what Britain was doing in Yemen, Aden and so on 100 years ago before Guernica, forget Guernica. The British were bombing. They were doing specific bombing of tribesmen in what is now Yemen and in Sudan in 1930s and in the 1920s. I’ve actually got lot of articles on the special strategies
They had for bombing civilian populations and so on. So this has been going on a long time, say 100 years, 100 years of relentless bombing by the United States and the United Kingdom, All over the world. Some of it noticed if it happened in Europe, like bombing of Belgrade
At the time of the bombing of Belgrade, Robin Cook in 1999, who later resigned on principle because of the Iraq war in 2003. So this is a British government Labor minister who stood up and said, not in my name in the parliament, British parliament, and resigned on principle because of Iraq. In 2003,
He stood in front of the cameras, the BBC in 1999 and this is what he said. He said, We have identified water and electricity as key choke points of the Milosevic regime. We have identified water and electricity as key choke points of the Milosevic regime.
And that’s 25 years ago when I sat and watched that. And I thought, aren’t water and electricity, not choke points of any regime, but essential infrastructure for civilian life. Do you see what I’m saying? So as soon as you start saying, let’s cut off the electricity,
Let’s cut off the power, you’re denying hospitals you’re denying people. You do that when you blow up bridges, you do that when you blow up hospitals and so on. So I think there’s something that’s deeply morally wrong. And there have been pieces going back 100 years about the bombing of hospitals.
But the ethics and so on of the bombing of hospitals is a long history. So I think I think history can help and I think comparative history can help, Fanon said. The dream of the victim is to become the persecutor, and I think that’s quite profound.
And I think there are people now who recognize that. He also said something a little peculiar. He said the victim wants to have what the persecutor has. He’d like to have those things and preferably with the with the guy’s wife. Yeah, so I think so. So it was a pretty honest statement,
But it kind of lacked a little of that, like feminist decolonization. Well, I don’t think there’s much of that, feminist decolonization, you know, to be honest with you. And I think actually that there’s particular kinds of sexual violence that are bound up
With a lot of these things that happen, and that’s got a complicated history Most of the postcolonial novels that I teach have rape featured in them, which makes it more difficult. I wanted to do that. So so I think how do you wrap your brain around Hamas, for example?
So because that’s the flip side of, you know, we’re talking about Israel, Israel, Israel. But what about resistance against Israel? Like, what are the lines? So how do you… That’s true. That’s true. And this has been going on a long time. So some people would say
That Hamas produced Israel or that Israel produced Hamas And I think about what’s terrorism and responses. I mean, I have worked on the 1641 Irish rising where they overthrew a plantation and supposedly a lot of massacres took place. I mean, a lot of goods were appropriated, that’s for certain.
But I think when it comes to resistance, risings, often people are boxed into a corner they’re deprived of their lives and livelihoods, they’ve left them the most barren piece of land. This is what happened in the 17th century. I’m talking about, they’re subjected to all kinds of, you know, daily tyrannies and injustices.
It blows up and when it blows up suddenly they’ve proved themselves to be the barbarians that the colonists had originally defined them as. So I think it’s difficult. I mean, Hamas, but obviously there’s the Palestinian Authority and so on.
But Hamas came into being and and actually that was a kind of a popular it was based on kind of popular objections to the fact that the Palestinian Authority itself wasn’t doing enough. So and then I saw an interview actually,
I don’t know if this is relevant, but again, many years ago, 20 years ago, I saw an interview, it was on the BBC. It was a young boy saying, first of all, he said, if one of us dies, it’s nothing. If one of them dies, it’s everything.
And then he said, if anybody stands up in a car or in any place and proves himself to be a speaker, I’m talking about Palestinians. So somebody who’s stands up and speaks, they get shot from a helicopter gunship because they’re seen to be a potential leader and they’re assassinated.
I think that systematic policy, and they’ve talked openly about it, assassinate anybody who’s a speaker, who’s charismatic, who’s a leader. If somebody says where is the Nelson Mandela among the Palestinians, they kill off as many of them as they possibly can.
So and what this wee boy ended up saying, he was about 12, he said, who’s going to be left except the people that want to fight? If you take away all the talkers, if you take away all the speakers, all that’s left is people who can fight.
So I think there are desperate measures in desperate circumstances. That’s not to excuse it, but I always think violence is not on the table. Violence is the table. And those of us who pay our taxes to give a standing army that goes all over the world and does things in our name
That we don’t approve of, we have to look at ourselves and say, well, violence is not a choice that we made, we can call ourselves pacifists. I mean, I know a lot of people that argue about what pacifism might look like and what nonviolence may conceivably be, which is very hard
To work out in some some cases and some philosophers have argued about it for years. Jacques Derrida was one of them. He talked about violence in relation to language and so on. And it’s it’s complicated. He’s got a long essay on the Walter Benjamin essay Critique of Violence, talking
About how states take the United States, states founded on violence, founded on violence, then sweep it all under the carpet. No, we’re against violence. We just enforce our… So, in fact, the fact is that states are violent, they’re founded through violence and they continue to operate through violence.
A lot of that violence is offscreen offstage happening in other countries. I mean, as I’ve said, the thing about the British. The British have been actively involved in conflict for over 100 years, some people might say for 400 years, but over 100 years.
In all kinds of theaters in the world overtly and covertly involved. And wars. Wars have been part of the make up and they’ve had their military bases deployed all over the world. They’ve had aircraft deployed all over the world. They’ve had relentless bombing missions.
They spend billions on aircraft that have to be used within a certain period. That’s why they want to test them and try them out. Some years ago, they spent £23 billion the British government on these fighter aircraft. Now they’ve become obsolete after a period of time.
So they have to be used, whether it’s in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, you know, wherever. So I think that’s a situation with the arms industry, with natural resources and the thirst for them, with big corporations and the fact that people, whatever government they vote for, they get a government
Which is in thrall to big business, which is in thrall to the arms industry, and that’s a problem. And that’s why you get Obama. Nothing changes. You get Blair Nothing changes. And with Biden nothing changes. So we’re not getting to change, if you like because there must be a way
Of changing foreign policy in a way which was talked about, believe it or not, by Robin Cook, this idea of an ethical foreign policy. But he’s the one who said we have identified water and electricity as key choke points of the Milosevic regime. Now we have to stop thinking of water and electricity
As things we can cut off to destroy civilian populations. It’s siege warfare. And it’s there’s an ancient form, but it’s utterly repellent and it’s happening today. Does it doesn’t it seem to me that the rules of war and war crimes and Geneva’s Geneva Conventions and all this stuff, I mean, I’m
Not saying… I appreciate Geneva Conventions, but it always felt to me completely absurd too, like what are we talking… like the rules of war, like the right way to I mean, I was like, this is kind of absurd and and the moral objections to incorrect war making.
While I completely agree when I hear these stories, I’m totally horrified. I think what is the what is the version where it’s not like like, like, for example, like how many militaries are volunteer armies? Like how many soldiers in human history have not been conscripts if theyre not economic conscripts? Yeah, yeah.
Especially if you include, like contextual forces and, and maybe even like even with the IDF, like, I’ve known a couple ex-soldiers and they’ve confirmed what I’ve read, which is if you do not in Israeli society, which is I mean, they have mandatory they’re conscripts, they have mandatory service there, but it’s also widespread.
And everybody, you know, everyone does it, not really everyone. But then if you don’t want to do that, you’re socially fucked. And if you and also not just that when you participate, like my friend Aron, who lives just up the street, he was a tank commander
Up on the north in some of the battles there in Lebanon and stuff. And he said that the fact that, you know, he’s smart, he’s like he’s just he’s got a really good like he’s a charismatic guy. Like people would follow him. He’s like, clear eyed.
And so he became a commander of a whole tank… I don’t know what what scale, but he was a tank commander of like some unit of tanks, which is a mid high level thing to achieve for not a professional soldier over there for like a you know, just during his service.
And he said this opened all kinds of doors to him as a you know, if he stayed in Israel to go to go and get a job, they go they ask about your service right away. And if he says, oh, yeah, well, I served this and that,
We were fighting Hezbollah, blah, blah, blah. And they’re like, Wow, okay, well, look, I think we got our guy here. So anyway, that’s sort of tangent, but who like, who’s willingly I mean, we’ll get back to the Spanish Civil war of course, because those guys, those guys were volunteering.
But a lot of the people, they were fighting weren’t. like, I don’t I’m not sure all the Spaniards that were fighting for Franco were all like pure volunteers. I don’t think that would be fair. I used to ask my dad that, like, what gave you the right to travel
Across the world and point a gun at some Spanish kid, who grew up in a village and thinks he’s defending his family. Or Moroccan. Moroccan kid. Right, right, exactly. For a mercenary. But obviously someone might…the economic conscript. Anyway, that’s a divergence. These are good points. I don’t think that was a divergence.
I think the point is the idea of legality. Like why? Why wouldn’t if NATO’s going to go in to Serbia, you know, do some campaigning there, they would want to create like what isn’t the main the main idea is you want to overthrow a government or reigning power
By creating it, making it untenable for it to rule. And, you know, as long as the people are like allegiant and going to stick it out, the average person, you have to keep decimating conditions until they become unlivable and people go, We won’t. We’re not going to obey our orders anymore.
