Fascism vs. Centrism

The stakes have seldom been higher. Enabling the rise of neofascism would be a historic mistake for the left.

Today is Election Day in the United States, a defining moment not just for the U.S. but for the world as a whole.

In these final moments, how should we think about Donald Trump’s candidacy? I recently listened to Joe Rogan’s 3-hour interview with Trump (so that you don’t have to), and Rogan is right to point out that Trump has “comedic instincts,” engages in a form of “stand-up,” and often performs with “great timing.” Trump’s flair for self-deprecation no doubt helps explain his political success. He is, at heart, a performer. By comparison, centrist Democrats often feel wooden—the gap between Biden and Trump is the distance between modernist self-seriousness and postmodern playfulness. But with her charisma, Harris has been far more successful at circumventing this obstacle than her predecessors.

Trump’s comedy, however, is for a narrow set: His is not a universalist playfulness. To those maligned during the October 27th Trump rally in Madison Square Garden, the jokes come with an existential bite. Trump’s court jester, Tony Hinchcliffe, spoke of a “floating island of garbage...I think it's called Puerto Rico”—hardly likely to endear Trump’s campaign to voters of Puerto Rican, Hispanic or Latino descent.

Trump’s Neofascism

Behind Trump’s jokey facade is the beating heart of a fascist. On Rogan’s podcast, Trump spoke of Kamala as a “low-IQ person,” an “imbecile, literally,” the kind of pseudoscientific discourse about intelligence typifying the far right and playing on racist, misogynist ideas about successful Black woman—and made all the more absurd in light of Harris’s considerable credentials. Trump also evidenced a weird obsession with his Air Force One pilots, which he likened to “perfect specimens,” a strangely clinical term, with one pilot said to be a “perfect-looking human being,” a fethishization of military aesthetics familiar to viewers of Leni Riefenstahl’s cinematography.

More centrally, Trump repeatedly invoked an image of foreign and/or criminal Others set on destabilizing the American social fabric, a classic fascist move, with “hundreds of thousands of criminals” said to be overrunning American communities, including “convicted rapists, drug dealers, drug lords.” Trump claimed that Springfield had “32,000 migrants dropped in,” all of them Haitians, and, surprisingly, “they speak no language.” Rogan corrected him: “No English, you mean?” But Trump doubled down on his claim. The idea that Haitians possess “no language”—a smear that has deep historical roots, involving the denigration of Haitian Creole—was likely intentional, reducing a vulnerable, hard-working immigrant community to language-less animality. Portraying minorities as barbaric (literally, those who, from the ancient Greeks’ perspective could only say bar bar, or meaningless, guttural sounds) is straight out of the far-right’s playbook. 

Unsurprisingly, one of Trump’s crucial final rallies took place at Madison Square Garden, perhaps referencing the 1939 Nazi rally in the same location. Back in 1939, more than 20,000 people gathered to participate in a “Pro America Rally,” sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” give the Hitler salute, and listen to speakers talking of “job-taking Jewish refugees.” In the 2024 rally, meanwhile, Trump invoked the alleged need to “stop the invasion of criminals coming into our country” and claimed “30,000 illegal migrants were put into a town of 50,000 people” and that “no place can withstand that.” The comedian Hinchcliffe, meanwhile, evoked the idea of an overly fertile domestic enemy, in the crudest, most repugnant terms: “These Latinos, they love making babies too, just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.” 

In How Fascism Works, the philosopher Jason Stanley rightly warns against how dangerous all of this rhetoric—and potential, implied policy—is:

The dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population. By excluding these groups, it limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination.

In October 2022, a top Israeli medical official spoke derisively of “the Arab womb,” that is, the idea that Palestinian, or “Arab,” women were overly fertile, with terrifying overtones of racist, misogynistic reductionism (as if all Palestinian women partook of one collective “womb”). Two years later, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed on the Gaza Strip. There is a straight line running from fascist words and ideas to fascist actions and policies.

