We must not apologise for rectal feeding.

It's always good to know the political class has all its marbles in line and its priorities straight. Liam Fox, the former war minister, and numpty neocon, felt the need to profess his Christian faith in time for Christmas. "It is, of course, a personal thing," he says. "But it is why, for example, I always choose a nativity scene for our Christmas cards — a reminder about what Christmas actually stands for." This was just days before the US Senate released its report on CIA torture.

"So for me it's not ‘Happy Holidays’, but wishing everyone of all religions and none a very happy and peaceful Christmas." Except if you're a Muslim, or you look like an Arab, then you can expect rectal feeding by American thugs. Undoubtedly, the British government played the role of lieutenant in the US torture programme. Either Liam Fox was fully involved in the programme, or he was too incompetent to even comprehend what was going on under his nose.

Reason has a price.

Aggressive secularism has long seemed like the last gasp of an increasingly anaemic liberalism. All of the prominent so-called 'New Atheists' - Ditchkins, Harris, and co. - stand as exemplars of the virtues of liberal democratic capitalism. Faith is the enemy of progress because it has the terrible tendency to reach beyond the liberal framework of individual rights and liberties. As right as Nick Clegg may have been to call for the disestablishment of the Church of England the fact that it was Clegg calling for it proves it is not a radical demand. I find myself sympathising with the conservative tobacco salesman Roger Scruton as he took aim Dawkins with his musket and fired this noteworthy potshot:

Richard Dawkins and his followers have recycled the theory of evolution not as a biological theory but as a theory of everything – of what the human being is, what human communities are, what our problems are and how they’re not really our problems, but the problems of our genes: we’re simply answers that our genes have come up with, and it’s rather awful to be the answer to someone else’s question, especially when that thing is not a person at all. Nevertheless people swallow that.

Not long after that I was amused to find, in The Spectator of all places, a piece on the "cult" of Richard Dawkins. He's still busy since retiring years ago. For just £85 a month you can be apart of the 'Reason Circle' and get discounts on Dawkins merchandise. If you should want the chance to see Richard Dawkins speak at an event then you have to pay £210 a month. Only £100,000 to have a meal with him and gain entrance to the 'Evolution Circle'. That's not where it ends. You could make a donation of £500,000 to have dinner with the man - just the once - and become a member of 'The Magic of Reality Circle'.

The New School for the Humanities comes to mind. It was set up by another 'militant' atheist AC Grayling and it charges tuition fees of £18,000 a year. Is this more obscene than the Dawkins cult? It's a close call. And it was a long time ago that Marx wrote "Now atheism itself is a minor sin as compared with the criticism of existing property relations."

Nietzsche was no friend of fascists.

Earlier this month, the UCL student union passed a decision to ban the Nietzsche Club, who pitched themselves as a study group for hard-to-far-right students (as many of them as there may be) interested in Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Julius Evola. As someone who is interested in Nietzsche and Heidegger I couldn't help but take some interest in the story. There are two things that came to mind initially:

1. Regardless of how repugnant the society was it did not pose a threat of physical violence to the student body. The ban will not be effective as the Club could just be set up again under another name and there would have to be another ban and so on. This is the impotence of censorship. Censors always fail as they can only act in retrospect and by then there is no use in censorship. If it has already been said then it has little effect in imposing a restriction. The obvious exception is when speech is used to call for violence and that is a criminal matter. If we want to live in a society in which it is unlikely for such instances to arise then we want greater change than banning lists.
2. It is a travesty that Nietzsche is still, in this century, associated with the Third Reich, as if he were some kind of proto-Nazi philosopher. You only have to judge the man by his deeds, not least his written in its proper context and understanding. Nietzsche distanced himself from his own sister due to her anti-Semitism and marriage to a German proto-fascist. Likewise, Nietzsche broke off his friendship with Wagner because of his growing inclination towards Christianity, nationalism and anti-Jewish racism. He had nothing but contempt, scorn and mockery for anti-Semites and regarded himself as a man without a nation. If only Nietzsche had lived into old age and remained sane to the end we would no doubt have record of his disgust at the early rise of Fascism.

There is a third point to be made alongside these. Both the philosopher Heidegger and the composer Wagner were involved in German nationalism. In Heidegger's case, we're talking about the moves he made to try and become the philosopher of the Third Reich in a bid to oppose the technological logic of modern society. His affinity for National Socialism was cultural and intellectual. With Wagner, we have the case of a man who lived long before the rise of Hitler, but he was a nationalist and anti-Semite in his later years. He did not hide these facts. In both instances, we can praise the work of these men without condoning or excusing their prejudices. This is a point worth making, as we would be mistaken if we assumed we would have to discard Nietzsche even if the opposite were the case.

Myra Breckenridge on Circumcision.

In Myra Breckenridge (1968) Gore Vidal writes in the first person as ‘Woman Triumphant’. I've already written about the possibility of crossover between the author and the protagonist in this example. Some parts of the book naturally stood out to me. As I've written about the issue of genital cutting in the past, the twenty-second chapter certainly stood out to me. The brief chapter is entirely a comment on circumcision after the narrator attends an orgy.

Just as I expected, seventy-two per cent of the male students are circumcised. At Clem's party I had been reminded of the promiscuous way in which American doctors circumcise males in childhood, a practice I highly disapprove of, agreeing with that publisher who is forever advertising in the New York Times Book Review a work which proves that circumcision is necessary for only a very few men. For the rest, it constitutes, in the advertiser's phrase, “a rape of the penis.” Until the Forties, only the upper or educated classes were circumcised in America. The real people were spared this humiliation. But during the affluent postwar years the operation became standard procedure, making money for doctors as well as allowing the American mother to mutilate her son in order that he might never forget her early power over him. Today only the poor Boston Irish, the Midwestern Poles and the Appalachian Southerners can be counted upon to be complete.