We’re not going to show up like in like in Germany or like in Japan. I was just listening to this author who was being interviewed about describing all the things before the atomic bombings. So the firebombing campaign, which I was largely ignorant of,
And they burned every major city in Japan, worked their way down to secondary cities with firebombing until they were running out of targets. And they preserved Nagasaki and Hiroshima for potential targets for the atomic bomb. They actually had to set them aside because they worked through
All the similarly populated cities with firebombing campaigns. And I’ve heard of Tokyo, but I hadn’t heard of every other place. And and yet there was still like a will to resist there. I mean, I don’t know. You know, there’s still like least political will, like from the emperor
And stuff. And it’s just like it’s kind of it’s hard to sort out. I mean, the morality of that for me is just like, yeah, if you firebomb civilian populations, you’re a fucking douchebag, you know, whatever the guy’s name was, I forget the guy who’s in charge of that LeMay,
I think his name. But yeah, Curtis LeMay. Curtis LeMay. Right. But at the same time, if your job is to get a very aggressive nationalist project like Japan to come to suspend its extraterritorial ambitions, I don’t know. But what if people I mean, it’s an interesting…
That’s a really important point because that this is actually that was about an unconditional surrender so it was about terms of surrender. I agree. Yeah, of course there’s that. Go back to the Versailles Treaty and what you could see as if you if you humiliate your enemy.
But if the point is to humiliate your enemy and to completely as as just at the moment you want to utterly disarm and utterly annihilate your enemy, that is possibly sowing seeds of future displaced issues so I think I think that’s one of the issues I would point to. The enemy
In Spain Franco was allowed to carry on because of all kinds of reasons, because of Gibraltar, because of strategy, because of keeping the communists out of Europe and so on. So I think all that history is is complicated. The savage, the savage there was savagery in all kinds of quarters.
They but I think I think that’s one thing I would say, as in asking if you’re asking for an unconditional surrender and there’s a particular national character that suggests that’s going to be difficult. And of course, they were firebombed. But just as they firebombed Dresden,
You have to separate the things that what seem to be necessary in order to save lives and end the war quickly. And then what is just simply, you know, revenge and spite and a desperate attempt to utterly crush somebody as a as any kind of potential. And then, of course, that
Country may go in to compete in other ways that are not military. And to save a lot of money on its own militarily, as for a period. Germany enjoyed great prosperity after the war, greater prosperity than than Britain, even now because it didn’t have the crumbling infrastructure and the terrible bill, the
Cost of weaponry and wars and so on. Right. Well, that’s but I remember looking up in some debates with my European wife, discussions let’s call them discussions, and I’m like every single I mean, there’s always an exception, but that for simplicity’s sake, every single wealthy European country, if you look at their export
And what they trade with the world to enhance, you know, because they don’t they have only have their land base and there’s limits there. It’s weaponry. You know, it’s one or two. Like it’s including like my Swedish relatives. And they love to like go on and on
About how they’re the greatest, you know, like they have this sort of like, smug, moralizing attitude about how they’ve created a lovely life for themselves without without all the heinous imperial behavior of the United States or other. You know, And I’m like, really?
Like, whoa, what about all those weapons you guys send everywhere? Like what? That’s and you trade on these terrible terms to, let’s say, the global South where there’s, you know, client states, for lack of a better word, who need these weapons to dominate their populations and keep the flow of resources
Heading to Sweden, among other places. And like this is all just like pushed under the rug. So I pretty much like, is there anybody who’s materially well off, any culture, country, what nation, whatever that’s materially what all of that is it completely involved up to its neck
In the standing violence or the open violence that we call warfare. And I say, no, there isn’t. And that all the people in those countries, including this one, who complain about the poor division of resources like in the United States, like the growing wealth gap and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
Or the racial disparities of wealth, which are very notable, you don’t hear those people talk about, well, if we actually got rid of the whole thing, where were we as a group are completely exploiting like Salvadorians or, you know, whoever grows our coffee and then we’d have a lot less to divide up.
Like, that’s never the discussion. I mean, there’s exceptions to this, but it’s always there’s a line drawn around and this is this is the pie and it’s unfairly divided and kind of like what you’re saying, Mark, what Fanon says, like, you know,
I want to I’m jealous of those people who are above me in this structure, Right. I’m jealous of my the wealthy people that live in the neighboring community and send their kids to private school and get to learn other languages and go on ski trips in Switzerland or whatever. But I’m not
Too often. except in very vague and self comforting moral terms, talking about the people that are serving my level of material wealth, which is not sustainable. If we divided, if we spread it around the world, and said everyone’s going to get about this big piece of the natural resources.
Well, I go down, even though I’m relatively a victim in this society, I’d live at an even more modest level that’s not discussed. Which brings all that stuff to me back to this, like anthropocentric everything being focused on human beings. But if you talk about resource base
And the decimation of the natural world and you know, there’s four times as many humans as there was when my dad was born, and that was just about the, you know, it was going on long before he was born. This incredible ramping up of numbers of people and per person impacts
On the actual biosphere. Then all this stuff to me becomes it’s like a netherworld of like it’s doesn’t make any sense. And of course you could say that just looking at Israel and Palestine, there’s a physical space there. There’s way more people there than there was in 1948
Or 1900, like vastly more numbers of people there. But there’s a there’s a there’s a resource base, there’s a you know, they always talk about that like the Israelis like stealing Palestinian water. Right. Which is clearly true. But the numbers of Israelis have grown of citizens of the state of Israel
Theres way more people there. and the number of Palestinians has grown of course, too. And so that’s not like of course, they’re fighting. They’re fighting. The Israelis want to take that space. It kind of reminds me of what Barbara Fields says about the slave trade,
She says that slave traders didn’t hate Africans, they weren’t racist. They didn’t care about any this. They wanted free labor. It wasn’t out of spite. They weren’t like, let’s go sail our boats all over the place and grab these people and do all this stuff. It’s like, yeah,
They want or they want to trade free labor to people who want to buy, you know, buy these, you know, create this product and then sell it. And then, of course, in order to justify that socially and morally they had to create a system of race that made it make sense,
Right, that these weren’t people and this is exactly what the Israelis are doing now, but they’re not doing because they hate Palestinians, although they clearly hate Palestinians at this point. They’re doing it because they want the stuff, they want the space.
And you can’t have the space if other people are there, you know? Yeah, but there’s that. But there’s not need to to have the other in order to feel united in your own group. I mean that’s just that’s just a but but don’t you think it’s a human compulsion.
But if there was there was just 500,000 people living in Palestine as there once was, I think. And and so there was like tons of space and there was no modern, giant cities without, you know, resource intensive lifestyle to… Yeah, early Zionism. You’re describing when people are totally getting along,
You know, they were hanging out and they were going like, hey, you want to come come to the mosque this week? We were having this special party and, you know, you guys get come and it’s pretty cool. We have a special food. You like it? It’s kind of like this special thing
You guys like to make that other time of year or whatever. There wouldn’t be this…at people’s throats. They might even have like a regional identity that transcended these religious or cultural distinctions and be kind of like, you know, still under one kind of ‘we’re people from this area or we’re neighbors’
Or some kind of identity, which apparently was going on quite a bit for a long, long time. Neighborly relations until well, now we want a whole lot of people to be here. And where are they going to live and where’s their water source, where’s they’re from, You know,
How are we going to grow food for them and how are we going to create an economy that gives everyone a role and gives them a forward path to greater prosperity and blah, blah, blah, modernity and industrialism. And then, well, now we have a problem. You know, now we have to displace people,
But it’s not out of… And then the hatred and the othering is the needed psycho social psych psychological mechanism so people can do this. You can organize the effort around the globe, the glue. Right. And also as a defense mechanism, too,
Like my dad used to sit around and go like, you know, you just, you know, no good German, but a dead German or stuff like this, he said, or Nazis or whatever. You talk about this, and I’d be like, Dude, I know people with Nazi tattoos
It’s like I’m growing in the seventies in Venice. They don’t know what the fuck it means, but they know it’s like outlandish and taboo and they have a intuitive sense of it. You know, they didn’t know anything about the war, and I’d just
Be like, these are, you know, this is like the Spanish kid you’re shooting at who’s from some fucking village in Andalusia and doesn’t know anything that does not have the capacity to understand what they’re participating in, not the way we might critique it, at least. And so how can this be?
I mean, you might have to defend yourself. Okay, But how can you possibly buy into the idea that this is you’re like at some essential level, this is your enemy, like a German. A German is your enemy. Like, well, where did this German come from? So you’re so you’re giving the Marxist
Class based analysis of I guess just or just like if, if, if. Yeah. Or like material. Like the material. Yeah. I think it all comes down to the material reality. I don’t think people would have any interest in fighting with anyone
If they didn’t have any conflict over material, the material base of life. I think people would be like, I’m just going to go catch a fish and take a sun bath. You know, like I’m not interested in punching anybody in the nose.
You know, I think if you if if they were more aware of it, because I think that there is ignorance, take Scotland, for example, Scotland exports more whiskey to France than France exports brandy to the world. That’s that Scotland’s export is whiskey. And there are some people in Scotland who might say
‘’isn’t it wonderful”? You know as well as whiskey, we’ve got salmon, we’ve produced all this oil that’s kept the United Kingdom afloat for 50 years, it’s all good. But of course, we’re also the host for the nuclear bases, we’re the host for American warplanes,
We’re the host for all kinds of war games that take place in the large stretches of our country that’s barb wired off. that we can’t go near, So, our water is poisoned by uranium or whatever? So I think you can you can always say
What is it we’re exporting? What are we importing and what are we making? And I think that was a very important point you made about the presumed innocence of countries where the citizens of those countries, whether it be Sweden or Denmark or Norway or Scotland,
They’re quite ignorant. They’re aware of the good things because they get told that and so on. But they’re not they’re unaware of the things that their economies, their governments and so on are involved in. But I think you to remember about ideology because it’s not
That we need certain things, it’s that we’re told we need certain things. So the way that mobile phones are produced, for example, or computers, that capitalism chases cheap labor and it doesn’t just chase cheap labor, it chases nonunion labor, it chases underage labor, it chases child labor all over the planet
So that it can have a reserve army of unemployed at home. Well, it’s got these people making clothes in Bangladesh or wherever else. So I think that they’re digging out the earth to get the cobalt and so on. So I think those things that go on under the eyes of
But not to the cognition of the populations in the supposed first world and I think a lot of people are just ignorant or lazy. We’ve got two levels of citizenship. I mean, I’ll often say to people things they don’t like. Like I think the United States and the United Kingdom
Have two of the most ignorant electorates on the planet, because when I go to other countries and talk to people, whether it’s Morocco, even people who live in countries that you may not regard as particularly democratic when you go there, people
Seem to understand their own history and have a critical perspective on it. They understand that government have a critical perspective on it and they know more about the world. Something somebody said once and this was a hundred years ago, they said Russians know more about England than any English person knows about Russia.