Thankfully, Trump’s neofascism still comes with considerable electoral risk, even in the current political moment. With his recent anti-Puerto Rican statements, and earlier scurrilous claims that Haitians migrants to Springfield, Ohio were consuming pets (“They’re Eating the Cats,” as one New York Times headline read), there is a real chance that the Republican nominee may lose—big time—with Latino and Hispanic voters; recall that Hispanic voters now constitute nearly 15 percent of the eligible voter population and cannot simply disparaged at will. The politics of ethnic identification and voting patterns are ambiguous, of course. But the Madison Square Garden rally may have proved a bridge too far.

Regardless of ethnic affiliation, it is clear what Trump stands for: massive trillion-dollar tax cuts to corporations and the rich, aggressive attacks on minorities and women, and the rehabilitation of fascism as a politically salable ideology.

Harris the Preferable Centrist

Harris, meanwhile, has a Palestine problem. She has been part of an administration that has enabled the Israeli genocide on the Gaza Strip. Disappointingly, Harris has failed to distance herself from the Biden administration’s policies, or offered meaningful assurances on ending the bloodshed. This is likely causing the Harris campaign to hemorrhage voters to not only third-party candidates but just sheer apathy and abandonment of electoral politics altogether. Some pro-Palestine (or anti-genocide) voters may even, misguidedly, choose to vote for Trump, despite the fact that Trump will only stay or worsen the line: Recall that Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in 2017, thereby recognizing it as the capital of Israel despite its annexation of East Jerusalem. And back in April 2024, Trump said that Israel needed to “finish what they started” and “get it over with fast”—hardly the words of a peacemaker. Everything suggests Trump will maintain or deepen the Biden administration’s policy stance on Israel/Palestine.

The crucial difference between Harris and Trump is that Harris remains a centrist neoliberal—a kind of Emmanuel Macron transposed across the Atlantic—while Trump is a neofascist. For leftists, the choice is one between two evils, yes, but one of the sides is clearly—by a wide margin—the lesser evil. The political calculus is, in this sense, clear and unambiguous, the choices and overall electoral context being what they are. For those who care about economic redistribution, too, Harris is clearly the preferable candidate: While Trump’s taxation and spending policies will allow the rich to grow richer, Harris’s policies will likely raise the incomes of the poorest one-fifth by nearly 20 percent, while making the top 0.1% pay more than $150,000 in additional taxes by 2026.

Strategic Timing

In this context, the left must learn the hard lessons of kairos, of “the right time,” which is to say strategic timing: The situation is not right for a third-party vote. For activists eager to punish Biden, the right response in the long term is to build a mass movement capable of pulling Democrats leftwards. For the near term, the leftist activist and writer Joe Mayall has produced an exemplary analysis of the concrete situation facing progressive voters. His analysis comes down to one basic insight: Harris and Trump are not the same; in total, Trump is far worse: “Domestically, the boilerplate Democratic politics of Harris are preferable to the MAGA agenda.” Given the grievous threats of Trumpism, Mayall argues that compromise is the order of the day:

This “compromise” is leftist voters casting ballots for Harris, so that we are not “hurled into battle” against the army of Donald Trump, who wants to “use the military to handle the radical left. I’m not sure what Trump means by “handle,” but I know none of us will be able to advocate for Palestine, abortion rights, or socialism from a jail cell, camp, or grave.

I also agree with the anthropologist Vito Laterza, a theorist of political communication:

Yet, this remains a binary contest - that is the nature of the electoral rules in America, rules that could use some changes, but these are not changes that will occur now or in the foreseeable future. Dispersing votes for third-party candidates on the left effectively gives a hand to Trump. And voting for Trump just doesn't make any sense. Not on any of the issues that Harris and Walz confidently stand for - and not on Palestine and Israel.

It would be a historic mistake for progressives to depress the vote for Harris, thereby enabling Trump’s return to power. Doing so won’t help the Palestinians; it will, however, harm women and ethnic minorities inside the United States; and it will create four years of instability, unpredictability, and potential chaos on the global stage. Neither liberal democracy nor the world as we know it may survive a second Trump term. As Trump himself told a group of evangelical voters in July: “In four years, you don't have to vote again.”

For once, we may take him at his word.

Trump as Apprentice -- or Master?

A recent biopic, The Apprentice (2024), prioritizes aesthetics over substance, downplaying Trump’s personal responsibility for his profound character flaws.