Myron never forgave Gertrude for her circumcision of him. In fact, he once denounced her in my presence for it. She defended herself by saying that the doctor had recommended it on hygienic grounds - which of course does not hold water since most foreskins are easily manipulated and kept clean. What is truly sinister is the fact that with the foreskin's removal, up to fifty per cent of sensation in the glans penis is reduced... a condition no doubt as pleasing to the puritan American mother as it is to her co-conspirator, the puritan Jewish doctor who delights in being able to mutilate the goyim in the same vivid way that his religion (and mother!) mutilated him.

I once had the subject out with Dr. Montag, who granted me every single point and yet, finally, turned dentist and confessed, “Whenever I hear the word ‘smegma’, I become physically ill.” I am sure Moses is roasting in hell, along with Jesus, Saint Paul, and Gertrude Percy Breckenridge.[1]

We might read Myra as a partial satire of Vidal himself – the consummate gentleman-bitch. If we do so we’re faced with certain questions and in particular: what should we take away from this about the author? Some would describe Vidal as ‘anti-Semitic’ here. The section holds within it vulgar imagery, but that can be said of the entire novel. It’s a ‘masterpiece in bad taste’ after all. Breckenridge damns Moses to the same ranks as Jesus and St. Paul, as well as the “puritan American mother”. The grounds of the attacks are pro-hedonist. Vidal was an exponent of promiscuity, not of commitment and monogamy. He disapproved of marriage equality on this same basis.

We find this is the case, as he goes on to write “I prefer the penis intact... in order that it be raped not by impersonal survey but by me!”[2] This is tongue-in-cheek comedy. It’s a self-caricature. Going by the extent Vidal parodies his own fears of overpopulation in the book this is not an implausible reading. He was promiscuous, experimented with drugs in the Sixties, enjoyed cinema, and claimed the advertisement was the only American art form. These things (and more) are all present in the book and taken to their own extremities.

This isn’t the only extract in the book worthy of notation. At one point, Myra remarks on Dr Montag, one of the Jewish characters of the novel, in the context of their disagreement over sexuality and womanhood.

Being Jewish as well as neo-Freudian, he is not able to divest himself entirely of the Law of Moses. For the Jew, the family is everything; if it had not been, that religion which they so cherish (but happily do not practice) would have long since ended and with it their baleful sense of identity. As a result, the Jew finds literally demoralizing the normal human sexual drive toward promiscuity. Also, the Old Testament injunction not to look upon the father's nakedness is the core to a puritanism which finds unbearble the thought that the make in himself might possess an intrinsic attractiveness, either aesthetically or sensually. In fact, they hate the male body and ritually tear the penis in order to remind the man so damaged that his sex is unlovely. It is, all in all, a religion even more dreadful than Christianity.[3]

So what should we make of the crude stereotyping and vulgar language around Jews? If we exclude the possibility that Gore Vidal was anti-Semitic (and I do, as I have already written) then we can only understand these passages in a handful of ways. If Myra is a partial parody of Vidal then it seems that this writing is at the extreme end of exaggeration of what Vidal actually thinks. Alternatively, Myra isn’t based on Vidal and in which case it can’t be said that these views represent those of the novelist. To paraphrase Houellebecq, when asked if his protagonists are really him, “Perhaps the mistake is to think of me at all.” 

As tempting as the latter option would be, I think I’ve already clarified why I think it is too convenient an option. That isn’t to say that I accept the accusations of anti-Semitism levelled against Vidal in the Eighties. In a way we shouldn’t be too surprised by Gore Vidal’s views on religion. He was a man of the Enlightenment and he didn’t feel the need to hold his tongue. It’s not as if Vidal was known for resorting to gentle euphemisms. In his response to charges of prejudice, Gore Vidal was blunt “I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster to befall the human race.”[4] He had plenty of time to romanticise polytheism and pre-Christian religions and Eastern philosophies.

So Vidal took the side of Athens over Jerusalem. Does this convict him of any offence? Only of leaving religionists offended. His politics were a snob cocktail of libertarian strains, where populism and leftism crossover. He admired the tradition of William Jennings Bryan, while he took charge against its descendants in the Creationist Right. The aggressive secularism in Vidal’s politics has to be understood in its American context. He lived through the revival of political Christianity in the Fifties and the rise of the ‘Moral Majority’ in the Eighties. Ever the provocateur, Vidal would take a swipe at anyone to prove his points.

---

[1] Vidal, G; Myra Breckenridge & Myron (Abacus | 1968, 1972) pg.103-104

[2] Ibid.

[3] Vidal, G; Myra Breckenridge (Abacus | 1968, 1972) pg.78-79

[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwc_M0KN2vU

A Late Response to Brendan Simms.

Last week, I read a piece on anti-Semitism in The Evening Standard in which the writer - Brendan Simms - argued that it is connected with 'anti-capitalism' and 'anti-globalization' on the nationalist Right. He even went as far as to suggest that it was anti-capitalism which led Adolf Hitler to anti-Semitism. In his mind Simms actually conflates Hitler's rage against the Versailles Treaty with anti-capitalist sympathies. Hitler was enraged by the defeat and humiliation of Germany as a burgeoning imperial power. Furthermore, it was this treaty which was used by the British and French empires to engender an inevitable crisis within Germany that helped create the conditions for the rise of the Nazi Party. Instead Simms claims Hitler "accused" internationally-oriented Anglo-American capitalism for the destruction of Germany, as if the consequence was not an actuality at all. Ironically, it was the financial hub of American capitalism that imploded in 1929, taking the world economy with it, that led directly to Hitler's victory in 1933.