So people in other countries in the world have historically taken an interest in the major powers, as they call themselves, and they’ve tried to educate themselves and know about their history. I remember meeting some guys in the street in Tangier who started talking about
Oil and history and OPEC and all kinds of things, in ways that I never heard people in the streets of Glasgow just suddenly come out with this understanding of their own history until we started to get the independence movement some years later, 20 years later.
So I think there is an ignorance at work and that’s why I say I believe in education, I believe in history, I believe in people learning those basic things, like if you enslave another nation, another people, and I know it’s hard
Because where do you start from it’s hard to say there is a history here. And I think one thing that this current conflict in Gaza has brought out with the bombing is people are trying to educate themselves. It’s not always easy. And I think it’s obviously it’s conflicted.
It’s not the answer because you won’t get you wouldn’t get the government, the government of Israel, and Netanyahu suddenly saying, hmm I see your point, now I see this I see what we’re talking about here, I’m getting it now. So I think that situation of…But I still
Believe in education because I work in the 17th century. I take a long view. So I find it hard to get too depressed about things because I say yes, it’s true. revolutions have failed. They’ve petered out into imperial displacements of classist colonialism as a displacement of class struggle, that’s exactly what it is.
And this seems to be a pattern that happened with the English Revolution, it happened with the French Revolution, it happened with the Russian Revolution. This is something that happens that there are these kind of conflicts. I thought the thing you shared the Rosa Luxembourg thing,
It was very good because I think it was very good just to look at that mess and say you can deal with things in a kind of abstract, but as soon as you’re in to the dirt and the mess of war, where you’ve got all these different conflicts
And you’ve got these manipulative machinations of big corporations and other governments deliberately trying to sabotage anything that looks like a democracy anywhere in the world that might represent a threat to them. And that’s the way Britain and France looked at Spain in the 1930s. They looked
And said, well, if it’s a choice between fascism and communism, what is it we want? The fear was of communism in Europe, especially with how they then saw the Soviet Union. So I think it’s I think it’s complicated, there is mess. But I do still believe that
There’s also edu … and I think we’re in a moment of enlightenment. I mean, it’s strange to say, butI because of the way the you… you don’t spend enough time on Twitter. Yeah, I do. I do. As Dave Chappelle says, Twitter is not a real place and it’s not called Twitter anymore.
You don’t understand the world. You’d understand the world better. I mean, I love what you’re saying, but I, I think about the idea of education, which kind of implies some kind of progress and direction. And everything you’re saying makes so much sense. But then I see how it actually plays out.
So on the one hand, you have all these young people who get manipulated into into joining armies and, you know, shooting other people and committing the worst crimes. So the 18 year old young men and then you see this whole generation of young people who are are being
Who are learning, like you say, you know, about what’s going on. And they’re saying from the from the river to the sea. And they feel like that’s they’re expressing this moral imperative. You know, that that and that’s a great that’s a great thing. But but they don’t have any historical context.
So in there they just jumble all these things into their in their mind. So I hear a lot of it is on Twitter, but there’s along with condemning Israel for its genocide, which is correct. There’s this really deep need among this whole, as I see it,
A generation of young people or young people who consider themselves leftists to see Israel as uniquely evil because it gives them some feeling of it gives them some feeling of perspective. You know, like I stand here as, you know, somebody in the United States or in Europe, and I have this moral perspective.
It has to do with what I’ve learned about colonialism and imperialism and Israel. You know, it’s like this this paradigm of evil that is unlike anything that ever came before. And I hear some of the smartest commentators making that kind of case, like smartest as in they’re not
Necessarily historically smart, but they’re just super smart. Right. I think you’re making an excellent point, and that’s what somebody would say antisemitism is when you single Israel out and speak about it in a way that you wouldn’t about another occupying, invading or another power, another settler colonial society
Or any other government doing any other kind of action. And I agree with that. I mean, 40 years ago when I was studying politics at University of Strathclyde, I told some friends were not in the university that I’d been asked to do a project on a fascist country and I picked Britain,
And that made them laugh. It made my non-university friends laugh. It wasn’t true. I wasn’t doing an essay on fascist Britain, although it would not have been wrong to do so. But I think you’re getting carried away and you’re now at risk of generalizing and universalizing.
And I’ll tell you something about Twitter that’s important. There’s a six part series on television that was on Netflix about Prince Harry. Now you may think what’s Prince Harry and Meghan got to do with anything, You know, in episode five of that, and my wife and I watched it. We were riveted.
In episode five, there’s a discussion about the racist Twitter storm, about Meghan that emanated into the tabloids and so on. But the racist Twitter storm. And there was a very interesting black American who appeared on the screen, man, and he worked for an organization
Called Sentinel, and their organization looked into Twitter and how it worked. And this is what he said. He said that there were something like two dozen accounts who were behind the 700,000 tweets. Now, think it is important to remember Twitter’s not a real place. There’s a lot of fakery and provocation.
There’s a lot of people that will say things. And that’s the opposite of what you think they’re saying, So I think there is a risk. I mean, it’s perfect propaganda. So I’m not saying it’s all psyops or whatever, but I would I would be distrustful of Twitter
There is another kind of Twitter and I will only go on as a kind of a troll, as it were, only look at a look at the things and I see that people are putting up Pathe newsreel. I saw two little pieces of footage on Twitter.
One was Harry Truman, about the founding of Israel saying the Zionists want the world that we can’t give them it, but that was him. He was coming out and Harry Truman himself was speaking and saying that the Zionists want to have more, but we can’t give them it.
And then I saw a clip of Joe Biden some time. I think it’s supposed to be the seventies or something. And Joe Biden was saying if Israel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it because we have a stake in that region or we want to have a stake in that region.
And I thought these are absolutely astonishing things and they’re not things that are real. I mean, they’re in the public domain, obviously, because they’re video clips, you know, unless they’re deep fake or AI. So I think what there’s another aspect to Twitter and that is that like it happened with Namibia and Germany.
Twitter is also a place where suddenly thousands of people know about German atrocities in Namibia this week who didn’t know last week. So I think as well as all those and I knew they’re terrible I mean especially around the transgender issue, the misogyny, the death threats, the rape threats
That women get, the terrible, terrible bullying and hate. And a lot of people have been frightened off Twitter for those reasons. Really nasty stuff goes on. And I know that even without… I mean, I don’t need to dwell on Twitter to know some of the poisonous, toxic,
Horrible, nasty stuff and people even that you wouldn’t expect to utilize. They’re responsible for some of this discourse. So as real, the real people who are really responsible for this, who should know better. But it’s like Twitter does something to people, mashes up their brains and people also go on angry.
So it’s bit like road rage. Social media rage is like that, it escalates. And if you’re not part of it, if you’re not in there you don’t realize what’s happened. There was a famous case of a British Labor leader called Neil Kinnock. And during an unsuccessful election campaign, he was taken into
An arena with 10,000 people waiting to hear him. But the people with him made a mistake. Fatal mistake. They took him through the crowd. They took him through the crowd before his speech and this crowd was so ecstatic and so over the top and so, so furious
About conservative rulers that by the time he got to the podium, instead of speaking, he just went ‘all right.’ All right. Oh, and everybody watching on television thought this guy is off his head. What’s going on here? But he was responding to the hysteria and delirium that he had just passed through.
And I see it on Facebook, because Facebook is about like a garden party and Twitter’s like a rave and something somebody comes off Twitter raging and comes on Facebook and it’s like your drunk uncle. arriving at the garden party, at his party. So I think there’s something about that environment.
I would also say to you don’t believe, everything you see on Twitter, that’s the first thing I would ask But my problem with that is Twitter is what you say. But there’s also a connection between what we see on Twitter and let’s say, well, what we see in elite universities.
And because it’s a generational thing and those people in the elite universities, they’re the next leaders of our system. Well, so however you however you analyze the system or understand it, you know, it’s neoliberalism and that’s the new hegemon… These people in the universities who are…
Going back to Palestine and Gaza, since that’s the big issue on the plate that’s kind of bringing all this stuff out. You know, they’re the ones who are just learning, even though they’re in these like, you know, super elite. this ivory tower world and
They’re being subject to their there I don’t know how to put it. They’re like they’re blowing all their moral and emotional energy in this, in this, in this cause without really understanding what’s going on. And I have everything that you were both talking about before, the real issues that are driving things…
But do you think do you think that do you think that’s true? Because I think, first of all, all universities have got an issue my university for example was part charity, part private, part private institution, part public institution. So I think universities have got a complex history.
For Thomas Hobbes, in the 17th century, universities were the seedbed of the revolution. Universities were. The problem is we had all the people getting big ideas about change and things. Universities were to blame for revolutions. Now everything’s changed over time. And if you’ve got a university like Harvard
That takes a billionaire in as a student because it’s money before merit, and then that billionaire becomes a graduate, and then that billionaire decides. So they don’t become a billionaire because of Harvard. They are a billionaire. They buy the degree at Harvard.
They move away from Harvard and then they come back and say don’t teach that. Sack this person, do that. You’re hoisted on your own petard. I mean I think the fact is universities aren’t independent, intellectual institutions, but I would also say that I would be fairer than you. and say
There are a lot of people in universities, who work in universities in different areas, whether it’s international relations, arts, politics, other areas who do have a political view, but they are not always, always able to voice it. And I think one thing that’s happened the way in which this particular conflict
From October the seventh, this episode that has blown up is that a lot of people feel have a build up of rage and they feel it’s been bottled. And I think that just happened to have come at the moment of social media.