The Apprentice (2024). Director: Ali Abbasi. Writer: Gabriel Sherman. Starring: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova. (IMdb)

Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice (2024)—the title playfully plagiarizes the 15-season reality show that made Donald Trump a household name—could hardly be more timely, purporting to tell the story of Trump’s rise from relative obscurity in 1970s Queens, New York to Manhattan moguldom by the mid-1980s.

The Apprentice does so effectively, even if it veers dangerously into aestheticism, devolving at times into an almost celebratory visual spectacle more than a critical biographical film. With all the familiar tropes of the 1980s aesthetic paraded before the audience—the big hair, VHS scan lines, disco needle-drops, cocaine-fueled parties, and the ruthlessly individualistic pursuit of profit and pleasure—The Apprentice largely forgoes deeper analysis of one of the most powerful and dangerous people in recent history, shifting blame instead onto the shadowy master-figure of Roy Cohn. 

We first encounter Donald in an almost pitiable position, collecting checks for his father, Fred Trump, from low-income tenants. He is skillfully portrayed by Sebastian Stan in an at-first understated performance that gradually evolves into all the now-familiar mannerisms: the spread hands, the pouty upper lip, the verbal tics (“frankly,” “incredible,” “the greatest”), a lexicon of superlatives and hyperbole unmoored from the reality principle. As Trump the younger makes his rounds, his father’s tenants verbally abuse him, doors slamming in his face; an overdue tenant even throws throws scalding water at him. We are almost asked to feel sorry for Trump the younger: No wonder he desires power and wealth, one might be forgiven for thinking, if this is the miserable world he came up out of. But precisely this founding narrative, this original mythic idea of an abused underdog, should make us wary of the film’s political instincts. There is here a not-so-subtle justificatory narrative being constructed, compounded by the fact that Donald, as played by Stan, appears naïve and innocent, a guileless youth who is then both hardened and corrupted by the world.

He begins life as the unappreciated and demeaned son of Fred Sr., an extractive, racist, middling real-estate developer in mid-century New York. On this telling, DJT must naturally rebel against his father’s old-world strictness—and worse, mediocrity—before falling, as if by chance, under the tutelage of the totally unscrupulous but charismatic attorney Roy Cohn, a debauched McCarthyite who brags shamelessly about helping bring the Rosenbergs to the electric chair in the 1950s. Cohn doesn’t hesitate to bug his friends and enemies alike—nor to use the resulting tapes to blackmail them into giving his clients what they want. On The Apprentice’s telling, then, DJT starts out as an essentially earnest young man who simply wants to make a name for himself.

Character development is the bread and butter of all storytelling, of course, but in this way the movie shifts most of the responsibility for his character-formation onto two powerful Oedipal figures, Fred Sr. and Cohn, which lets Donald himself off the hook. Who, after all, can blame an apprentice for what are essentially his masters’ misdeeds? Even if DJT certainly possesses plenty of agency toward the end, ruthlessly manipulating or discarding everyone around him—his siblings and parents (trying to cheat them out of a family trust fund to pay off his Atlantic City casino’s Taiwanese financiers), his wife Ivanka, his brother Freddie, even his one-time mentor Cohn—the damage has already been done.

The structure of The Apprentice is fundamentally Oedipal. To begin with, Donald must defeat all rivals from within: He does so with ease, for his alcoholic older brother, the disgraced airline pilot Freddie—whom Fred Sr. derisively likens to a “bus driver with wings”—is dead set on self-destruction. With Cohn’s aid, Donald then sets about on a decade-long road to toppling his father Fred from the throne of his own business empire, later christened “The Trump Organization” by Donald, a mafia-esque moniker if there ever was one. 

Fred Sr.’s absent love is clearly formative of DJT’s own blossoming ruthlessness, according to The Apprentice, but his paternal recognition, once Donald finally has it, ends up meaning nothing to him at all: Donald has become a “king," his father finally marvels, but by then, the very attributes that have forged Donald into a real-estate kingpin preclude the recognitive force of Fred père. Perhaps surprisingly, DJT cares little for his mother: Her gushing expressions of pride in her regal son barely make a dent in an ego lusting only, in the final reckoning, after lust itself—for Donald’s desire in The Apprentice is a desire turned in on itself, which ensures its properly limitless, infinite quality.