Sadly Mr Simms seems short on historical perspective. It has become somewhat fashionable to claim that the Left is a harbinger of anti-Semitism and belongs in the same ballpark as Fascism (if not worse, for some). He wants to situate the Left as a natural ally of Hamas, Iran, and even Hungarian neo-fascists, for its commitments to 'anti-globalization' and anti-capitalism. He claims these forces are coalescing against Israel and liberal democratic capitalism. I wonder if Mr Simms was present at the dinner where George W Bush consorted openly, for money, with self-declared 'Messianic Jews' converted to Christianity in order to bring on the Rapture. The anti-Jewish ramblings of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and John Hagee, might not be so easy to swallow. Even still the article is packed with innuendo like "This makes [anti-Semitism] dangerous not just to Jews but to those seen as their allies, most of the Western capitalist democracies, or plutocracies, as anti-Semites (but not only they) often call them." That point requires more pause for thought.

It wasn't that surprising to find that Mr Simms is a prominent figure in the Henry Jackson Society, that heroic brigade of laptop bombardiers for whom there is never enough blood to spill around the world. It is awfully convenient for the Henry Jackson Society to discover that their enemies are all virulent anti-Semites. It presupposes that the actions they back to the hilt have an immaculate moral character. There's a switch-side to that coin. To what degree can the aggressive foreign policy of the US and Israel be defended morally, that includes the criminal use of white phosphorous against human beings in Fallujah in 2005 and in Gaza in 2009. The easy way is to simply slander the critics and opposition while the killing frenzy reaches a peak. This is a part of what Douglas Murray seems to think of as a struggle for civilisation over relativism. Actually the opponents of mad-dog neoconservatism are closer to where progressive republican Immanuel Kant stood in the late 18th Century. Far from relativism. More like the core of the Enlightenment.

Someone should tell Mr Simms that the only thing that brings anti-Semites together is Judeophobia, apart from that they can be pretty varied, as anyone who has put a few minutes into researching the Far-Right. Anders Behring Breivik, the Butcher of Utoya, managed to be pro-Israel and anti-Semitic in his writings. Holocaust denier Nick Griffin can't make his mind up on the subject, pledging support for Operation Cast Lead one minute, and then accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing the next. Perhaps Simms has the on-and-off talks between the Israelis and Palestinians in mind when he penned the article. As Alexander Cockburn wrote in 2004 "Over the past 20 years I've learned there's a quick way of figuring out just how badly Israel is behaving. You see a brisk uptick in the number of articles here accusing the left of anti-Semitism." Yesterday we found Prime Minister Netanyahu accusing John Kerry of being an 'anti-Semite'. The Palestinians suspect the talks are a smokescreen and have good reason to reckon so.

This comes as Danske Bank, the biggest Danish bank, divests from an Israeli company on the grounds that it is tied to settlement building. Then there were those EU sanctions last year. Clearly the Israeli government can see the creeping impact of its isolation in the international community. So it is a testament to Netanyahu's paranoia that he would attack his closest and most important allies in the world. But his fears may well come to fruition if the US backs down at the UN. And that would almost certainly mean the Palestinians would get a state of some kind. Meanwhile the Hank Jackson know-nothings - which includes the combined mental might of Michael Gove, David Willetts, Denis MacShane, and not just Douglas Murray - can get back to their domestic agenda of ripping tax-payer money out of public services to feather the nests of the ultra-rich. It's clear what people like Murray and Simms want, and it isn't civilisation.

Anti-Semites for Israel.

The younger Bushman has crawled out from under his rock to speak to speak at a fundraising dinner today with tickets going from $100 to $100,000. For the latter you can get a VIP pass for twenty guests to see the anointed one, have your picture taken with him and get a copy of Decision Points autographed. This would not be a noteworthy event if it weren't for the fact that the event is being held by the Messianic Jewish Bible Institute. If that sounds odd here's a little clarification, the Institute's stated mission is to convert world Jewry to Christianity in order to bring about the Rapture. No doubt this is in accordance with the view that the End Times will mean burning in an everlasting lake of fire for all Jews (except for 140,000 Jews who are converted to Christianity). This is just one strategy for those on the Christian Right in its Armageddonist fantasies.

We should not be surprised to find a confluence of this level of fantasy and anti-Semitism. Even if we accept their professions of love for Israel as genuine we should not buy into the assumption that the Jewish state and the Jewish people are synonymous. Faiths and cultures are far too complex generally to be confined to a body national. The history of Christian anti-Semitism is too often whitewashed in an era where Israel seems mired in perpetual conflict with its neighbours and the Palestinians. The Roman Catholic Church only rescinded its accusations of deicide against the Jews in 1965, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. European societies have long found the presence of the apparently unsettled and rootless rather troubling. No wonder then anti-Semitism often combines with anti-Roma sentiments. The solution for some European Christians was to resituate the Jews as rooted citizens, either by stripping them of their Jewishness or by relocating them entirely.

 

Even in the liberal Christian states of the 19th Century the problem was that the Jewish tradition was not easily confined to the realm of an individuals' rights and freedoms. Traditions are communitarian rather than individualist. In the past this meant effective conversions and later it led to the proposals of the Nazi Party to relocate European Jewry to Madagascar. By contrast the Muslim world had little beef with Jews as a people without a land, it was once the state of Israel was founded (and the way in which it was founded) that the problems really heated up. In this way we find that the Christian anti-Semites have a vested interest in a Jewish state as a solution to their problem. You find this with people like John Hagee, a televangelist who has even suggested that the Holocaust was a part of God's plan to turn the Jews back toward Israel. This is not an exceptional case.