And I think that a lot of outpouring and I think a lot of that that can become hysteria, that can become desperate, that can be absolutely. Yes, I would say it can be. And that can give rise to antisemitism. It can give rise to generalizations and to hate speech and
Anti really factually incorrect statements as well. i’m sure it can. On the other hand there is also a danger that you characterize some of that material, that you see that as being the whole picture. And luckily because I’m not on but the American universities… I’m not safe from Twitter.
My brother’s not on Twitter. But he’ll send me now and again a really interesting interview with the son of a Holocaust survivor talking about Palestine in a very intelligent way in a 20 minute interview, and that’s a link that’s been posted on X, or he’ll send me some other exchange.
Or he’ll send me all the videos that open up about the history of Yemen and so on, or on Namibia. So I think that is another side to things. And I think obviously you can go in there and you can go straight into the dark side, straight into the,
You know, the really unpleasant stuff. And I know it’s there. I’m not unaware, I’m not ignorant or innocent, but I think that also out there is a lot of information and I think people are also getting you know ok it’s a crash course but they’re getting a crash course in history
Some of these people. That’s my claim. I’m Pollyanna, I’m on steroids. I want to be optimistic. So I you see that as there is good stuff out there. You just have to get to the good stuff and you get to the good stuff.
If you don’t follow the algorithm in a particular way, then you can kind of navigate through X, and what you’re getting is, is more dissent intelligent dissent. You know, I think I did generalize about universities because I’m really thinking about a certain kind of private elite university in the United States. Yes.
And they’re like they’re nurturing the next generation of people who are going to be in positions of power and this situation in Gaza, as an example, and I would say identity politics in general, have allowed them to blow off their steam, their energy, you know, their moral righteousness in a way that’s harmless
To power. And that in a few years they’ll be at Goldman Sachs, like working along, you know, they’ll join the ranks and it’s a it’s their their… But not if the doners have their way their energy and idealism is being, you know, kind of hijacked. And I think that’s
That’s the part that I see on Twitter, how there are always there’s a core group that’s ideological and they know what they’re after. And then there’s people who are just kind of seeing things on the surface, and they’re morally outraged, rightly so. And they don’t see how their rage is manipulated, in fact,
Diverted, diverted into these harmless, harmless directions. I just want to and I mean, we’ve talked about this before, Mark, and I was kind of you know, I tried to investigate what you were saying and it’s obvious it’s so obvious to me… Investigate which part? The question of i’m sorry, yeah
The role or what extent or even if at all, of antisemitism has anything to do with the with the discourse around around what’s going on Palestine and and it’s so obviously true. It’s just so patently obvious that antisemitism has a big piece of this
And and it’s not it not in the sense that people express outrage at the at the violence perpetrated by the state of Israel. That’s not there’s nothing antisemitic about that. Hopefully natural to anybody who has a heart, you know. But but the particular framing and the analysis and the sort of
Contextualizing and this stuff quickly starts to have this flavor. And I’ve sat around thinking like, why are these people all like, where? Why, what? Why would they even where would their antisemitic sentiments come from? And I don’t think it’s the typical ones of like, let’s say,
You know, Nazi or neo-Nazis or something that have bought into some secret government stuff or the elders of Zion or the, you know, manipulating us or something, all those kind of fantasies. It’s just it’s okay to do it. And so I can indulge my my personal need to be morally righteous,
Which is entirely about managing my own psychology. That’s what it is to me. It’s not complicated why people go in for this stuff. They go in for it at the same way people like to take showers. It feels good to wash yourself off,
Get the dirt off, feels good, you feel fresh, you know, put on some clean clothes and you go, wow, you know, I’m feeling good, I’m looking good people want to wash off. And that’s where a lot of the moral righteousness comes from. Because anybody who lives in, say, the United States.
Like I’m listening to a let’s say, a young Palestinian-American, someone born in the states to either parents or grandparents who were, you know, dispossessed or fled or whatever, you know, left probably under duress. So but they’re living in the United States. They have a job in the United States.
They have this community is very similar to Jewish Americans, very focused on education. So it’s a highly educated population and they honor that stuff and they pursue it. And the kids do well, you know, And so they they do they do fairly well in the United States, of course, for cultural reasons. And
And so they have a university education. They’re working at some nonprofit or something, and they’re carrying on about settler colonialism and the Zionist project, all of it true, not a word that they are now their entire lives since the day they’re born, a participant
In a much greater crime called the United States of America. If you’re interested in settler colonialism and the problem is it presents and the terrible, terrible consequences that it makes inevitable for people in the periphery or at the center during the the settler times,
Then you can’t, as a citizen of this country, get up and start. You could get up and talk about it with great conviction, but you can’t get up and start pointing fingers. You can’t. That’s so disconnected. It’s unfathomable. So why would someone do that?
Because it’s intellectually bankrupt and it’s so clearly that way. And I think it’s it’s motivated by a psychological mechanism. Right, too. I want out of this. I want to be on the outside looking in on, you know, on the terror, on the these dark behaviors, right? bombing of civilians, for example.
I don’t want to be the taxpayer who’s funding that. But they all are just as I am. I mean, they might say to me about blah, blah, blah, you know, it’s the say I was a typical American Jew, which, by the way, Willy
Just so you know, my whole life I’ve been talking shit about Israel and I just got ex-communicated, to use the Catholic Church term, over and over again. you know, like I barely can get my dear father, who was super clear headed about who’s like the bully and who’s the victim.
But he had trouble with Israel, like he’d get kind of muddled. He wasn’t like a Zionist, but he’d get muddled. It would tangle him up because he was 30 years old. When the Holocaust reached its peak. There’s a context to everything but I think… Go ahead.
But I think you’re saying context and comparison, you could say the Namibian protocol is part of that understanding that there’s been a history outside of the history of the Second World War and understanding that that there’s a history in the United States now.
And you’re absolutely 100% right to say that people are looking in one direction and when you look in one direction and you single out one state that that is a kind of exceptionalism and you have to be aware of the fact that the United States has a whole history of global colonialism.
The second world war is more than the Holocaust. This is about the world and that space that Africa and Namibia are suddenly on. Right. What’s going on, which is really interesting that they’re leading in that sort of as on the nation state level,
I, I so I’ve tried to answer this question my whole life. Why would why would let’s say when I was in my twenties at university times, I couldn’t find a single person that could tell me anything about the Vietnam War. And literally there were still tons of unexploded bombs.
It was just over. I was in junior high when it was actively going on and no one knew anything about it. They didn’t know even things like roughly, how many people died in the you know, it’s more than just in Vietnam. But people have no idea. It’s good. I wouldn’t fucking know.
So I would think about why would someone want to know that? There’s a lot of things you could know. You’ve only got so much time to know, stuff you can know about some random sports shit or, you know, people got all kinds of knowledge, deep knowledge, you know, who’s the poker
Champion of the world, which? Are you talking about five card draw or Texas Hold’em? People know crazy things, but they don’t know about that. And I thought well well right. People even say, well, why do you even care? And I’d be like, You’re such an asshole. But then I think, well,
If I take their question more broadly, why do you want to know? Well, they’ve got a point. I’ve been accused of being self torturing my whole life, basically along these lines of why would you torture yourself with that? So why would people want to fixate on Israel
As opposed to just focus on it because it’s a legitimate moral calamity but fixate on it. Well, I think it’s about this. I think it’s like a displacement technology, right? Like, I want to be rid of something. So I’m going to put it there and
The thing that people want to be rid of is the same as my Swedish relatives. What do they want to be rid of? The terrible angst and depression and self-loathing and all kinds of complicated and unmanageable psychological conditions that come with being honest and fair
About what’s going on and where your bread is buttered. And similarly, as in this country, I’ve been to lots of talks. I got sort of like attacked at one where I where I got up. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with Michael Parenti, but it’s really great artist, thinker.
He’s giving a talk here in Berkeley this is nineties, early nineties maybe. And I went to it and he was talking about Empire and why? Why is the United States involved in Central America or Iraq or all these places? And he kept talking about us and them.
So like the them was the militarists, the elites, the corporate elites, the political elites and their interests. And then us and us was the people in the room like the Berkeley leftists, I guess. Right. Or whatever. And so I got up at question time and I said, okay, like, I truly appreciate
Everything you said, but it seems to me like there’s a few more categories. And one of the categories is the people we’re all going to step over on our way home after this wonderful lecture tonight to go back to our warm houses with our refrigerators full of food.
You know, to think about what we’ve learned and, you know, I started saying something that I shouldn’t have said, mocking the audience there. Right. And and he got flustered. The crowd started yelling stuff at me. Someone took my stuff. When I went back to my seat, my shit was gone.
And I was like, seriously, guys? And people are like, ‘’get out of here.” But but my point being, I was agreeing with what he was saying And I was glad people were there. And I do think on one level people did care about these things of
Like the empire and the friendless nature of it and the US in particular, but they didn’t want to account for the benefits that accrue to them as you know, they’re at the center and the Empire is largely about the flow of resources to the center.
And these arguments about who gets what at the center are important. But if you’re not going to discuss the disparity of just that accumulation and what’s required for it to happen, then you need to project that somewhere else. So If I understand you
What your sort of underlying point is, it’s kind of similar to, let’s say, the way Germany approaches their guilt over the Holocaust. And so there is a strong need to imagine that it was a very specific evil that was perpetrated by a very small group of really bad people.