How much of this is accurate as biography? We can leave that to the historians, but The Apprentice at least makes for plausible psychological drama; and there is a fair amount of overlap with established sources. More important than strict historicism, however, the psychodynamics on offer do ring true: One senses that Trump’s essential gaudiness, his basic tawdriness, his showy, neo-roccoco fantasies, can never fill the insatiable abyss within, no matter how many towers or casinos he might erect. Toward the end of the film, Trump meets with the writer Tony Schwartz in the early stages of researching what will become the bestseller, The Art of the Deal. “Making deals,” Trump says, “is an art form”—his art form, like Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (he observes humbly). But to what end, Schwartz wants to know, sensibly enough: What is the point of all of Trump’s dealmaking? “Deals are the end,” Trump replies, as if puzzled by the very question.

Here at last we see his embodiment of the pure capitalist spirit, revealing its own pointless self-involution: Capital wants to endlessly accumulate, desiring only its own infinite revalorization, because that is all capital is good for. Capitalists, therefore, are tragic figures, enslaved by passions that are, strictly speaking, alien to them. In Abbasi’s Oedipal story of the sorcerer’s apprentice, then, Trump the “apex predator” finally finds himself incapable of vanquishing one last paternal figure alone, Capital itself—which even kings and emperors must obey.

The Apprentice is an entertaining, even stimulating, film, aided by Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Roy Cohn and Stan’s slowly evolving Trump. But its deep, structural problem is that it risks turning a fascist—even just a nascent one within the movie’s timeline—into an aesthetic icon. One can all too easily imagine MAGA-adjacent adolescent boys raptly watching and taking notes on how to win friends and influence people. That may not be entirely the The Apprentice’s own fault, of course, but aestheticism is a trap for all artists, and this one joyfully marches into it.

For how else can we characterize Trump in this film than as a budding fascist, one who pontificates that “there are two types of people” in the world, “killers and losers”? This essentially pagan-Manichean vision (“Killer means winner,” Trump clarifies, as if to soften his vicious ontology) is fueled by a steady, abusive intake of diet pills, which, so the film suggests, accounts for his accelerating callousness, if not outright brutality.

But there’s that lack of personal responsibility again. It’s not DJT’s own penchant for evil, it’s the pills, the film seems to say—just as it’s the malignant influence of Cohn, or the tough love of Fred Sr., that is to have helped turn Donald Trump into the bilious, vulgar, hate-filled strongman of later years—anything but Trump’s own willful wickedness, springing from within himself, from the depths of his own being. 

Was Trump really, then, ever an apprentice, as the movie’s title suggests? Outsourcing all blame to a supposed master like Cohn is much too convenient; if Republicans care as much about personal responsibility as they say they do, then surely that must extend up to and include their own leaders’ life stories. Moreover, the image of original innocence lost thatThe Apprentice tries to sell does not convince. But more importantly, Trump seems—in reality, not the movie now—more like one who was always-already a fully developed master, skillfully and ruthlessly manipulating his environs, seeking out aid from the wickedest, to be sure, but acting finally of his own accord.

But whether an apprentice or a master, we may all end up paying the price for this fatally flawed man’s renewed quest for power.

The Madness of Civil War

Returning to Alex Garland's 'Civil War' (2024) leaves a mixed impression, but its core theme is, unfortunately, more relevant than ever.

Civil War (2024). Director/Writer: Alex Garland. Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny. A24 Films. (Rotten Tomatoes) (Imdb)

Despite occasional glimmers of hope, Civil War (2024) is a terribly depressing movie; but worse still, it is largely an empty movie.

Missing are two crucial elements, which could have compensated for the film’s overall bleakness: situating the U.S. as portrayed in the film within a global system, forcing a reckoning with the possible role played by the American empire in its internal disorders; and a tangible analysis of the domestic political situation leading to the film’s central conflict. Strangely, for a movie about civil war, Civil War is remarkably uninterested in how the war came about, and it shows zero interest in what the rest of the world is doing about it.

This makes Alex Garland’s film an essentially vacuous tale, lacking any attention to political dynamics, either internal or global. And it means we cannot, for the most part, actually use the film for anything in our own hour of need. Audiences turning to Civil War for suggestions about how to think about the hyperpolarized American polity, crosscut by multiple antagonisms, will find precious little of value here.

