The End of Innocence

Beautiful text on the meaning of Gaza entitled The End of Innocence (La Fin de l’Innocence)

The whole world watches Gaza die, and the whole world watches the West watching Gaza. And they see everything… Blessed is he that watcheth, and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame (Revelation 16:15)

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By Frederic Lordon

“Humans have several means not to face their own violence and to establish themselves in innocence while indulging in all their other passions, notably their violent passions, their passions for domination. The first consists of degrading the other humans on whom these passions are exercised: they are not truly humans. Consequently, the harm done to them is, if not a lesser evil, a lesser harm…

The second means, undoubtedly the most powerful and most commonly applicable, is denial. This is what the category of “terrorism” serves for, for example. It is a category made to prevent thinking, to sideline thought, and notably the thought that ex nihilo nihil: that nothing comes from nothing. That events do not fall from the sky. That there is a general economy of violence, that it operates on negative reciprocity, that is, reciprocity for the worse, and one could paraphrase its principle according to Lavoisier: nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything returns. The countless, astonishing acts of violence inflicted on the Palestinian people for nearly eighty years were destined to return. Only those who possess nothing but condemnation for all intellectual endeavors were guaranteed not to see it coming nor to understand anything afterwards. Yet there are cases where not understanding is not an intellectual deficiency but a trick of the psyche: its categorical imperative. One must not understand in order to be able not to see: not to see that one is part of the causality – therefore, that one is not so innocent.

Having wanted to start the sequence after October 7th from the 7th of October is the most vicious and characteristic intellectual malpractice of this general type of situation, malpractice to which only ontological innocents could adhere, and all those who, envying them, love to believe with them in effects without cause. […] They do not even respect the dead whose memory they claim to honour and support. But that’s because “terrorism” is the shield of bourgeois innocence and Western innocence.

The situation of the word antisemitism is analyzed in very similar coordinates. In its uses, it would be better to say in its present distortions – which obviously do not exhaust all cases, since there is antisemitism, there is! – in these present distortions, then, the accusation is made to be turned against all those who would have the offensive project of restoring causalities—and would therefore want to challenge innocence. […]

All the denials and all the symbolic compromises of the world, however, all the intimidations and all the censorships, will do nothing against the enormous emergence of reality that comes from Gaza. What the camp of unconditional support is aligning itself with, and at what cost, is evidently no longer visible to it, as it is blinded by its own points of reaffirmation. For all the others who have not completely lost their reason and observe it, appalled, the ideological perdition in which the Israeli government is sinking is bottomless, between biological racism and messianic eschatology. What we knew before October 7th, and in general, is that eschatological political projects are necessarily murderous projects. This is proven once again.

As shown by Illan Pappe, the essence of a settler colonization is that it envelops the elimination of any presence of the occupied people – either through expulsion-deportation, or, as we now know, through genocide. Here as in other occasions duly archived by History, dehumanization has again been pre-eminently the justifying and permissive trope of the great elimination—and we now have countless attestations, both from official Israeli mouths and from the muddy flow of social network testimonies, astounding in their monstrous joy and sadistic exultation. That’s what emerges when the veil of innocence is lifted, and as always, it’s not a pretty sight […]

From all these elements one can already make a recap by showing the table that emerges. It’s the table of a moral suicide. Never, perhaps, will we have seen such a rapid squandering of a symbolic capital that was thought unassailable, one that had been built around the [Holocaust].

But, solidarity for the worse obliges, the hour of symbolic reckoning is about to strike for everyone, especially for that entity that calls itself the West while claiming the monopoly of civilization, and that has mainly spread violence and predation wrapped in its self-serving values. Assuming it ever existed, its moral credit is now also sent to the bottom. The arrogance of the soon-to-be deposed dominants, who do not yet know it, is needed to believe they can sustain without damage what they currently support. People who thus remain passive, often complicit, sometimes even deniers of a crime so enormous, being committed under their eyes and under the eyes of all, such people can no longer claim anything. The whole world watches Gaza die, and the whole world watches the West watching Gaza. And they see everything.

Inevitably at this moment, one thinks of Germany, where unconditional support reaches a level of delirium utterly astonishing, to the point of being made “raison d’État,” and of which an internet user with black humor could say: “Decidedly, in terms of genocide, they are always on the wrong side of history.” It is not certain that “we” – France – are much better, but it is certain that History is waiting for everyone at the turn. History, indeed: that is what the West has an appointment with at Gaza. If, as is not forbidden to think, it is the rendez-vous of its downfall and destitution, then soon will come a time when we can tell ourselves that the world has tipped at Gaza.”

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