Pro-Hamas protesters are sanctimonious psychopaths
The bloodthirsty desires and doctrines motivating intolerable behaviors
must be identified and rejected outright
By Jordan Peterson
We are now exposed to the truly appalling spectacle of widespread demonstrations across the West supporting – explicitly or implicitly – the terrorists of Hamas. Some of the most shocking scenes unfolded in London, a city often held up as a beacon of immigration-fueled multiculturalism – one that has now seemingly lost its shine.
Yet, troublesome though the impact of such accelerated immigration may be, it is by no means the main reason why Hamas has acquired so much support. It is instead the careless naiveté and sheer blind heedlessness of the West in dealing with one of its most deadly national foes – Iran – in combination with the destructive ideological reaction presently threatening our culture to the core.
The tyranny of the Iranian mullahs
We like to believe, in our oft-unearned comfort, that differences in metaphysical and religious outlook can simply be overlooked in favor of the humanity we all hypothetically share. In consequence, we fail to seriously consider the very real differences that still exist between people (especially at their worst), and which cause the eternal conflicts and predatory and parasitic criminal activity that keep so much of the world poor, miserable and mean. We believe we can wave the magic wand of goodwill, and have all such variance in opinion and outlook vanish at the borders, leaving nothing behind but the much-vaunted “diversity” whose pursuit has become a moral imperative – or else.
We also foolishly underestimate the persistence, strength and cunning of those who regard our virtues and freedoms as vices and historical accidents. Some reports have Hamas leaders or former leaders taking up residence in London, or operating in the West with little genuine constraint. Regardless of the truth of those specific claims, or the clear and present danger posed by those leaders, there can be little doubt that the serpentine authoritarian operatives of our enemies are now causing as much disruption as they possibly can everywhere in the major cities of the democratic world.
The most germane example is currently provided by the tyrants of Tehran. Are we really too stupid to detect the presence of the Iranian pseudo-religious thugs behind these massive demonstrations, taking full advantage of the current conflict in Israel, which they did everything possible to bring about? It has long been to the advantage of the totalitarians who wish to cling pathetically to their power in the Middle East and elsewhere to use the Palestinians as cannon-fodder and goads in the side of the Jewish state, upon whom everything throughout time can so conveniently be blamed.
We need to remember that the Iranian mullahs are on the ropes. They are hated, with a vengeance, by their own citizens, and deservedly so. They are, in addition, existentially threatened by the Abraham Accords, and are doing everything in their power to discredit and destroy them. These agreements, long deemed impossible by the entrenched and intransigent State Department bureaucracy, brought peace and the possibility of cooperative prosperity to certain Arab/Muslim countries (the UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, and Sudan).
The much more powerful Saudis also welcomed and facilitated these initiatives behind-the-scenes. We therefore missed a stellar and historically unprecedented opportunity to bring them into the pro-Israel fold, mostly because of Democrat unwillingness to credit Donald Trump’s administration with any positive achievements whatsoever.
This is tragic, as the Abraham Accords profoundly undermined the narrative of “Muslims against everyone else” (most focally Jews); a narrative the bloody psychopaths always and inevitably depended upon to motivate the worst of themselves and their followers. Thus, it is in the clear interest of the Iran “leadership” to force the Israelis to defend themselves, using all due force, so that their military and strategic prowess can be spun as even more evidence of their oppressive and colonial ways.
Which brings us precisely to the central problem: the vengeful narrative of victim and victimizer that has infected broad swathes of the Western world.
A new front in the culture war
Everyone who hasn’t lived under a rock for the last two decades understands that we are in a culture war of unprecedented depth and breadth. It has not yet broken out into full-fledged conflict, although it came close with the Black Lives Matter and January 6 protests and, most recently and seriously, the massive aforementioned pro-Palestine demonstrations.
Disturbing as the dark cloud of the latter may well be, it came with the proverbial silver lining: the unquestionable revelation of the true nature of the culture war: a revelation shocking to so many. How could it possibly be that so much of Western academia (as well as progressives, more generally) could support the very movement behind the worst planned attack on Jews since the Holocaust?
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To understand that, we must come to understand the unholy alliance between postmodern philosophy and Marxism; something particularly, although not uniquely, attributable to one Michel Foucault, currently the world’s most-cited academic.