For those content to dwell in the film’s dark aesthetics, this is hardly an issue, but for the rest of us, Civil War has limited utility as a story for our own troubled times. The shadow of its own unreality hangs over it like a stifling haze, and the politics of Civil War are make-believe politics. Clear-eyed analysis has been sacrificed for mood, atmosphere, and immediacy—perhaps in an attempt to appeal to the immediacies of our contemporary culture or out of a misguided fear of the ponderous. Whatever the reason, the absence of a convincing political narrative in a movie about one of the most extreme political situations a society can find itself in—the total breakdown of the social and state order, a condition in which “brothers turn against their own brothers”—is damning. Much of the critical ambivalence the movie has been met with surely stems from its preference for texture and affect over a structural rationality capable of accounting for itself. There is no “concrete analysis of the concrete situation,” as Lenin might say.

Strangely, it took a second viewing to even grasp that the sitting president is meant to be the villain, an authoritarian strongman, and that the invading secessionist confederacy of the so-called Western Forces, comprised of California and Texas—an extremely unlikely pairing verging on the comical—are somehow the protagonists (along with the Florida Alliance, barely alluded to). With hindsight, you can always tell which group Hollywood wants us to side with from the sophistication of their matériel; such is the industry’s militaristic chauvinism: The helicopters, fighter jets, and tanks of the Western Forces “prove” that they are better than the ragged loyalists clinging to power in Washington.

Civil War’s libertarian instincts are coupled with the intolerance of analysis typified by the drug culture: The traumatized photojournalist Lee and her sidekick, the Reuters reporter Joel (Wagner Moura), are scarred by the trauma of having to bear witness and have seen it all before; and so, Joel smokes weed to survive long nights of faraway gunfire, or drinks himself to a stupor after trading war stories with fellow reporters in a hotel that could have been in Baghdad or Kabul but is in New York. While the movie wants to say clever things about journalism, it ends up doing the profession a disservice by portraying reporters as reckless scavengers of the sensational image, in chase of the exclusive scoop, at the cost of proper analysis (which doesn’t require so much up-to-the minute news as careful, considered thought, usually in a collective).

Still, there are highlights: There is a near-unforgettable scene portraying the horror of an ultranationalistic militia in the throes of ethnic violence against those it deems intruders. The leader (“Soldier”) is played by the actor Jesse Plemons, whose ability to portray a menacing everyman brings an uncanniness. Soldier’s mere appearance on the screen signifies the suspension of normality and the arrival of a surrealist violence—or violent surrealism: Peering out from behind his strawberry-tinted spectacles, with a freshly cut mass grave behind him, he interrogates the traveling reporters at gunpoint about their ethnoracial “credentials.” 

Identity politics is, in the final instance, always a politics of survival, of existence, of the right to live, and the avoidance of death.

Here then, at least, we see the logic of our times condensed and concentrated in a spasmodic moment of pure genocidal violence. Identity politics is, in the final instance, always a politics of survival, of existence, of the right to live, and the avoidance of death. Plemons’s Soldier is the ultimate identity politician, a gun-toting racist vulgarian who, one imagines, might one day wander the halls of Congress.

If Civil War is ultimately a failure, it is redeemed by such moments of clarity, almost in spite of itself. And if it never really grapples with how the descent into the madness of civil war has come about, it hints at the possibility of peace and coexistence as the band of reporters stumble upon a town seemingly untouched by the war. Are the townspeople even aware there’s a war going on?, Joel asks a saleswoman. “We just try to stay out,” she replies. “With what we see on the news, it seems like it’s for the best.” As viewers, we’re invited to scoff at them for their cowardice. But what if they are the only sane ones left in a world that has long since descended into the madness of armed strife? 

George Orwell once wrote that “if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” After Civil War, we can add that if you want a picture of the future, imagine a fascist militiaman in rose-colored shades, pointing at you with a Colt AR-15, demanding to know your identity and whether you “truly” belong: “What kind of American are you?”, as Soldier asks. For this insight alone, Civil War, despite its overall unreality, approaches a kind of convergence with our own deranged times, where the specter of fascism once more overhangs.