That’s not us. We’re not all complicit. So there’s this need to avoid our own complicity and to feel you’ve atoned in some way And so let’s ignore the fact that this evil is actually a universal trait true among humans. And so the only way to find a way out of
It is to understand that because if you if you try to reduce it to the acts of some bad people or some bad group or some particular bad ideology, then you ignore the complicity of everybody, the banality of the whole thing. And it will just come back.
You’re having it’s but I would say for Germany, the end result is the opposite of what they’re seeking, which is that idea of never again. Well, I think that by ignoring the fact that it was all of them, it was all of them.
It was all of us that were complicit that went along. It happened because of everybody. And they did it before. and they did it before in Namibia, because the US has done it and everybody has done it. And history didn’t start in 1933 or stop in 1945
And I think there is a problem that these things have happened before, genocide has happened before, genocide has happened, since. And I think if you get caught up in a sense of the one and only ness of this and the singularity and so on and the absoluteness, you lose sight of that.
I mean, Dov mentioned Vietnam. Vietnam was televised and mediatized in a way that Korea wasn’t. the way that what was happening in Central America wasn’t. So I would say that you can go back and go back and go back and see that there’s a whole pattern of this.
And I think to understand the fundamentals of that pattern of empire, of resources, the ecology of war, the arms industry and the immense power of the arms industry, and how unpatriotic it is and how it can produce battleships, wherever it can. wherever it can get cheap labor
And they’ll sell their weapons to whatever regime they possibly can, I mean that is the territory of Catch 22 This Killers of the Flower Moon film, I haven’t seen it but I think sometimes a film comes along and reminds people of their own history or an aspect of their own history.
And I think that has a very positive effect and sometimes culture and fiction. Recently in the UK there was a program about the post office as a post office scandal where a lot of sub post office not only staff were accused of absconding with money.
And it was actually to do with a new IT system that kind of failed. So these were false accusations. But this fictional piece of drama about this, has led to a major government inquiry. And sometimes as just people become aware through culture, through whether it’s through film.
And I think that’s one of the things that maybe with Vietnam, but I think I remember looking at a documentary by Chomsky about Korea and I just remember how interesting it was in terms of what was happening in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War,
Which was a continuation of the anti-communism that was shared by Germany, by France, by Spain, by Britain, by America, by all the major colonial powers shared in a single thing which was their commitment to eradicating communism. And that is something which traveled right through the thirties
And the forties and into the 1950s and beyond. And there’s always been a left with that left has been fissured and fragmented in so many ways a by propaganda and so on, and also for understandable reasons because of the way that states
That were supposed to in some ways be a hope for them turned out to betray them and to be too and to be false hopes and so on. But I think that sense of a awareness of history repeating itself, that’s depressing.
But history repeats itself, but it’s also a lesson that history repeats itself for people to be aware of it and to watch out and say, Wait a minute, I’m coming in halfway through this movie, but I’ve seen this before. I know where I am. And I think this is there’s something very familiar.
About what’s happening. I mentioned something on Facebook, which was 15 years ago. I was sitting watching Fox News for some reason that I never quite worked out. I was at somebody’s house that had Fox News. I don’t have it myself. And Shep Smith was on Fox News interviewing
Mark Regev about what was happening in Gaza. And at a certain, and at a certain point, Mark Regev said, you know, Shep we’re not dealing with people here. or words to that effect, at which point Shep Smith, I nearly fell off the couch,
Shep Smith said something that no BBC journalist had ever said, he said to Mark Regev, I’m sorry, I’m not going to let you I’m not going to let you speak with that. This was a Fox News journalist telling Mark Regev that he wasn’t going to be allowed on his show
To refer to these people as subhuman or not human or animals, whatever. And I thought, God, that’s amazing, because there’s not that that challenge isn’t done and you don’t even get that on the BBC. and the same with the with the BBC and The Guardian at the moment. They’re just ‘Hamas terrorists’
Every time Hamas is mentioned its ‘Iranian backed militants.’ But they never say the ‘US backed IDF.’ But that’s the reality. Reality is, in fact, if somebody was to look at them they might say in terms of who’s funding who and how much they’re funding them by
The United states is a far superior funding body. Yeah, if you’re looking for that, if you’re looking for an arms grant they’re a far superior funding body of weaponry around the planet. The same goes in Iran and the United States that a lot of ordinary people are living. a threadbare existence.
I heard a statistic 40 years ago, and it probably wasn’t true. But somebody said 40 years ago, that in Reagan’s America, it was 10 million unemployed and 2 million eating out of the trash or living on their wits basically And that’s the great world leading economy and military policeman and so on.
And so I think there is that kind of complication as to how things are reported. And I think as soon as you start bandying the word terrorist about, then you do dehumanize and you can dehumanize, dehumanize a whole population by characterizing it in a particular way.
That goes back to your original question about political violence and who’s for violence or who’s against it and whether violence is the table, whether it’s on the table, whether we can choose or whether it is, Dov would say and I would say that it’s not a question of choice
Because we live in states founded on violence whose foreign policy and a lot of their other policies are conducted with violence violence is never very far away and sometimes violence is happening that we might not know about, violence happening, you know, in order to get the resources that we’re thriving on.
And so I think there’s that kind of aspect of a citizens duty, not a subject’s but a citizen’s duty to inform ourselves as best we can. And I agree about not singling out a particular example because what happens, it’s a kind of journalism.
Suddenly something’s front page and then it drops off, it’s Ukraine and then it’s Israel and Gaza and so on. And I think I think we have to be more aware of the interconnected and interlocked way we are the world. There is there is one world and governments don’t represent
The people and a lot of the same things occur time and again. And I think if we can sufficiently arm ourselves with knowledge and educate ourselves and educate others, then we can at least begin to do something. I try not to be despairing, especially I mean, my father fought for a
Socialist republic and died under an imperial monarchy. And that would probably be the same story with me. So it’s not a good story when you feel that that hasn’t been the change that you need. And Obama talked of a change we need. But what did he do?
What was he able to do to achieve that change? You could look back and see what actually materially changed, What can you see? And some people might point to some reforms that had some benefits and so on. But I think the fact is that the Labor Party and the Conservatives in
Britain, you could put a credit card down to try and separate them the Democrats and Republicans in America and that until you change the foreign policy and the outlook and the attitude to other countries and the capacity to bomb anywhere in the world with impunity
Without even debating it, it wasn’t debated in the British parliament, it wasn’t debated in Washington what they did. So I think this impunity, that’s something that has to change. This is a non sequitur for me, really. It’s just to respond to what you said.
Living here is…, I don’t disagree with anything you say in spirit. In my heart, that’s kind of how I feel. But in my mind in my studied opinion, living in this culture, I can’t even think of Obama. It’s just it’s not like, what was he like?
The idea of what he was able to do, the limits… I used to have these debates with some of my family members, they’d be like, Well, his hands are tied. He can’t let the prisoners out of Guantanamo because the Senate won’t let him or something. And I was like, Yeah, he can.
He has executive power to do that. It might be politically expensive for him, and it’s not like he has a certain amount of political capital to run against the.. you know, and he doesn’t want to spend it on that. That’s okay. That’s a that’s a possibility. But he could do it right now.
He has all the power do that vested in him, politically in his office. So he’s choosing not to do that. And anyway, putting that aside, I just want to clarify something about the Germany stuff. So two things, but mostly for Mark, I guess, because we talk about this stuff
Having spent about two years living in Germany and quite a bit of years, you know, having German family and relations with German folks, I don’t think anybody there is tripping on the Holocaust or I don’t think anybody’s trying to manage their feelings about the Holocaust.
And no one’s ever mentioned a word about it to me, and I’m pretty sure I’m the only Jew many of these people have ever met. And there’s no and I don’t feel any discomfort either, Like they’re trying not to mention it. There’s no tiptoeing. It’s just not a topic.
But if you if you look at how Germany is dealing with the what’s happening in Gaza, this whole issue of antisemitism and their hate laws, that they that, you know, it’s I saw somebody say a tweet, which was actually a good one. They said, Germany, why don’t you get a therapist to deal
With your guilt over the Holocaust instead of supporting a new genocide? Right. Right. But I don’t I think that’s the official part. Yeah. Okay. Most people, they’re are either unaware like they don’t know about like the German submarines being sent to Israel. They don’t really keep track on it.
Like, what exactly do we have to do with it? What is going on, with reparations, still or not, It’s not a topic of discussion for most people as something they don’t probably know anything about. Mostly. And also that’s the official government.
I think a lot of people are not super happy with the government in general. Like the whole COVID stuff was like there was this huge dissent and this sort of the German states instinct to do clamping, you know, to clamp things down. That’s kind of the political instincts there.
And that probably does have to do with the trauma, if you want to call it that the political trauma of the Nazi period and how it’ll how do we manage this stuff? Let’s do this, right? So you’re not allowed to protest in Germany, you know, a pro-Palestinian protest,
Or at least in certain states in Germany. But that’s not coming from popular.. that’s not the demand of the people. I’ve seen no evidence for that. I think these things are more to do with the government. But I think you’ve made you’ve made a really important point. The other one
You were talking about, the psychosocial aspects and psychology, because I was saying to my brother recently, I believe in guilt, you know, I think it’s right that Germany feels guilt. It’s right that middle class people feel guilt, but it has negative consequences. So even though I can approve of the guilt,
I can approve of the guilt that any state might feel that has behaved in a particular way, I can approve of it. It’s a very negative and dangerous emotion, because what it can lead to is a some kind of displacement, or inability to see.
And I think in the case of middle class guilt, of which I heartily approve, I heartily approve of middle class guilt. But I think what happens then is that you get the complete obliteration and denial of social class, the very existence of social class. And I think that’s that’s really a problem.
That’s why the class has just been squeezed out of most politics. And I think that’s that’s that’s a glaring omission and I think in Germany’s case I think there’s guilt but I think Germany has a lot had a history prior to the 1930s and history of antisemitism which goes back much further, too.