Foucault, who was the very embodiment of resentful bitterness (not least because of the alienation he suffered due to his sexual proclivities) devoted his tremendous intellect to the task of reducing all human motivation to a single dimension: that of power. For Foucault and his idiot quasi-Nietzschean followers, there is no reality other than that of compulsion and force: no responsibility, no rights, no truth, no heaven above nor hell below – nothing but the all-against-all of Thomas Hobbes.
Even those claiming to be motivated by, say, the intellectual tradition, the liberal ethos, or even the much-vaunted current Goddess of All-Encompassing Compassion are, according to the postmodernists, pursuing nothing but their own narrowly self-centered aims. Loathes they were to accept the existence of any uniting story – any “supreme meta-narrative,” in the jargon – they were eager to adopt this infinitely broadened formulation of the arrogant, resentful Marxist victim/victimizer narrative that was particularly attractive to so many major French intellectuals of the time. Thus – and predictably – they swallowed the proverbial camel, while straining at a gnat.
History, for Marx, was best understood as the eternal battle between the corrupt haves and the innocent, virtuous and oppressed have-nots – the now-cliched bourgeoisie and proletariat.
The world he proclaimed was thus pure conflict: two classes of inevitable enemies, eternally vied off against one another for control of the economic spoils (the only domain of value posited to exist, once all the religious and metaphysical “opiate of the masses” had been properly and progressively stripped away). This has morphed, under the pressure of the postmodern de-constructive ethos, into the meta-Marxism that similarly proclaims two classes of humanity, but in even starker form: the victims (those from whom the victimizers have robbed) and the victimizers (those who have everything – or anything at all).
The dichotomy is no longer merely economic, as it was under Marx. Instead, it characterizes every conceivable dimension of categorization, sexual, gendered (so-called), religious, ethnic, racial, athletic, aesthetic and meritorious. Everywhere there is the dynamic of power, and the inequality it inevitably produces; everywhere there are evil oppressors and the virtuous oppressed. This is the standard doctrine of the “elite” universities. From such sources, it has disseminated everywhere – and is opposed by faculty, students, administrators and now common citizens at their great peril.
The festishisation of victimhood, and its consequences
In this bleak existential landscape, there are no sovereign citizens of ineffable essential worth, exchanging rational opinions in the attempt to bring clarity, productivity, generosity and truth to the fore. There are no divinely-souled human beings, capable of civilized cooperation and competition. There are merely competitors in an irreducibly ideological realm, clamoring for arbitrarily-granted attention and fighting for power – with the worst of those promoting the veritable language of freedom, rights, responsibility and human dignity for no other reason than their narrow self-aggrandisation.
There is no property: only theft. There is no merit: only the definitions of merit that serve the powerful. There is no intrinsically-meaningful human struggle. Instead, there are the brief dominance-motivated battles of mortal material beings, struggling in pointless quasi-Darwinian competition, trampling in the rush to seek status on the heads of the arbitrarily less-fortunate others.
A more comprehensively destructive, nihilistic and inevitably sadistic doctrine has never been imagined; neither has a system of thought ever so clearly and unapologetically justified the use of force and compulsion. Remember: if nothing exists but power, it is only the fool who fails to use it.
In this nightmarish world, there are only two social positions: you and your group (for there are no “individuals” in this conceptual scheme) are either victims or victimizers. This is a very simple theory, and something therefore profoundly attractive to the willfully blind, stupid and ignorant. It is equally convenient, however, to the bitter and resentful – and, therefore, downright irresistible to those who combine both sets of dubious attributes.
The central venomous claim? If you are successful, in any guise, by any standards of comparison whatsoever, then you are a victimizer. If you are not, you are a victim.
A rigid moral claim accompanies this act of starkly black-and-white comparison: there are, as well, only two forms of acceptable and laudable moral conduct or reputation. If you are a victim, or an “ally,” you are with no further effort goodness incarnate. This is supposed, on “philosophical” grounds, to be self-evident, following as it does so deservedly in the wake of your loudly trumpeted compassion. If you are a victimizer, however, look the hell out: you are evil incarnate, and inescapably so: a predatory parasite, rightly subject to the most brutal of treatment. Indeed, the terrible treatment you thereby experience does nothing but redound to the credit of your so-Godly-and-compassionate persecutors.
If you are a victimiser, after all, you have no moral standing whatsoever. No punishment is therefore undeserved, or sufficiently severe. This is true even if you are “only” a member of a victimizing group, and have done nothing wrong other than that, because “individual” is a category that within the postmodern philosophy no longer exists.
