On the Teleology of Genocide
“Accusing Palestinians of being antisemitic is like accusing indigenous people of being anti-European or anti-Christian.”—Norman Finkelstein, on an Issue of Justice.
The empire has exported the colonial logic of fear. The effect? Aggressive disavowal. It is the key ingredient that allows for a renewed terra nullius through ethnic cleansing. To achieve this, the propaganda model, as described by Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent, is utilized in every arena of society. But this false consciousness stands on no ground. The colonizing machine is not a thinking machine, Fanon reminds us. Through false flag operations, it jump-starts an attack to raise anxiety, in which all fantasies of paranoia can be directed onto a phantasmatic Other. The Shame Industrial Complex has been captured within the hegemony, which is then sublimated to active hatred of the minority and willful ignorance of the majority.
Antisemitism has been repackaged, repurposed, and exported. The word has been so abused that it has become the dog whistle to bypass all rational thinking.
“It seems to me the Holocaust is being sold—it is not being taught,” said Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, Hillel director at Yale University.
In a neoliberal world where good feelings have become a commodity and marker of status, knowledge of truth has become a kryptonite of the contemporary bourgeois. I constantly return to the double bind expressed by Baukje Prins, as referenced by Gloria Wekker in her book White Innocence, “If you want to be equal to us, then don’t talk about differences, but if you are different from us, then you are not equal.”
The cycle continues ad infinitum. The question is, what happens when we have consumed the entirety of the Other? The colonizer or white supremacist is in a position of constant anxiety. It relies on a Manichean split to exist. An apartheid state requires the existence of the Other to function—a slave to its own creation. Bruce Fink writes, "For once desire is articulated in words it does not sit still, but displaces, drifting metonymically from one thing to the next. Desire is a product of language and cannot be satisfied with an object.”
The problems of the Europeans became the Jewish Problem, which went to a “logical conclusion” of a “final solution.” For now, it has transformed into a Palestinian Problem. The elimination of the Second World, the Communist problem, had become a problem of terrorism or a repackaging of the Muslim problem. The problem of the poor becomes a Negro Problem, an Asian Problem, a Mexican Problem, an Immigrant Problem. The problem of the undesirable becomes a Ghetto Problem. There is no satisfying the obsessional neurosis. The more you scratch, the bigger the wound.
Thus, the anxiety of the other is not only a problem of someone somewhere out there but eventually becomes something within. Who is the colonizer? And does one ever truly succeed in a genocide?