So I think that there are issues that are not addressed when it’s simply about guilt. And I think you’re right that there are certain kinds of psychological issues that don’t get examined, they don’t get examined, they’re not self examining. And I think that can lead to problems.
And that also goes back to what Mark’s been trying to do by talking about it, you know, implicatedness in this. Our own stake that we have in certain things. you know, I’m an Irish citizen living in Scotland under a British government,
So I’ve got three governments and I’m not happy with any of them. And I’m happy I’m probably most happy with the partitioned 26 of 32 counties in Ireland. So Ireland is not independent. I’m happy with the government of the Irish Republic at the moment, happier
Than I’m with the Scottish Government or the British government. So I think I think that sense of kind of trying to open up a little bit of distance between ourselves and what we think we should be loyal to, whether that’s I mean, I don’t have any loyalty,
To any kind of notion of Scottishness or any such thing. I would like to dispute the existence of the British state. So that’s, that’s, that’s something that I would like to see. Then I’d like to see the British state dismantled because I think it’d be good for not only good for Ireland,
Not only good for Scotland, not only good for Wales, but good for England. And I think it’d be very good for the world because I think instead of resources disappearing or being plagued with these endless kind of wars and displacements, we could actually get rid of our monarchy,
Get rid of our aristocracy and have some kind of levelling, which we need. The phrase is leveling up. But I do think that democracy and real social change and socialism doesn’t mean that we get pushed down. It means that we get
As many people raised up and the things about population that you were saying earlier I don’t know. I think when it comes to arguments about resources and population, there are situations to do with private land ownership and people being put off land and land being exploited in particular ways
For particular kinds of resources like fossil fuels that I think has to be attended to. So I don’t I mean, I’m not an expert enough to say can we support the population we have or can we only do so by changing our ways, by stopping waging war,
By stopping digging out certain kind of resources or running the world in certain kinds of way as in a more fulsome, humane, inclusive, non conflictual way to go on. But I would say what I want to believe that I mean, it might be like I’m a Jehovah’s
Witness pamphlet, but I want to believe that such a thing is possible. That’s the kind of socialist utop… that’s the idea that people want. They want to say we want money to be spent on health and housing and education and not on weaponry, not on the billions that’s going to be weaponry.
And just as somebody was saying about the billions that the US government is spending just now on various wars in various theaters that could be put into public libraries or the crumbling infrastructure or helping people with their health and so on.
And I would say the same in the UK, you know, we seem to be able to afford billions for weapons that would become obsolete within 20 years. But we have absolutely fundamental problems, problems that include detection and treatment of cancer
And all kinds of things that are close to home like end of life care. You know, we’re all going to get old and we’re all going to die. And we don’t want to die in circumstances that are straitened and impoverished without proper care.
But the way that the UK is going, we’re definitely heading for that precarity, even for people who think they’re well off. Margaret Thatcher privatized the care homes in the 1980s and that now means that you have to sell your house from under you
In order to be able to pay this astonishing four star hotel bill for very basic care, end of life care. So I would say you, know, we have to help people that I mentioned Neil Kinnock going through that crowd and I mentioned the kind of delirium anad hysteria.
But one of the things that Neil Kinnock said, when he lost that election in 1992 one of the things he said to people, he said don’t get old, don’t get sick, don’t lose your house. And he said a lot of things that were just the basic truths
Of we’re now entering a period where you’re going to be in need, your life is going to be precarious and your and your future is precarious because that’s what people are voting AAnd people have voted against their interests because they voted based on complete lies.
This is what happened with Brexit it’s what happened with Trump. He’s going to open up these factories again and do it. And I think the power of lies, it’s really astonishing how strong ideology is that people can be told, you know,
You’re in a situation because of X or Y, because of these people, because of immigrants, and you believe that. And then suddenly you’re in a situation where you say, wait a minute, these immigrants were working in our care homes, working in our health service, they were keeping us afloat and so on.
And they were absolutely essential to our, to our infrastructure. And this was all about billionaires and tax dodgers, nothing to do with them. It’s all Brexit propaganda. I think you might call it Trump propaganda. I mean, one seam of it was Islamophobia, which we’re still in the midst
Of and have been in the midst of maybe for some 30 odd years that it’s been really that it’s been the dominant, I think, the dominant prejudice. in the media, certainly if you look at the media and studies have been done of Brexit, it was all
It was about Europe and free movement in Europe. A lot of the propaganda was about Syrian refugees, Afghani refugees. In other words, it was it was aimed at Muslim countries outside of Europe, even though that was not really relevant to the to the particular case that was being made. And this has happened.
Over this Rwanda story, about Tories wanting to send all the immigrants to the Rwanda and they’ve paid them £400 million to take these immigrants and so on. So there’s a lot stuff that goes on. It’s back to the kind of propaganda that we’re all familiar with from the 1930s
That’s been stoked and stirred up again in particularly ways Even earlier from the late 1800s I just read an interesting book by this historian Enzo Traverso, and his topic is the end of modern history for Jews. I forget exactly the title, [The End of Jewish Modernity] since the late 1800s.
He’s talking about this, this kind of evolution and how in the late 1800s and early 1900s, every nationalist movement in Europe had antisemitism as a core part of their toolbox. because it worked and it brought people together and that has totally shifted. So that same role is now played by Islamophobia
In the nationalist movements all over the Western world. And so it kind of brings me mentally full circle to the despair of, you know, how we’re in this endless cycle that where, you know, things transform. sort of mutate into other versions of what they were before.
But just very briefly, if you think of that word universalism that we talked about, it’s obvious that there’s a problem with We’ve maybe not got a problem with internationalism. And I think internationalism, i.e. a recognition that we can see beyond our own national interests, our own tribal interests our own particular interests
Even our own community interest that must be necessary. And I think on the left, including the Jewish left, there always was an understanding and they were in the vanguard of the anti-fascism in the thirties and in Spain, for example, there always was an understanding
That an injury to me is an injury to others and we have to stop this in its tracks. And so there was a sense of the international and I think maybe that’s something that’s been lost. You might say is it coming back, how is it coming back?
But I think there’s probably a tendency to kind of box ourselves, So this is how we look at the world and we see a little bit at a time and we don’t actually open up and try to see it as my father did in the 1930s,
As many communists did, you were interested in what was happening in the world as a whole as far as you could be. I mean, nobody can have the entire globe in their head, but you took an interest in that and you were certainly critical of your own government
That just went with the territory that you were critical about your own government. And I think a lot of that is has been over a period of time watered down and made more difficult. It’s now more difficult for people to say I don’t agree with that. I sent you that Alexei Sayle thing
Because you can’t say everybody thinks alike. Of course they don’t. Israeli citizens don’t think all think alike. You know, Jewish people don’t all think alike, Scots.. People […] disagree and they disagree deeply and fundamentally. And you can find those disagreements all over the place.
But we’re kind of a duped into thinking there’s a particular way of thinking and I think that’s a racist stereotype to think that people from particular communities or in particular countries or in particular states or in particulat religions are all on the same page they’re absolutely not
But there aare certain governments who would like to make you think that maybe even certain universities would like to enforce an impression, that that is the case and it’s is absolutely not the case. I see disagreement everywhere, even in my own head. So I think that your view raises a question.
It has a formal name. It’s called standpoint epistemology. And it’s this idea that because of some, let’s say, material or identity claim, a person might have as a working person, as a carpenter, I would just like to say what the facts are. This is an absurdity and yet it’s an understandable
Inclination that people have to sort of imagine that rightfully, like maybe you maybe I do know some carpenters that agree with me. You know, like they can’t say this as a Jew because, you know, the famous joke is you get like three Jews in a room,
You got seven opinions or something like this. It goes different ways, but so it’s hard to do it. The thing about antisemitism that I think makes it so odd among isms of especially negative use, you know, bigotry, let’s say, is German, you know, the antisemitism of the thirties of twenties and thirties
In Germany in particular, and the Holocaust and all that. This was not this is fundamentally different. And the resulting genocide is fundamentally different than what happened in Namibia. But no one talks about this. The Herero weren’t maligned and attacked and murdered because they’re just these bad people
That we don’t want. there was, let’s take the land. There’s a bunch of people that are farming there that live there for, you know, no one knows how long and we have to displace them and then they’re not putting up with that. They were resisting.
So we’re going to machine gunned them and march them out in the desert and have them starve to death, not because we hate them, although I’m sure that was a, you know, a psychological necessity to start doing that to make it feel comfortable for the machine gunner, let’s say.
But because we want their land. this is an expansion, right? We’re going to take this land and create a German colony. But the Jews in Germany, I mean, there’s this fantasy of they’re controlling everything, but it’s not true was not true. And the material grab of Jewish, apartment buildings
And businesses was relatively a minor thing. That wasn’t the reason. And it was not the Germans, it was all the Europeans. But no one talks about that. The fucking Greeks. I mean, it’s everywhere, in Poland, of course some people didn’t feel that way
And they even went out of their way to protect people. You know, there’s heroic resistance. But you know, where as Mark talks about in Ukraine a lot like this, it was not just the Germans, but it’s always talked about like Germany did that always the Nazis did it. I’m like, everybody did that.
But it wasn’t for material reasons. So it’s unusual that way. It was for these fantastic imaginary and unifying narratives, about all the conspiracies and the secret hand and all this stuff… But there was a distinct sort of class aspect to antisemitism. I mean, it was made up, it was instrumentalized, you know, but,
But it was very powerful. And it had a real aspect. In Ukraine, there were the Polish landlords and then there was the Jewish merchant class that were typically worked for the Poles. You know, they were the innkeepers, you know, my own grandparents, I knew vaguely they were innkeepers in Ukraine.