Critique and Conspiracy

How can we distinguish between problematic or dangerous conspiracy theories and legitimate intellectual critique?

Has there ever been a more magnificently paranoid vision of intellectual activity than that offered by the Italian leftist thinker Pier Paolo Pasolini in one of his final texts, “Is this a Military Coup D’Etat? I Know…”?

In the article, published a year before his murder, Pasolini declared his knowledge of societal secrets in a series of incantatory declarations: “I know […]. I know […]. I know […].” Among other things, Pasolini claimed to know the names of those responsible for various far-right “massacres”: in Milan in 1969, and in Brescia and Bologna in 1974; Pasolini also claimed to know the names of a “group of powerful men who, with the help of the CIA” initiated an “anticommunist crusade to halt the ’68 movement.”

So how had Pasolini come to know these things? Writing more programmatically, he declared:

I know because I’m an intellectual, a writer who tries to keep track of everything that happens, to know everything that is written, to imagine everything that is unknown or goes unsaid. I’m a person who coordinates even the most remote facts, who pieces together the disorganized and fragmentary bits of a whole, coherent political scene, who re-establishes logic where chance, folly, and mystery seem to reign.

This was a vision of the intellectual-as-seer, one who assembles all the relevant facts, passed over unnoticed by the majority, to penetrate beneath mere surface appearances in order to reveal the secret links between phenomena and their undisclosed causes. The intellectual is the one who sees what others do not, who finds telling signs where others see nothing out of the ordinary.

But is there any difference, even in principle, between this basic critical-intellectual stance, and that classic Hollywood portrayal of paranoia, A Beautiful Mind (2001)? In the movie, we realize that Russell Crowe’s character, the mathematician John Nash, has fallen into delusion when we see what has become of his office: Hundreds of newspaper clippings are pinned to the walls, connected by threads of colored yarn—a “network” of furtive nodes and mystical vertices, revealing that which ordinary citizens have failed to comprehend, lacking as they do Nash’s piercing gnosis—his secret knowledge and insight.

Something similar appears—but more entertainingly, less tragically—in the dizzying opening montage of the film Conspiracy Theory (1997). Here the protagonist, Jerry Fletcher, a New York taxi driver played by Mel Gibson, launches into a series of semi-deranged conspiracy theories as he ferries his unsuspecting passengers around Manhattan. Fletcher’s theories range from the role of the Vatican to microchips, via “black helicopters” (“They’re everywhere.. You can’t hear them until they've already gone.”), to the fluoridation of drinking water:

You know what they put in the water, don’t you? Fluoride! Yeah, fluoride. On the pretext that it strengthens your teeth! That’s ridiculous! You know what this stuff does to you? It actually weakens your will...Takes away the capacity for free and creative thought, and makes you a slave to the state.

The ironies of history are rife here. Fourteen years later, the U.S. government reportedly deployed a pair of “stealth helicopters,” or heavily-modified Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawks, to kill Osama bin Laden, ascending onto his Pakistani compound almost unnoticed. Meanwhile, some research does suggest that water fluoridation can indeed be harmful to some groups, such as pregnant women, as the New York Times recently reported (with multiple caveats). And in a final bizarre twist of life imitating art, Mel Gibson himself would fall from grace some years later for espousing a vile antisemitic conspiracy theory, stating to the police officers that were apprehending him, “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world,” according to The Guardian.

From Pandemic to “Infodemic”

Clearly, conspiracy theories can be deeply troubling. At best, they are a nuisance and a distraction; at their worst, they can lead to pogroms and genocide. They are, in the words of the philosopher Frank Ruda, “problematic manifestations of a rational demand, a demand of reason.” As he writes, “This demand is a demand for orientation in a world that no longer allows for any, since the constitutive principles of its organization have become obscured.” In the chaos and complexity of the world, conspiracy theories provide the appearance of order, clarity, and coherence; they offer reassurance that an often incomprehensible world can be made simple and intelligible. But they also often satisfy an appetite for an easily identifiable “enemy” onto which all the ills of the world can be heaped—a form of social misdiagnosis.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy theories seemed to gain in importance. Far from being mere irritants, the very future of the world now seemed to hang on the ability of governments to do battle with the ideas of “anti-vaxxers.” The World Health Organization went so far as to declare an informational epidemic, or “infodemic,” alongside the viral pandemic, in late 2020. Hazy ideas about 5G towers, microchips, and billionaires like Bill Gates had circulated on social media for years, without much effect on global events. Now, however, conspiratorial anti-vaxxers rose in stature: They seemed to stand a real chance of blocking the resumption of normal everyday life on a planetary scale by preventing the mass rollout of vaccines like Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech.

