[Orig to FB]
It seems that being “complicit” in another nation’s “genocide” bothers US lefts far more than being straight-up guilty of incinerating one of the greatest cities in the world and many people in it. I put “genocide” in quotes not because I’m skeptical about that (my views on that don’t matter) but because the word itself became a shibboleth: someone’s willingness or refusal to use it served as a shorthand way to announce which camp they were in — in other words, it served as a technique for eliminating any middle ground (and THAT is why I was and remain reluctant to use it).
Still: the mind-bending contrast between the public rage over Israel’s attacks on Gaza and the private passivity over the US war on Iran support my skepticism about much of the conflict surrounding Israel and Gaza… For now, there’s no discursive need in the US to eliminate the middle ground with regard to US attacks on Iran, so reactions to US attacks are more (sadly) ‘normal’ — muted and consistent with responses to earlier US wars of choice. And no, sorry, the issue is NOT that Gaza was a “genocide” but Iran isn’t one yet. If you buy that kind of pedantic explanation — “I’m not mad about Iran because it doesn’t mean UN such-and-such criteria” — you’re a fool and a dangerous one at that. EVERY violent death is a individual serving of the apocalypse, and NO person murdered in a cultural conflict will ever know whether their death was a part of a genocide.
Understand well, I believe that the pro-Palestinian movements demands for an immediate cessation of violence were right in every sense, and I know that Israel‘s expansionism is wrong in every sense. But, beyond that, the fury over Gaza had less to do with Gaza than with the US left’s internal dynamics — a desire for clarity, a drive to name things unambiguously (sayonara post-structural theory), a rage at the impersonal depredations of capital (or wtf ever), and — not least — a fury at our own inability to achieve our goals in durable ways. We can blame whoever or whatever we want for that, but the bottom line is that the US left is afraid of its own fucking shadow.
This is why I’ve been saying FOR YEARS AND YEARS that if you want to run things, you need to accept — and even embrace — the inexorable fact that the use of force will necessarily and inevitably make you complicit in harming innocent people. The aim should be to do it as little as possible and learn as much from every wrong. But if we want a just society, then we’ll need to MAKE a just society. And I’d much rather be complicit in a flawed effort to actively build a just society than guilty of passively accepting other’s efforts to build an unjust one. That distinction — which is several, really — defines where the US left sits now.