On "hatred," Eric Adams, and Israel

Remarks on the occasion of NY Mayor Eric Adams accusing the Democratic Socialists of America, which opposes the Israeli invasion of Gaza, of Nazism (an accusation that is a pure falsity):

First, when someone accuses someone else of hatred, this is often a clue that the accuser hates.

Secondly, the concept of "hatred" is thrown about all too easily in a society that pays at least (and perhaps mostly) lip service to the Christian ideal of universal "love." It is easier to believe in that as an idea than it is to practice it in any consequentially beneficial way. Consequently, it serves well as ideology. And that ideology is not necessarily a very reliable key at all to the generosity or goodness of the people proclaiming it.

Thirdly, "hatred" and "love" go together, and their objects are typically the "enemy" and the "friend," which are united by the situation of legitimated conflict or war.

Fourthly, nationalism is the typical ideology in the modern world of war, and identity politics is the nationalism of the set or subset of persons specially valued by the polemical and belligerent constitution of the privileged identity of "us," those who "belong," and are recognizable as fraternal friends who owe and may expect solidarity from one another, and that precisely and only in measure of their shared opposition to some foe, who is excluded by the inclusion of those who belong in the set.

Fifthly, a minoritarian identity politics poses as radical or left when it wants to use its invocations of resentment to win assent to those it claims to represent, and poses or acts as right-wing in the consequent exclusions.

Sixthly, identity politics and nationalism, through national and identity-based liberation movements, effect a pseudo-liberation achieved by means of representation.

Seventh, this explains and makes probable affiliations such as New York Mayor Eric Adams. He embraces a Zionist narrative (in the particular form of hatred of its enemies, in his case furthered with blatant lies he expects in a post-truth age that many of his followers will believe) because it links up with his own pseudo-liberationist representational right-wing politics.

Eighth, this touches upon current world problems in the following way: the situation of the Palestinian people is of being potential victims of a war between state actors, one of which claims to represent them, the other of which will kill many of them in the name of the opposing state actor. In this regard, they are in a position similar to that of many people who may become migrants. They are potentially displaced by conflicts among states, and actually dispossessed materially by contemporary global capitalism. and the militarism that serves it. The situation they are in has, in some important ways, less to do with the particularities of the religious and national differences involved than with movements of global capital that consistently involve the enrichment of certain population groups and the correlative impoverishment of others.

Ninth, the Holocaust is not over, and it is doubly much more than a Jewish event. In the first place, it had many non-Jewish victims, and the specificity of the event itself is thereby widely misconstrued. Secondly, we live in a world where whole peoples can be subjected to conditions that make it difficult or impossible to go on living even a bare life. The Holocaust was one instance of that, with certain particularities to be sure; it was not purely a consequence of any logic of capitalism per se in the sense of profit, but it was a feature of a modernity in which large numbers of persons can be treated by powerful actors, financial, government, and military, as, basically, disposable.

Finally, while the causes of the Holocaust are multiple, one of them was German identitarian nationalism. It was a certain idea of the construction and perfection of a national state, involving a set of features that are still with us. That is a problem, a bigger one that most people realize, and it is doubtful that any national liberation project can solve it. None has achieved more than protecting some of its own citizens.