 

That old mountebank Pat Robertson wrote a book of conspiratorial fantasy in which the Jews play a role in a new world order set up. Then there was Billy Graham who was caught on tape to President Nixon (another remarkable bigot) agreeing that the Jews have a 'stranglehold' on the American media and referred to a 'synagogue of Satan'. And of course, you can't forget Jerry Falwell, the spiritual godfather of the Moral Majority, who once stated that the anti-Christ is among us and that he is an adult male Jew. Yet all of these men professed support for Israel and pledged a great deal of political support for the Israeli government in wars from 1967 onwards. One of the prerequisites for the Rapture is that the Jews return to Israel. The compatibility of this restorationist agenda with anti-Semitism should not be ignored. Evidently, Judeophobia is not unique to the Old World. It's a country where hotels once bore the label 'restricted' to mean they wouldn't take in Jewish guests.

 

Given that George W Bush gave up Johnnie Walker Black for the Nazarene we may not be so shocked that he is at least sympathetic to the most fervent depths of nuttiness. This is one of the main sources of votes harvested by the GOP machine (not that Bush much needed votes). The former President is in good company as the last big speaker was Glenn Beck, the same man who tooted a horn for Elizabeth Dilling's crackpot tirades against Jews and Communists. Let alone the way he scapegoated Hungarian-Jewish banker George Soros as a 'puppet master' of the Left. In the end Beck lost his platform at Fox after he started to cost them advertising dollars and the dip in ratings. He had gone too far for Abe Foxman, but never too far for the Messianic Jewish Bible Institute who gave Beck its Defender of Israel award and then chowed down on a mighty hog-roast. Seriously treif scenes.

A Land with a People.

Click on Image

In a discussion over the events in Gaza recently I had the following exchange with a friend of mine about the fundamentals of the conflict. Note that the questioner is coming from a Christian perspective on the conflict, while I'm coming from an atheistic perspective. The primary issue is raised is the claim to the land and the specifics of the Zionist project.

Q: I will gather all the nations and bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat. And I will enter into judgment with them there, on behalf of my people and my heritage Israel, because they have scattered them among the nations and have divided up MY land..."Does this land belong to Israel or Palestine? Well actually, according to bible scripture, God calls it His land, but the prophetic word from Joel, written 850BC is that it will in fact be divided.

 
"I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel. There will be one king over all of them and they will never again be two nations or be divided into two kingdoms." (Ezekiel 37:22)

 
Joshua (great name Joshua, means 'God is salvation' or 'God rescues') rightly calls this a 'miserable situation', it has a long history, Ezekiel was written sometime around 590BC, about 650 years before Israel and Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans and the people scattered to 'the four corners of the earth'. We may ask the question was Israel returned there in 1948, fully in 1967 simply to fulfill prophecy, was it just a self-fulfilling prophecy or is there some authenticity to the prophecy. Will Jerusalem be divided? Certainly according to bible scripture it is not intended to be and if it is, will those responsible incur God's judgement?

A: Well, I don't think Jerusalem should be divided, that's merely the beginning of another problem. I take the position that is enshrined in international law: Jerusalem should be an international city, it's just too precious to belong to any state or religion. This is the same framework that would settle the conflict in a roughly 80:20 split of what used to be Palestine into Israel and Palestine. I won't comment on the scripture as I'm not a theologian, nor am I a religious man (in spite of my cool name! lol) and I think it's fair to say that the Bible is open to a lot of debate and theorisation - just look at the use of the recurring use of Gog and Magog by fundamentalists, from Reagan to Bush II, to explain foreign policy decisions.

We know from Israeli archaeology that there is considerable evidence that there has been a Jewish presence in Palestine for a very long time, this can be determined simply by the lack of pig bones in ancient communities. So there is a legitimate Jewish claim to live there. That's the case even if you don't buy the Bible, which most Israeli archaeologists don't by the way. There is also evidence that suggests the Palestinians are the descendents of the Jews who were living there thousands of years ago. Probably they were converted through conquest. This is all interesting, and somewhat ironic, but it doesn't provide any answer to the crisis in itself. The question of what the Zionist mission ought to be in its finer details is left completely open still. That could be part of the reason why there is opposition to peace from inside Israel, it remains unclear where the expansion should end - if 80% is too little how about 90% and so on? There are those who dream of a Greater Israel, and that will mean a perpetual war with the Arabs.

Example, should Israel be a Jewish state or a state for Jews? That's an important distinction which has never been fully clarified in Zionist circles. This matters because it relates to what kind of law there should be in Israel, as well as the demographic composition - if it's a state for Jews then it doesn't have to be a majority Jewish state for instance. By comparison, Pakistan was founded as a state for Muslims modeled on India but in the 1980s the dictatorship began to change this to the notion of Pakistan as an Islamic state (and even began to compare itself to Israel funnily enough). It impacts the internal politics of the nation-state, Pakistan has been dominated by authoritarian governments sometimes more irreligious at times. I think that Israel could've been founded in a better way than it has been, though in its foundation it was just like every other nation-state (e.g. born out of violence/theft). But we can't turn back time. The strongest claim of the Jews is perhaps based on their need for a safe haven. Again, that doesn't really deal with the details of what Israel should look like.

The important point to stress is that Israel (however defined) can exist with an independent and free Palestine as it's neighbour. To paraphrase Abba Eban, a free Palestine would pose the same threat to the existence of Israel as Luxembourg currently poses to Russia.

What ever happened to Brotherhood and Unity?

