If genocide was the answer, what is the question?

Franco "Bifo" Berardi's new book "Thinking Gaza: An Essay on Ferocity" is one of the more provocative essays yet on the meaning of the current crisis posed for the world, including the Jewish world. With a clear debt to a line of thinking that extends from the Adorno's famous pessimism about the possibilities of world civilization after Auschwitz, Berardi channels unremitting despair. What he his faith in is critique in the face of this despair, the resistance of thought. Obviously written quickly in the force of circumstance and extending his recent thinking about chaos and the increasingly manifest destructiveness of a capitalism that seems to have no opposition or escape. I wondered, does he think our global capitalism will lead the world into something akin to the fourteenth century's contagion that wiped out much of Europe's population along with a flourishing medieval world (but that was followed by various developments). We can't know the answer to such questions, though Berardi seems determined to announce an ending that promises no beginning. We do know that most of the world's people would, or will, welcome the advances of the sciences and the artifacts of culture in the absence of mass immiseration and constant war. For we could have culture and even technology without its being used only to protect hoarded wealth with apparatuses of destruction. Nothing in mathematics itself entails that its main uses are to build machines of war and policing. Berardi thinks the "socialism or barbarism" question has been decided irrevocably in favor of the latter. I think we don't know.

But that the Gaza war should be read as a sign that what was advancing during the second world war under the hegemony of a ferocious militarism that briefly conquered Europe, that this is further advanced today.

We certainly also know that consoling fables of Jewish identity are no help and very much a hindrance. Simply: there are Jewish Nazis, and Judaism is as susceptible as any religion or set of literary or artistic works of being used in the service of the worst crimes imaginable. And it is being used for that purpose. This is irreparable.

The best way Jewish leaders can stem the tide of antisemitism is to fight fascism, starting where they, we are now.

It is not the first time that many of them were part of the problem even, and especially, when they meant to be part of the solution. As in Europe in the 1940's, the present situation is unmanageable.

The dream of capitalist reason is the monstrosity of the destruction of worlds and world. This is no longer a proposition to be entertained as if it were a possibility existing somewhere on the horizon that we pray, hope, or hedge our bets wishing to avoid, god forbid, since all good children want to believe that they are good.

The world is on fire and telling the stories of our ancestors so that we can believe we are good, happy, and, of course, free is a place that if we got to after escaping some particular nightmare would not, in this one, be enough.

Given that there is unmanagable, irreperable, irremediable catrastrophe, that the worst is real, that there is no immanent redemption, what is to be done?

In the name of ideologies that are easily supplied with their compelling reasons, people are murdered, tortured, imprisoned, often in unspeakable horrifying ways.

What is happening today is not lessened in its horror by comparison to the Nazi camps. It is often enough just as horrible. This has been true for a long time.

The Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim claimed that because of Auschwitz, Jews have an obligation to be Jewish and cultivate Jewishness. In this way, and this way only, can future Holocausts be prevented.

This is false, and today that it is false is plainly evident. That is what the Gaza genocide should teach Jews today. Future Holocausts will not be avoided by Jews being Jewish in the best way, because the essence of the Holocaust as the destruction of the Jewish people was not that it is a people that were almost destroyed but that what happened to people was destruction. This point may seem trivial but it is a very consequential logical truth: If event E happens to subject S, what is most important to understand, that subjects S, having suffered what we all agree is an intolerable wrong, must not so suffer, at least not be destroyed, but must instead persist, perhaps so that they can testify to the event? The event needs testimony, so that, if possible, we find a way to 'cure' its causes so that there is no repetition of this event. Holocaust memorialization did not provide such testimony with this effect; instead it was used to sanctify the victims while making the event something that should be repeated in a displacement onto other victims in order to prove to ourselves that we were wronged and should act. But the world today does not need as much to be reminded that Jews were victims of a Holocaust as that things like the Holocaust are possible. What are their conditions of possibility? Hatred of a people? But the Palestinian people are in a situation more akin to that of much of the world's poor. They were in the way and not needed. Capital didn't need them. This war was America's war and the ideology supplied for it may have as little relationship to the war itself as anti-Communist ideology did to the genocidal war in Vietnam. There, it was to suppress a national liberation movement (then, as now, not the most lovable one imaginable on all points when considered in actual terms) that was in the way of American capitalism. The ideology was useful to the warmongers and the very profitable industries that supplied them. The losers were a lot of poor people. Who wanted, mostly, to stay alive and if possible live free of the domination of another country that they didn't want. That their own government wasn't the best in our government's opinion might or might not be an important consideration, but might not justify a genocide, if you ask what is just and not only what ideas serve to justify what we are doing or the sense of collective self we want to have pride on. Ideologies are sold to and bought by citizens of national states who enjoy believing in their government's cause.

Judaism has key founding texts that authorize taking the side of the poorest and most disadvantaged people. Christianity and Islam also do. This is a shared tradition.

Another theme of some in these traditions is obedience to the state of things and the normal expectations. And another is power. Nazism was a secular religion of power, force, violence. Fascism is that.

Israel is that. It has effectively morphed into this glaringly, stunningly, appalling apparent contradiction of a Jewish Nazi state.

Any kind of antifascism will have a mimetic character that it must resist while also acknowledging the necessity of. The liberal mind cannot tolerate this thought. It always blames those who resist and fight injustice. But this mimetic character means that an antifascist and a fascist will have some formal or stylistic resemblances along with opposite objects, based on very different modes of thinking, different kinds of desire.

There is, as yet anyway, no Jewish holiday appropriate to present circumstances.

If God freed the Jewish people from some kind of Pharaonic oppression and led them to a promised land that is an armed fortress camp in permanent war against the dispossessed and impoverished people on the outskirts of its castle walls, it would not have been enough. It would have been too much.

I am not sure the present catastrophe is not the worst one, morally speaking, to have befallen the Jewish people. Because by now we now how we can deal with the memory of the Shoah. And it doesn't inculpate all of us.

This genocide is not the consequence of Judaism; it is the consequence and expression of capitalism. But Judaism allowed it, just as Christianity allowed the Inquisition. And if the Inquisition did not refute every proposition in Christianity, nor the Gulag every proposition in Marx, they did and do call them radically into question. The same is true of Torah and Talmud. Scholars respond, of course, not by burning books, and then people, but by studying them, to find what we can that might point to some possible future for humanity.

The crisis of Judaism is the crisis of capitalism and vice-versa.