In August 2020, UNESCO and others launched a campaign to “raise awareness of the existence and consequences of conspiracy theories linked to the COVID-19 crisis.” Fact-checking websites and features became increasingly commonplace. By early 2021, Twitter introduced its “Community Notes” feature, allowing for added context on popular but controversial posts. The European Commission, meanwhile, outlined six features of a conspiracy theory:

An alleged, secret plot.

A group of conspirators.

‘Evidence’ that seems to support the conspiracy theory.

They falsely suggest that nothing happens by accident and that there are no coincidences; nothing is as it appears and everything is connected.

They divide the world into good or bad.

They scapegoat people and groups.

Definitional Dangers

However, this war on conspiratorial reasoning comes at a cost. First, we should also inquire about the political-economic conditions that provide fertile soil for conspiratorial thought. Too often, the problem is construed in purely communicative, epistemic terms, when material conditions like social insecurity are responsible for providing the perfect breeding ground for these narratives. Improving people’s life chances—by raising social safety—is likely to be far more effective than banning and canceling utterances. At root, this is a problem of social insecurity.

Second, even a cursory inspection of the six features outlined above suggests potential overlap with the routine legitimate activities of, say, investigative journalism, critical social science, or intellectual critique. For instance, “An alleged secret plot” and “A group of conspirators”: But sometimes there really are plots in the straightforward sense of individuals or groups coming together to plan and organize an outcome aligning with their interests. Or: “‘Evidence’ that seems to support the conspiracy theory”: But quite often, what counts as evidence is itself subject to debate; the so-called “criterion problem” means that the standards of factuality that have to be met are part and parcel of debates over particular issues.

Or consider the feature, “Nothing is as it appears and everything is connected”: Certainly, there is an element of exaggeration here, but is this not a near-perfect encapsulation of what Paul Ricœur called the hermeneutics of suspicion, manifested in each their own way by the three giants of modern critical thought: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud? In his writings on the parapraxes, for instance, Freud suggests that (almost) nothing we might blurt out is accidental; every slip of the tongue has its origins in the unconscious. Meanwhile, Marx, while not necessarily scapegoating, certainly does ascribe significant agentic power to the capitalist class, castigating it for exploiting workers; the state, on Marx and Engels’s account, is nothing “but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”

Closer to the contemporary world, when social scientists try to reveal the connections between power, social structures, and life outcomes—an ambition that encompasses critical sociologists like C. Wright Mills, Pierre Bourdieu, and many more—they do tend to suggest that “nothing happens by accident” and that, indeed, “nothing is as it appears”—because we live in a world of ideological figments, amidst the workings of symbolic power and doxa as well as the collective behavior of powerful social elites.

As for dividing the world into “good and bad”—I recall a senior social scientist once cautioning against using the very term “elites” in a draft paper because the rhetoric of “elites,” it seemed to him, was politically inflected—both from the left and right. But this is troubling: There really are elites, and their actions and attitudes matter; these are sociological facts, whether we like them or not. Certainly, we shouldn’t scapegoat elites; but where do we draw the line between a legitimate calling-out of the power of social elites, say, and what they themselves might describe as malign mistreatment? In Norwegian public debate in recent years, for instance, the Labour-led government has been attacked by business owners for its rhetoric about the importance of taxing the wealthy, which some have dismissed as “hatred and jealousy” of a particular class of people: the rich.

Return of the Dismissed

Moreover, acts labeled and dismissed as conspiracies can sometimes undergo a strange reversal of fortune: In the early stages of the pandemic, the Wuhan “lab leak” theory was dismissed as reckless, conspiratorial speculation, failing to accept the random meaninglessness of natural life and the inherent dangers of zoonosis. While early on in the pandemic Facebook censored lab leak posts, by May 2021 it had reversed its policy; at the time, the company said its change its “comes ‘in light of ongoing investigations into the origin’.” Three years after the pandemic began, the New York Times noted that while the idea of a Chinese “lab leak was once dismissed by many as a conspiracy theory,” the idea was now “gaining traction.” 