Quite some time ago in the middle of a talk about a political union in Europe there was a debate on Newsnight. It was apt that Nigel Farage make an appearance in standard populist colours against the liberal multiculturalist elites. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as Farage drew a comparison between the European Union and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The UKIP leader suggested that the reason Yugoslavia collapsed into appalling violence in the 1990s was a result of the imposition of Yugoslavia over sovereign nations in a bid to craft a multiethnic federal system. Thankfully Farage is too thick to comprehend the implications of such an analogy. Effectively it would go as far as an endorsement of the Fascist movements - such as the Ustaša and the Chetniks - that devastated the region before the Partisans triumphed over them. This is nothing unusual, and it's not the first time that the analogy has been drawn between the EU and Tito's Yugoslavia. Farage has deployed it repeatedly.

After all it was the final victory over the Communist-led Partisans who had succeeded where the Left had been defeated in Italy and Greece where the West crushed left-wing movements soon after the War. Out of the warring chaos parts of the Yugoslav Kingdom fell into the hands of Hungarian fascists, as well as German and Italian occupying forces; the Bulgarians and Albanians. Croatia and Bosnia were unified under the clerical fascist Ustaša while the Serb Chetniks fought against the genocidal regime with the aim of building a Greater Serbia. The Croats became a client-state of Nazism where Jasenocav (the fourth largest concentration camp in Europe) was founded with the expressed intention of exterminating Jews, Roma and Serbs. There around 600,000 people were slaughtered. There was a great deal of collusion between the Ustaša and the Catholic clergy, going as far as forced conversions of Jews and Orthodox Christians. The establishment of a socialist Yugoslavia was the ultimate defeat of Slavic brands of Fascism.

The West took the side of Tito's Partisans for pragmatic reasons and the Serb Chetniks as well as the Ustaša of Croatia were defeated. The Soviet Union lent the Partisans support only to portray Tito as an agent of Western imperialism after the split between Tito and Stalin. It was clear that the new Yugoslavia was not going to bow to any foreign power. Instead Tito carved out a particular place for his country as a founder of the Non-Aligned Movement with an apposite place in Europe between the competing superpowers of West and East. The idea was that the unity of Yugoslavia would prevent it from being thrown about by international forces. This is contrary to Farage's warped wish to see a free-market world of nations, where every country is powerless to the onslaught of international finance and multinational corporations. In his invincible ignorance Farage fails to see that British withdrawal from the EU would undermine British sovereignty even more. Likewise Farage cannot understand the implications of what it means to say that the EU is just another Yugoslavia.

It should be kept in mind that there have been many right-wingers who found the sight of Yugoslavia's crumbling into barbarism absolutely beautiful. This differs strongly from the small band of leftists who supported Milosevic out of a misguarded belief that it was the last chance to hold together Yugoslavia. By the time of the explosion of violence it was already too late and Yugoslavia was dead on its feet. What did the Right see in this? Well, the multiethnic composition of the federalism and its dependence on a culture of solidarity could not have repulsed many rightists any more than it did. The Titoist campaigns against nationalist sentiment certainly worry backward types like Nigel Farage. No doubt the Eurosceptics fear a federal state where they will be stamped out. Even more freightening is the possible end of the racial tensions that the Right can exploit to its ends. A culture of solidarity doesn't stop at ensuring improved relations between countries and peoples, it could go as far as to build a strong working-class movement.

After all the primary reason for the policy of brotherhood and unity was to hold together Yugoslavia as a socialist system. Tito could not launch a Stalinesque collectivisation, as it would've torn the country apart. Instead Tito decided to give away power to the republics and build the country into a model of market socialism. It featured a limited place for private enterprise and markets combined with a decentralised state-planning apparatus and workers' self-management. It was a prosperous system of development and growth for quite some time. The average rate of GDP was 6% at one point and the standard of living increased significantly, with the establishment of universal health-care and education came a life expectancy of 72 years and a literacy rate of 91%. Every Yugoslav citizen had a right to a job, unemployment was reduced drastically until the 1980s and every worker had a free month-long holiday every year with pay. There was affordable housing and public transportation across the country, while the borders were held open.

It's this model that the Right despises. It is not coincidental that so many right-wingers wanted to leave the Slavs to slaughter one another. The more honest reactionaries have been blunt in their support for the violence. Michael Savage was an open defender of Serbian nationalists attacking Muslims. Later Savage went on to attack Bill Clinton during the intervention in Yugoslavia. He even labelled the President 'Clintler' with regard to the NATO bombing of Serbia. What else would you expect from this fascist? Then there was Nora Beloff who wrote to The Economist in condemnation of the critics of Serbian atrocities. The way she saw it the Muslims are guilty by virtue of being Muslim, she's of the Israel First brigade you see. In this view the Serbs are just exercising their right to self-defence as the Christians fending off the barbarous Muslim hordes. Hitler said about the same of the Poles. It's about the same line that Karadzic has used to defend his actions - such as sending snipers onto the roof of his hotel to shoot civilians as he made his escape.

On Suicide.

 

As far as I can see, it is only the monotheistic, that is to say Jewish, religions whose members regard self-destruction as a crime. This is all the more striking in that neither in the Old nor in the New Testament is there to be found any prohibition or even definite disapproval of it; so that religious teachers have to base their proscription of suicide on philosophical grounds of arguments lack in strength they have to try to make up for by the strength of the terms in which they express their abhorrence; that is to say, they resort to abuse. Thus we hear that suicide is the most cowardly of acts, that only a madman would commit it, and similar insipidities; or the senseless assertion that suicide is ‘wrong’, though it is obvious there is nothing in the world a man has a more incontestable right to than his own life and person. Let us for once allow moral feelings to decide this question, and compare the impression made on us by the news that an acquaintance of ours has committed a crime, for instance a murder, an act of cruelty, a betrayal, a theft, with that produced by the news that he has voluntarily ended his life. While the former will evoke a lively indignation, anger, the demand for punishment or revenge, the latter will excite pity and sorrow, which are more likely to be accompanied by admiration for his courage than by moral disapproval. Who has not had acquaintances, friends, relatives who have departed this world voluntarily? – and is one supposed to think of them with repugnance, as if they were criminals? In my opinion it ought rather to be demanded of the clergy that they tell us by what authority they go to their pulpits or their desks and brand as a crime an action which many people we honour and love have performed and deny an honourable burial to those who have departed this world voluntarily – since they cannot point to a single biblical authority, nor produce a single sound philosophical argument; it being made clear that what one wants are reasons and not empty phrases or abuse. If the criminal law proscribes suicide this is no valid reason for the Church to do so, and is moreover a decidedly ludicrous proceeding, for what punishment can deter him who is looking for death? If one punishes attempted suicide, it is the ineptitude of the attempt one punishes.