It was actually the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But now Ukraine. And now I actually have a little understanding of what that meant. They had an inn of some kind. It was probably owned by somebody who was Polish and it served the Ukrainian peasants and it would give them credit. Typically
They would be broke and they would give them credit. And so there was this whole this whole this whole class issue and then resentment. Yeah. And it got fueled. And so it was a it was a path to power for any kind of, you know, politician who wanted to
Take advantage of the opportunity and to use it. And these whole movements grew up, and that’s how they united everybody and against this other, you know. No, but but but that sort of the political side but that other was also a direct it came from a long history of religious other ism.
You know so it was already set up. Right But do you see my point though? How do you ever get out of that cycle? Do you see my point, the settlers, not even that long ago in California, but let’s say in the United States, initial waves of settlers,
I don’t think people came with some animosity towards… They were like, yeah, yeah, there’s no land here. I’m never going to have any, you know, whatever. to some extent, the bulk of these people would be economic refugees, not unlike, let’s say, Salvadorans at the border today at the Mexican border,
Or Haitians or whoever is trying to cross into the United States. They’re like, I can’t make it, we’re going hungry here. I can’t feed my kids. And it’s socially unstable because of there’s such a minimal resource base in the community. People are going after each other and gang kind of level stuff.
Let’s get out of here and go to this other place where we could do better or survive even. So, they show up there. they don’t know what the hell’s going on over here. They show up, they’re ignorant, and then, you know, they become agents of genocide, but they’re not motivated
By some animosity to indigenous people or some religious fervor. I mean, you hear that Not on good on day one, but on day two. I mean, which you said basically I don’t think they’re motivated by that. But the people resist. People resist.
And then next thing you have a slogan, the only good Indian is a dead Indian, whereas the day before they were the people who brought you some corn, you know? Yeah. there are those stories, right? Yeah. And there’s those stories from Palestine as well. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.
So, so but I just think it’s always getting the the cart and the horse backwards. And if you stick with the material question, you can kind of… wrap your head around, it’s It’s not the only thing, but it’s sort of the baseline and it does
Make antisemitism is a little strange that way because. I think it’s not quite as clear. It’s super clear with African colonialism. It wasn’t like bunch of Europeans woke up one day? You know, Leopold didn’t think, “I hate Black people.” He said, “I like being rich.”
And the less I know about what’s actually going on at the sausage factory, the better, you know. You know, he does. He’s not like, Hey, come tell me exactly how you butchered people and, you know, like, I just can’t get enough of these blood and gut stories.
Can I come down and do some? I want to get in on it. You know, I feel like I’m out of the action here. I think all of that is true because it’s not the moral critique. in a way And I think that economic imperative that’s very Marxist
[…] that’s a very Marxist line to say follow the money or […] people are after their resources. And that’s what people do. Even I’ve heard and I don’t know if this is true or not that gas and oil in the Middle East. And so there’s always those stories.
I mean, before my father died in 2007, he’s 99, he was reading about Sudan and he was saying, you know, with the oil there and these issues. And so my father whenever there was anything in the news, he wanted to know what’s the resource, what’s the reason, what’s the game,
What do people want, what other countries are involved in it and who’s competing, over these particular resources and so on. So he did always try to contextualise and and see what’s really going on. This is one story we’re getting but what’s the rest of the story?
And I think that’s that’s maybe something that’s, that’s missing, now in the way that people look at things because they don’t look through an internationalist lens. They don’t look to see what’s the story behind the story. They only look at what they’re getting in the headlines and post-modernist lens
And a distorted post-modernist lens that has completely diverted everyone from the materialist analysis. So we’ve sort of come full circle on that one. And that’s and that’s like I’ve been using the term it’s probably not original. I don’t I don’t have any idea, but I made it up for myself,
Which is like morality politics, which is like the value of a position taking statements or expression of values that serve one sense of morality, like the value in them is not material necessarily. It’s not motivated by a material interest. It’s not the same as a union organizer talking about,
You know, the profits of the company and how they’re not being shared. That’s a material argument, right? It has a moral aspect to it. But but it’s not purely moral. But these purely moral claims for people who aren’t even materially involved, it doesn’t affect them one way or the other.
What’s going on in some situation that the psychology. So just like taking the material analysis of what is being fought over, let’s say, oil or the land. I think a lot of it’s land. What are wars fought for? My claim is that all wars are fought over human and natural resources, period.
Nothing else. All the other stuff is the is the cultural and psychological overlays to motivate, justify, mobilize, you know, or resist these efforts. But nobody fights a war over nothing I just don’t think that’s true. Or if it is true, it’s exceptional. You know, there’s exceptional cases.
And then if you just extend all that to the psychological realm as we’re facing, we’re in this extinction event, we’re in a biological collapse, that stuff’s real. I’ve spent a lot of time studying it. It’s not made up, you know, used to off the coast of Scotland, the old fishermen there
The old tales from 200 years ago and stuff and you used to be able to walk across the shoals of herring. They’d be so thick in the water that you couldn’t see the water. These don’t exist anymore. The depletion of the natural systems.
The forests in the northwest of the United States are decimated. And if you ride your bike down the cut roads, you can’t see it from the freeway. But I’ve done bike tours up there and it’s just like you come around the corner
And there’s entire like valley that looks like someone set off a hydrogen bomb all over the place. So anyway, the psychological version of that is like we all, especially in the communication times we live in now, where everyone can know so much Twitter, social media
And just endless channels of information that you can gather, this puts a lot of psychological pressure on everybody. It’s talked about as if it’s a great thing, information age. But this is this is catastrophic for human psychology unless you’re a weirdo like the three of us or some other
5% of the population that likes to obsess about thoughts and finds it sort of tolerable, if not somewhat painful. The rest of the people don’t want to do this. I know a lot of people that’s not what they want to do. They don’t feel good at it. They don’t enjoy it.
They want a story that they can live with and then they want to turn it off and get back to their special dinner they’re going to cook or the vacation they’re planning or or their disgruntlement with their neighbor or whatever, some smaller, smaller frame issue.
And so I think if you just take that material, material claim and it transfer over the psychological needs of most people or all of us to some extent, then I think a lot of this makes sense. The sloganeering like what’s popular at university, these ridiculous things that are being said and the promotion.
Like if you take Thomas Kuhn’s, you know, like the the nature of scientific revolution, [The Structure of Scientific Revolutions] He talks about these paradigms as he calls them, and if you just transfer that over to political paradigms, well, operating inside a political paradigm you can advance.
You can become a Judith Butler, I can tell you her salary and you can look it up or at least part of her salary. She makes a half a million dollars a year saying this stuff and writing books or more even. And so there’s this huge..
A lot of the problem I’d have with someone like who we talking about? GATES Right. And the Black studies departments which have given rise now we have Israeli studies, so that’s good. You know, we have obviously there was a need for that. But but also there were positions offered.
You know, Angela Davis is drinking wine, as Norman Finkelstein likes to point out, on Martha’s Vineyard right now with a bunch of, you know, the worst people in the world are having parties and stuff anyway, So I’m saying a little too much there.
But I think there’s a psychological world that can be as much parallel to a marxist materialist kind of analysis world, and that this explains a lot of why people are adopting certain postures. And these postures are not helpful because they displace actual political organizing.
And that’s what’s wrong with them to me, not that they’re just factually incorrect, historically ignorant, simplistic, but they’re displacement. And that’s, I think, why they’re tolerated. That’s why that all that for all the complaining about the universities and the leftism of the universities, it’s okay because it just disables, disables actually
Any meaningful organizing and cohesive challenge which of course the material conditions the United States would support. Right now. There’s I stepped over two people getting into the Y to go swimming this morning. You know, it’s like everywhere it’s obvious, you know, increasing levels, as you were saying,
Willy, you’ve got to sell your house to be an old person now. So you think that would be an organizing, you know, that would provide some organizing energy. And it’s widely understood, right? I mean, people know this. It’s not like they find
It might have been a rude awakening for someone 20 years ago or something. And now it’s commonly discussed. So anyway, I think that that explains a lot of the kookiness of the social media realm, which is also out on the street. It’s not just in Twitter
And with Willy, did you happen to have a chance to to watch that two minute video, that CIA recruiting video I sent, I Have you seen that Dov? Of course. It’s the best thing in the whole world. I mean, people could listen to us talk for 2 hours
Or they could spend 2 minutes and just watch that video because it’s it’s absolutely it’s priceless. But it kind of encapsulates what you were just saying, like, perfect is this illusion of of change and cutting edge. “politics”, politics in quotes, which just is a complete diversion from anything real.
But it also speaks to something I think that’s real, especially in the US, which is it is actually also true what they’re talking about. If you are, I mean, this is maybe a little bit played out in academia, but in the nineties, like when my friend was getting his Ph.D.
With Judith Butler, no less at Cal here, if you were a young, bright, academically inclined black student and you were serious about your studies and you had the talent, you had a red carpet, that would roll out in front of you. You’d be a professor by the time you’re 30 years old.
You’d be tenured by the time you’re 40. No question about it. As long as you were, you know, a good academic worker. You produced your papers and you got cited and you and you didn’t maybe cross certain lines, which is required for everybody in academia, as I’m sure Willy knows.
You can get bounced pretty easily if you go against the wrong people, depending on your discipline. Maybe not so much in 17th century literature because it’s not politically charged perhaps. I don’t know. But certainly if you’re talking about contemporary race relations in the United States. So So that girl,
That young woman who’s the CIA agent. I know, I know. I don’t doubt that there’s people like that. And then if you were a young, bright, nonbinary Latina, proud Latinx, whatever, what was she like […] cognitively? Yes. She has like anxiety, like sort of like, you know, on the spectrum or something.
That’s right. Yes, you can that you actually could easily find yourself being an analyst, you know, not running the agency. But with a good middle class job at the CIA, they’d be happy to have you. They want to diversify. Stanford The Harvard wants to diversify as seen by the whole,
You know, swirl around their president. You know, they’re eager to so and the military as well, and on and on and on. So maybe that ad was just reflecting, as absurd as it was it was actually an honest recruitment video. Oh. Oh, yes, absolutely. Yeah.