If you are a victim, by contrast, any and all moral outrage is justified, worthy and laudable – even morally required – even if you are merely a self-aggrandising, vindictive and hypocritical “ally” of some marginalized group. The fact that such latitude in reactive or vengeful action fully opens the door to the worst possible actions by the worst imaginable narcissists and psychopaths is also something rapidly glossed over or ignored by the vengeful ideologues of the postmodern Left – most likely because it is an outcome most intensely desired in the their most resentful fantasies.
‘Victimizers’ and its impact on the Israel-Gaza conflict
What does this mean, specifically, for understanding the Israel-Gaza conflict and the world-wide demonstrations following in its aftermath?
Well, few would disagree that Israel is a highly successful nation. It is a society that hyper-values intellectual accomplishment and success. Does this make it admirable? Not to those for whom any sign of success whatsoever indicates the dynamic of victimiser and victim. Not to those who would rather assume that such success must be a consequence of some behind-the-scenes conspiracy. Ability, effort and merit do not exist, remember, in the postmodern meta-Marxist world. Historic attacks on Israel and its citizens jives in more modern times all-too-well with the radical Leftist insistence that success is nothing more than the evil consequence of the evil capitalist system in which it arose.
The consequent inevitable conclusion that the disproportionately successful Israelis must then be uniquely exploitative turns out to be very convenient for the Iranian leader-thugs, eternally hoping to deflect the attention away from their own unforgivable failings.
There are plenty of Arabs or Muslim oppressors for the truly “compassionate” folk on the Left to concern themselves with. There are many truly oppressed people. Take for example the devastated inhabitants of Sudan, where various militias operate brutally and invisibly – completely off the radar of many virtue-signalers in the West. The same might be said even more broadly of the women of Iran, the oppression of whom is a clear hallmark of psychopathic brutality.
Where are the howls of outrage from the Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge do-gooders about the plight of the veiled in that brutal state? Even Amnesty International, most notable now for its woke foolishness, has called without success on the world to make its objections to such things noted.
Even if the Palestinians were victimized – and some case can be made for that – they are certainly not alone, and it is hard to put forward a credible argument that the Jews of the region don’t deserve at least equal a priori sympathy, especially given how many are direct descendants of those who went through some of the worst catastrophes in the history of the world under the Nazis – something acknowledged by the UN when it announced an independent Jewish state (and, lest it be forgotten, a corresponding Arab state) in 1948.
A warning from history
The danger of the victim/victimiser narrative, as such, cannot be overstated. It was its promulgation that engendered Lenin, Stalin and Mao. It was its spread that gave rise to Nazi Germany, and to the more recent absolute catastrophe of the Rwandan massacres. It is a tale as old as time: Cain himself was the first victim, and his good brother, Abel, the first victimiser, deserving of nothing less than a violent death.
The instinct operating within the doctrine driving such divisions is aimed not at the forgiveness and peace it constantly claims but the punishment and mayhem that it more truly and most deeply desires. This is a motive in keeping that famously diagnosed by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, where he accused the intellectual socialists, in particular, of not so much loving the poor as hating the rich. Such simple and convenient identification of oppressor provides the murderous with precisely the balm to conscience required to despise and torture, with the best of conscience.
There are now hundreds of thousands marching for the denomination of Jews, manipulated, behind the scenes, by the actions of the Iranian autocrats. They would have little purchase, however, if not enabled by the wretched, simple-minded, prideful “intellectual” Western ideologues, fulminating hatred in the name of compassion, contaminating everything everywhere of any worth whatsoever with the dread accusation of exploitation and oppression.
This has happened time and time again in history. The descendants of the ancient Israelites are the universal canaries in the coal mine. If we allow those who are envious of their success to rule, or even to move among us unimpeded in their actions, we are most truly laying our necks, as well as theirs, on the line. We will pay the dread piper, inevitably, as societies and the individuals who compose them have always paid for committing this most egregious, covetous, arrogant, prideful and sadistic of sins.
Enough stupidity and blindness. The barbarians are no longer at the gate. They are inside – inside our cities, our civilization, and our souls. Too many clamor, in consequence, to once again punish Jews. The bloodthirsty desires and doctrines motivating and justifying such behavior must be identified, understood and rejected, before things get seriously out of hand – and that could happen sooner and with more devastating force than even the most pessimistic among us might be inclined to think.