The only cogent moral argument against suicide is that it is opposed to the achievement of the highest moral goal, inasmuch as it substitutes for a true redemption from this world of misery a merely apparent one. But it is very long way from a mistake of this kind to a crime, which is what the Christian clergy want to call it.

Christianity carries in its innermost heart the truth that suffering (the Cross) is the true aim of life: that is why it repudiates suicide, which is opposed to this aim, while antiquity from a lower viewpoint approval of and indeed honoured it. This argument against suicide is however an ascetic one, and is therefore valid only from a far higher ethical standpoint than any which European moral philosophers have ever assumed. If we descend from this very high standpoint there no longer remains any tenable moral reason for damning suicide. It therefore seems that the extraordinary zeal in opposing it displayed by the clergy of monotheistic religions – a zeal which is not supported by the Bible or by any cogent reasons – must have some hidden reason behind it: may this not be that the voluntary surrender of life is an ill compliment to him who said that all things were very good? If so, it is another instance of the obligatory optimism of these religions, which denounces self-destruction so as not to be denounced by it.

But the terrors of death offer considerable resistance: they stand like a sentinel at the exit gate. Perhaps there is no one alive who would not already have put an end to his life if this end were something purely negative, a sudden cessation of existence. But there is something positive in it as well: the destruction of the body. This is a deterrent, because the body is the phenomenal form of the will to live.

The struggle with that sentinel is as a rule, however, not as hard as it may seem to us form a distance: the reason is the antagonism between spiritual and physical suffering. For when we are in great or chronic physical pain we are indifferent to all other troubles: all we are concerned about is recovering. In the same way, great spiritual suffering makes us insensible to physical pain: we despite it: indeed, if it should come to outweigh the other it becomes a beneficial distraction, an interval in spiritual suffering. It is this which makes suicide easier: for the physical pain associated with it loses all significance in the eyes of one afflicted by excessive spiritual suffering.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Pussy Riot's Challenge.

"Holy Mother, Blessed Virgin, chase Putin out," they sang only to receive 2 years for less than 2 minutes of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. Out of the convicted Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich have participated in performances staged by Voina. In one such instance Samutsevich released Madagascan giant cockroaches into a courtroom and went on to kiss on duty female police officers. Tolokonnikova took part in an orgy staged in the Biology Museum in Moscow. Pussy Riot could be seen as an off-shoot of this movement in its devotion to shock and challenge the assumptions of conservative Russians. Predictably Pussy Riot has come up against the cursed spirit of Russian chauvinism in its personification of a pallid dwarfish man-beast. This hardline strain of intolerance ought to be a source of shame for a country that produced so many great artists - from Dostoevsky to Mayakovsky - and particularly great in literature with which the West can hardly compete to this day. Now art has become a battleground for the faithful and the political in present day Russia.

In defence of the trial and sentencing Alexander Nekrassov pointed to the cathedral as an anti-Stalinist monument. Except Nekrassov conveniently forgets that the parodic punk prayer was meant to strike at age old pillars of Russian authoritarianism. The first target was Putin's Kremlin, the secondary target was Russian Orthodoxy as a superstructural spectre of the conditions in Russian society. It has to be said that the Orthodox Church has long served to legitimise the status quo in Russia. This was true in the days when the Tsar stood as the semi-divine head of the Church and it's unfortunately true in the present Mafia state. It was the Russian Orthodox Church which fabricated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, blaming the evils of the world on the Jewish people, and in doing so contributed greatly to the Judeophobia rife in Europe at the time. Indeed, it became Hitler's "warrant" for genocide. Today it is the bedtime reading of neo-Nazis everywhere, it has been distributed by Henry Ford and Hamas while David Icke has cited it as a 'factual document'.

 

Even Nekrassov's claim that the Church can be taken as an anti-Stalinist symbol shouldn't be taken too seriously. Although the Church had flirtations with oppositional activity, the suicidal regime of Stalin's creation fell back on religiosity as well as nationalism to support the war effort. The campaigns against religion in the 1920s and 30s were put on hold until Khrushchev began to close churches once again in the 60s. Indeed, it made sense given that the war with Germany was a bloodbath for Russia – leaving in excess of 20 million dead. The breach left open after the fall of the Tsar was filled by Stalin as he took on the guise of a god-king complete with an era of heresy hunts, miracles and even an inquisition. It was the Orthodoxy that had worked to instil a cultural credulity among Russians to the benefit of the Tsars and later Stalinism. This isn't to say that the Soviet Union was a religious state, but the Church can hardly be taken as anti-Stalinist so totally. We should turn to the question of Russia's politics and the rudderlessness of organised religion.