So and I think that’s kind of where this like the meeting of the tides is, between the you know, did I say the word woke? Okay, said it well, but like, well, but like identity politics and a lot of stuff in that realm that’s very popular in academia
And fixating on those things meets with class issues or more substantive material issues, they kind of meet and there’s a swirl at that little meeting place and there are a bunch of people in there that actually will benefit from this meeting. It’s not the entire, you know, like not everyone,
But there is a lot being offered there, I think. And so again, like in the US where it’s like a win lose culture, a kind of pirate, like, you know, as long as there’s opportunity, people are down with it. They’re not, you know, that people love Trump partly because it represents this casino
Like concept of a culture, which is kind of how it is here. And some people do really well, and that includes black and brown people now. nonconforming people can do really well and people want to be one of those people, they want to win, you know, pull the lever and win.
Get three cherries and hear all the money fall out and are willing to put up with you know what that means for everyone else, if they can have that feeling that that might happen, which is why… Yeah, the individualism is basically what I’m saying, which is so baked in here that it’s
It’s really hard to imagine anything transcending that. Anyway, I’ll shut up there. That’s a lot. But that was excellent. That made me think of Lenin said at a certain point a section of the intelligentsia will break off. And instead of putting their own interests first,
They’ll become kind of a leaders and so on, there seems to be less of that. I mean, We probably all have some kind of relationship with Judith Butler. I taught her work for years I know that Mark’s got a connection you’ve got a connection there
I try to think of what’s happening just now as people who you disagree with fundamentally on one issue, it turn out to be absolutely on your side on another issue. That’s why woke culture or as I call it, zombified, somnolent culture or cancel culture… Somnolent, so sleepyheaded, it is zombified culture.
There’s nothing woke about it. And I think cancel culture, too. You have to recognize that some of the same people may come out with different views, some of which you agree with, some of which you don’t. And so I think the whole basis of cancel culture is censoriousness that denies
You access to discourse that, you really ought to hear. And there are people in the UK whose opinion on one issue, a couple of issues, have shut me off from them, who I now hear are making statements that I agree with.
So that’s just a reminder of being aware of the fact that individuals contradict themselves and they have different kind of views. A stopped clock is right twice twice a day, you know, and you kind of a take those things on board and you try to be inclusive
Because we all live in our own times where we get we get angry or we get upset with someone and we think, right, you know, I’ve had enough of you. And so then you realize that there’s another side to it. So just to try to keep the conversation
Going, as we are doing, I think is extremely valuable and important. I used to say to my students in a cliche, I would say, I come to school every day to learn and not just to teach. And I feel that if I haven’t learned something new, then I’ve not had a good day.
I wish I could live longer for a variety of reasons. And one reason is just so that I could know more and read more and understand more. I’ve got 30, 40, 50, 100 years of stuff I’d like to read and things I’d like to write about it. And there’s so many
Ideas, that’s the important thing, it’s just to keep that conversation going and not have it bounded by ‘you can’t say this’ or I’ve got this wrong George Orwell went down into the London Underground in the 1940s because someone told him that it was predominantly Jewish people that were down in the shelters.
He went down himself, George Orwell said, and wrote some things that can be seen as anti-Semitic. Then he backtracked or learned and said things that were critical of antisemitism. The same George Orwell that can be seen as occupying these different spaces. And I’ve got a whole bibliography about Orwell
And antisemitism and people who don’t like Orwell and think he was a British MI5 spy or that he was a Trotskyist, or he didn’t do enough in Spain or that he was an anti-communist. These people will like to hear the stories about Orwell the antisemite, but other people will read
Orwell and say well Orwell was crisscrossed by contradictions to do with his background, his birth in India and where he served in Burma as a kind of policeman. He was full of those contradictions. He wasn’t perfect. He said and thought things
Sometimes, which he then learned from and changed his mind on and backtracked. But if you only focus on one, you could pick out one quotation or one passage from Orwell and use it to damn him and maybe to try and cancel him if you’re of a mind.
I think we have to be more able to look at the whole, to look across someone’s writing and also realize realize that everybody’s allowed to change their mind. I always quote them the Karl Marx thing, who said for a long time I believed there would be a revolution
In an advanced capitalist country, Germany and Britain being the two examples. And then he said deeper study has convinced me of the opposite. And I think that’s a great line. Deeper study has convinced me of the opposite. Nothing will happen in England until it breaks the connection with Ireland, he said.
So colonialism is the ruin empire is the ruin of the possibility of socialism in England because it was a displacement of class. There’s no diversity without social diversity. It was a displacement of class. It led to racism that created migrant immigrant labor that could then be blamed. Also, Marx spotted that
And he revised his position on deeper studies. I think we can all benefit. I’ve changed my mind about all kinds of things I love John Milton, but I used to say to students John Milton’s wonderful, but he hated women, the Irish, Catholics and Scots. Apart from that he was great and it’s true.
He was. He was a wonderful radical. But the English revolution never happened. It was a colonial war waged by Cromwell in Jamaica and in Ireland. It was about colonialism and the levellers and the diggers and all the dreamers of the 1640s
Ended up in prison in the 1650s or executed or poisoned in one case. So I think that history is not what we think it is. And I think we have to abandon our illusions and go back and say that wasn’t so good
Even I’ve got friends who are dyed in the wool communists who wanted to justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine and their kind of a Soviet nostalgia but Lenin wrote quite emphatically about the risks of a new tsarism, and a new imperialism specifically with reference to Ukraine,
Even in that little pamphlet, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, probably the most important thing that Lenin wrote, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. It starts off by saying that he couldn’t say some things about Ukraine and he says this in the preface after the Revolution.
He says, I couldn’t be as frank and honest about Ukraine as I wanted to be. So he was talking about Ukraine in the original pamphlet without actually mentioning Ukraine and in the later editions he was able to make clear that Russian imperialism was something that he saw
Was in danger of surviving the revolution, as it were. So I think there are all kinds of things we can learn and all kinds of inconvenient truths, to coin a phrase, you can come to terms with once we start, start looking into the history and, we can we can have our illusions…
We can have some of our idols toppled and some of our illusions. But I would say consistently I remain 100% committed to Scottish independence and not simply for selfish reasons. I would like to argue and I remain a committed internationalist and I totally recognize I posted a thing recently about a documentary
About the Jewish volunteers in Spain and I posted it saying my father was in a prison camp in 1937 with several Jewish comrades who were at risk and some of these people went under pseudonyms because they were at risk, the same as the young Germans were at risk, particular risk And so
There’s a Jewish left that survived from the time of the Spanish Civil War, and earlier and is still here and is still critical and still as it were our comrades and part of an international. I would call it an international. So try not to be despairing. There are still a lot of us
Who are dissenting from whatever we might see as the dominant ideology. And I try to take some hope from that. Even in these dire times. I want to interject that I think that part of what you’re talking about in, like in in Jewish culture or Ashkenazi culture,
It relates to that idea of a mensch. And a mensch isn’t something you’re born. You know, it’s not it’s not an essential thing. It’s something you work towards. It’s something you try and it’s not even something you work towards. It’s the outcome for others to
Judge, of course, of a process of exactly what you spoke of, like a questioning mind and a desire to to dig deeper and understand these intricacies or contradictions and to try to try to grapple with them and to try to maintain a I don’t know what the right word is.
I don’t want to say something corny like loving, but like a compassionate, empathetic concern. Orwell’s like this. To be a principled person is to live an insecure life and to willfully do this to know that you don’t have such solid ground on everything. Maybe on some things.
There’s some things I thought when I was 15 years old. I still believe these things are true. You know, like I haven’t found a reason to throw them overboard, but so I don’t think everything’s not everything’s totally unstable. I think that partly what’s going on now, like maybe globally for human beings, is
Like a reassertion of essentialism. And I think this is partly what fuels cancel culture. So someone isn’t a you know, people use this language. They won’t say someone did something, they’ll say they are something, right. They didn’t commit a rape or sexual assault. They are a predator. They are a rapist.
As if this is some assuming that the accusation is somewhat true, that’s a big assumption that they just are that way and they’ll do it again. They can’t help themselves. It’s like a kind of like an animal, like they’re a cat. They’re going to kill mice. That’s just what they do.
And so I think then that ties in with Puritanism, the desire to be pure, to claim purity, which requires to project onto others. that others are the evil doers or the witches, and we’ll burn and we’ll be rid of this evil and good and evil and all that stuff.
And I think that’s just on the rise and that that’s probably on the rise because of the background animal level, understanding that people are coming to of the limits of this world and that we’re up against them and that there’s going to be a lot a lot… it’s
Going to be ugly going forward because just to eat or to have, you know, material security is very much on people’s minds and very much affecting ever increasing numbers of people. You know, this idea of a world full of refugees wandering around is not I don’t think that’s some kind of dystopian future.
I think that’s the likely future. People sense this or even have a steady understanding of it. A few people. So this is rising against this this I think older view which is you have to work for it and it’s a never ending process
And I got that from my dad as it sounds like you did from yours that now you have to you have to engage in this always. You have to continue to engage it and you can’t sit back and just take purely moral positions and castigate everybody.
I mean, you can take some moral positions to some extent, but you have this underlying qualifying sensibility that this is open to question and needs to be questioned because it will have its limitations, it will have its boundaries where it doesn’t function anymore, where it’s even self-contradictory. That’s a dying ethic.
I remember when my father used to say, keep fighting on until you hear the bell, then stand up and fight like hell John Milton talked about how every time you get on a peak, every time you think you’re on the plateau now the peak you realize that it’s just a ledge with another…
Yeah, you look up there like, Oh there’s this.
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