The real test is whether or not the Orthodox Church will rise to its stated commitment to the principles by which Christ lived by. As Giles Fraser points out "The legal case against Jesus was that he violated the holy. He was criticised for allowing his disciples to eat without washing properly and for picking corn on the day set aside as holy. He said he was God yet he was born in a filthy stable and willingly laid hands on lepers. He had no problem with being touched by menstruating women or eating with those regarded as unwholesome." This constituted a thoroughgoing deconstruction of the holy, as Fraser notes, that had become an alibi for political injustice. The same challenge was made by the Hebrew prophets, being profane is precisely the point. This should be taken as an opportunity for Russia's progressive Christians to reassert themselves as an alternative to the Kremlin's mascot church. Right now, the Russian Orthodoxy is just another rod with which Putin can kosh dissidents. But the Church will survive as a weapon for future administrations. So it's vital that there be an alternative Christianity to the established Church.

Socialism as a secular faith.

In God is not Great Christopher Hitchens writes “When I was a Marxist, I did not hold my opinions as a matter of faith but I did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered.” He goes onto note that there is no supernatural or absolutist element in dialectical materialism, but it did have a ‘messianic’ aspect in its faith in the coming revolution. There are also martyrs and saints in the figures of Che Guevara and Vladimir Lenin. With Stalinism there was the papacy complete with heresy hunts, miracles and inquisitions. He draws parallels between the leftist reverence for Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg and the elevation of particular figures in Christianity to the status of sainthood. No doubt Karl Marx is the founding Jewish prophet of this faith, while Luxemburg is a mixture of Cassandra and Jeremiah in Hitch’s mind.It has been acknowledged by Hitch’s former IS comrade Terry Eagleton that Karl Marx may have been an atheist there are Judaic themes in secular form to be found in his thinking.

This includes notions of justice, emancipation, the reign of peace and plenty, the day of reckoning, history as a narrative of liberation, the redemption not just of the individual but of a whole dispossessed people. You could draw a parallel between Marx’s avoidance of sketching out utopia of the future and the Jewish aversion to any speculation of the World to Come. Hitchens favours this side of the bearded dialectician because this is where we find the hostility to fetishism, idols and illusions. Again, all of this could be seen as Judaic. Yet it is the case that the tenets of dialectical materialism do not consistent of any set of claims about the cosmos. So the religious may subscribe to Marxist materialism, the curious blend of German philosophy, French politics and English economics. In fact Karl Marx once told his wife Jenny that if she wants to “satisfy” her metaphysical needs she’d do better to seek out the Jewish prophets than to attend the Secular Society. Perhaps if Marx is the founding prophet then Leninism serves as a Pauline ‘betrayal’ necessary for the establishment of a universal church.

Today it is no coincidence that the liberals have become increasingly obsessed with secularisation while the radicals have taken up theology as a pursuit. It’s nothing new. Nietzsche’s enmity for socialism came down to his view of the project as a radicalised kind of Christianity. There is an element of truth in this charge:just as the Christians live for the otherworldly the socialists seek to build, out of this world, the other world. It is no wonder then that the New Atheists fall back on liberal shibboleths as a presupposed Gnosticism – especially the notion of history as progress, to which any obstacle must be circumvented. It might be because liberalism really believes in nothing except that the individual should be free to believe that the last obstacle is totalitarian belief itself. The first step towards totalitarianism, in the liberal mind, is any attempt to reach beyond the confines of capitalist society. So for many it would seem the only political project, of any worth, is the fight to rid the world of faith.

In this sense the New Atheists are post-political in their anti-theism. It is apt then that Christopher Hitchens took on this projectafter he lost his ‘faith’ in socialism. Despite Hitch’s tirades against God, conveniently framed to provide a defence of the ‘War on Terror’, he admitted that if he could he would not rid the world of religious conviction. Apparently there is no third camp between Athens and Jerusalem, rationality in one corner and religiosity in another. Yet in his newfound ‘free-thinking’ Hitchens severed any responsible commitments he had before to take on the convictions needed to support the invasion of Iraq.The liberal tradition (which certainly includes the New Atheists) does not have the monopoly over democracy, civil liberties, human rights and notions of equality. The same goes for its claim to science, reason and unbelief. The Marxist project was originally pitched as scientific in its critique of capitalism, which went as far as to take the church as a superstructural institution that serves to legitimatise the economic system.

There is no contradiction here. The New Atheists may adhere to a strenuous conception of secularity, but it was the Catholic tradition which spawned secularism as an irreligious realm where there is space for religious conviction, influence and practice. John Gray traces absolutism and atheism to the advent of monotheism, in its fundamental claim to universal truth. Unbelief is just an extension of the Abrahamic passion for truth.Gray stresses that “Only with Christianity did the belief take root that one way of life could be lived by everyone.” Before monotheism it was taken for granted that the rejection of one god merely meant the embrace of another god and another cult. It was the first time that there was strictly one way to live and believe, which had to be taken above all others. He claims that “If the world had remained polytheist, it could not have produced communism or ‘global democratic capitalism’.”For polytheism is too ‘delicate’ for modern thinking Gray concludes “If we live in a world without gods, we have Christianity to thank for it.”

In defence of 'anti-Semites'.

The charge of anti-Semitism is regularly levelled against anyone with the clarity of moral conscience to criticise Israel in its rejectionism of international law and aggression against the Palestinians and neighbour-states. Ken Livingstone was routinely labelled an ‘anti-Semite’ for his support of the Palestinian rights and putting a Jewish journalist on the spot for writing for a paper owned by The Daily Mail, formerly pro-Mosley and pro-Hitler now just a sour proto-fascist rag. Incidentally The Daily Mail has stuck to the line that the Frankfurt School are behind the triumphs of gay rights, dependency culture, mass-immigration and multiculturalism. In other words, all the faults of modern society (as they see it) are down to a left-wing Jewish cabal. The bogeyman of cultural Bolshevism has been replaced by cultural Marxism. This is no different to the Hitlerian claim that the source of all the world’s problems is Judeo-Bolshevism. The Daily Mail gets away with it because it is ‘pro-Israel’ and Ken Livingstone is put on the spot for reviewing books on Press TV. It was more important for much of the press to slander Livingstone as a Judeophobe for his position on Palestine. 

The elementary standards of morality and human decency go out of the window in such cases. This is most evident in extreme instances of vilification. For example, Masada2000 have produced the Jewish SHIT list which amounts to a list of 7,000 Jews who are Self-Hating Israel Threating complete with black-and-white sinister photographs. The ambulance chaser Alan Dershowitz – a good lawyer for guilty clients – went as far as to accuse Norman Finkelstein’s late mother of being a Nazi collaborator while she was in Auschwitz. He then went on to conjure up a campaign against Finkelstein that culminated in him being denied tenure at DePaul University. No doubt the Catholic university would’ve been labelled ‘anti-Semitic’ if it had done otherwise. The most recent shocker was when a poem by Günter Grass was banned by the Israeli government, simply because it points out (what we all know) that the Israeli political-military class wants a fight with Iran. Even Mossad and Shin Bet have confirmed that Netanyahu is a dangerous figure, but it’s still too much to say so in the West where criticism of Israel is still unwelcome.

As Gore Vidal notes it was Irving Kristol, the fairy godfather of neoconservatism, who wrote “If one had informed American Jews fifteen years ago that there was to be a powerful revival of Protestant fundamentalism as a political as well as religious force, they would surely have been alarmed, since they would have assumed that any such revival might tend to be anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. But the Moral Majority is neither.” This conveniently ignores the anti-Semitism rife on the Christian Right. The evangelicals are supportive of Israel only to bring on the Rapture and see to it that the Jews (except for 140,000 who are automatically ‘saved’) along with the Muslims and other assorted heretics are sent straight to hell. It was Herzl who had foreseen that the anti-Semitic nations would become the political allies of Zionism. Today the anti-Semites who are ‘pro-Israeli’ can be let-off, while any opposition to Israeli policy from gentiles is a sign of a Brownshirt and from Jews it’s a symptom of neurotic self-loathing.

It was Ronald Reagan who said “Israel is the only stable democracy we can rely on as a spot where Armageddon could come.” The subject of Vidal’s scorn was another leading neoconservative Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter. The neoconservative ‘democratic revolutionaries’ are typically ex-leftist apologists for American military might and the cause of a Greater Israel. Irving Kristol remarked that a neoconservative is a liberal mugged by reality. It could well be said that these mugged liberals discovered the useful side of the politics of hate: whether it be feminists, blacks, fags or quiche-eating liberals the dice have to be rolled if you’re a betting man. And betting men like Kristol and Podhoretz have no problem taking the side of some of the most rancid anti-Semites on the planet. Gore Vidal pointed out that the Israel lobby has had to keep in line with American foreign policy for the sake of military aid to Israel. This has meant that the old liberal positions simply won’t do and the American Jewish Committee had to shift further rightwards.

The scathing ink of Gore Vidal’s pen never shirked away from controversy. He was not one of the politically correct minded liberals. This fearlessness came across in his provocative insinuation of ‘dual loyalties’ among the ex-leftist Jewish intellectuals who comprised neoconservatism at the time. It is the political-military establishment of the US and Israel to which the neoconservatives are most loyal, not the love of any country in particular. He stands with Israeli peaceniks, the very people that the neoconservatives despise.He describes the Israeli settlers as ‘predatory’ in the same way that the white people who settled and cleansed the Americas were ‘predators’. This isn’t ‘moral equivalence’ as Gore Vidal knows full well that the founding of America involved the deaths of millions of Native Americans. He merely acknowledges Israel is in the same line in its state-founding violence. Nearly 1 million Palestinians were dispossessed to found Israel and now constant violence is used to further expand the nation-state.

There’s a line that you cannot cross when it comes to criticism of Israel, then you instantly become an anti-Semitic defender of radical Islamism.In the attack on Gaza in late 2008 over 1,400 Palestinian civilians, one-third of them children, were killed by Israeli bombs and bullets. There was no target out of bounds, hospitals, mental health centres and ambulances were attacked. Even schools were doused in white phosphorus and the illegality of such an action does not rouse the conscience of the apologists for barbarism. In the words of George Orwell "The nationalist does not only disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." It all falls under the umbrella of ‘self-defence’, but if the use of white phosphorous is justified in these terms in ‘defence’ of Israel then would it follow that the suicide-bombers of Palestine are justified by their claim to ‘defence’? It should be noted that the Palestinian claim to self-defence is surely stronger than the Israeli claim, for the reason that the Israeli government is the primary aggressor.

Chaim Weizmann used to say that the danger to Israel was not the ‘extremists’, it was the ‘moderates’ who posed the real threat. It is the case that the Israeli establishment prefers anti-Semites to moderate reformers, it can dismiss the opposition if they are salivating at the prospect of slaughtering Jewish children. This is precisely the reason that the Israeli government protected Sheikh Yassin for a long time. Yet he was a major proponent of Islamic nutdom as well as anti-Semitic delusions. In the early days of the first intifada the Israeli government actually sponsored Islamism to undermine Arab nationalists and the secular Left. Strikes at universities on the West Bank were broken up by busing in Islamists. It went as far as to actually fund Hamas in order to undermine Arafat’s base of support. The PLO had to be destroyed because it proposed a pragmatic solution in 1976: a return to the borders before the 1967 war, 22% of the land goes to the Palestinians and 78% to the Israelis complete with recognition of Israel. The US blocked the settlement even though it had the support of virtually the entire world including the Arab states and the PLO.