The point is not that the lab leak hypothesis is necessarily true; most likely, it isn’t. Our desire for its truth may be fed by a need for clear agency and unequivocal responsibility, where instead we face what amounts to “a series of unfortunate events.” But all of this does point to the difficulty of establishing clear, rigorous, unassailable definitions of conspiracy theories, when something that “everyone” agreed was a conspiracy only a few years later is given a fair hearing in respectable broadsheets.

Counteract—Without Concepts

So are conspiracy theories destined to remain resistant to “objective” or rigorous definition—a case of “I know it when I see it,” as Justice Potter Stewart put it in his famous 1964 Supreme Court opinion on obscenity? Probably. Attempting to create a general, universal definition risks sweeping up legitimate intellectual activities within a broader definitional scope. The definition above, for instance, though well-intentioned, could plausibly be used to dismiss somewhat simplistic but still-legitimate social analysis.

This is not to say that we should run out and accept any old thing we are told. Nor does it mean we should quietly accept what we might perceive as nonsensical or dangerous claims about events, phenomena or groups. Instead, it means that we cannot define ourselves away from the hard work of countering these claims on the terrain of evidence, and where relevant, clear argumentation, including moral arguments. If we don’t agree with or like conspiratorial claims (which do not, in any case, as a rule meet the higher threshold of a “theory,” it must be said), or if we find them not only repulsive but downright dangerous, we should rather confront them head-on—not nullify, cancel, or censor them through conceptual moves that seek to “out-classify” them.

Certainly, some of these claims will be of such a nature that we may safely choose to ignore them, because of their marginality and/or preposterousness—which is not the same as censorship but rather a prioritization of effort. The work is great and the laborers few. And some may fall under the heading of hate speech, which is a different legal question altogether, to be dealt with by whatever procedures a particular society might have chosen for this category of utterances.

But by and large, we should not be afraid to counter conspiracy theories using all the intellectual tools at our disposal.

Only then can we say, like Pasolini, that “we know,” that we too have “piece[d] together the disorganized and fragmentary bits of a whole”—and made an honest attempt at understanding the totality, without lapsing into either paranoia or delusion.

Stuart Hall, An Intellectual for Times of Reaction

In these troubling times, we should return to Stuart Hall, a remarkable political thinker and cultural analyst.

Stuart Hall (1932-2014), born in Jamaica and educated at Oxford University, was one of the key cultural theorists, Marxist sociologists, and leftist thinkers in the postwar era. Hall is particularly known for concepts like encoding/decoding and authoritarian populism, and for his interest in studying conjunctures (the totality of societal situations); he is also known for his critical analyses of Thatcherism in the 1980s and studies of popular culture, identity, and race/ethnicity, and for helping establish cultural studies as a distinctive subdiscipline.

As a Marxist, Hall was concerned with economic conditions, but in his works, he avoided a reductive class determinism or economism (the excessive causal emphasis on class and economics), allowing instead for the autonomy of the political field, the state, the media and realm of culture. The concept of conjuncture was important to him in this respect: Hall repeatedly tried—particularly in the late 1970s and 1980s—to understand the totality of Britain’s political, economic, cultural, and social situation. Rather than fall back on formulaic concepts, Hall attempted to ground his analyses in the “specificity of the present.”[1]

This analytical approach was inspired by Lenin’s emphasis on the importance of “concrete analyses of concrete situations,” and Hall also drew on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and the Althusser’s concept of ideological state apparatuses and interpellation. Hall’s attempts to understand a society were always grounded in concrete facts “from below,” but sensitized to power relations and the effects of power within such relations. Hall also contributed to making Marxism more attuned to the political, cultural, and identitarian dimensions of social life; the Marxism he initially had encountered in the postwar period had been “a very economistic Marxism,” as Hall said in a later interview.[2]

Hall was also a prolific writer: A bibliography listing the titles of his works alone runs to 79 pages. In the 1950s, he cofounded the New Left Review, an influential journal that remains an arena for important debates to the global Anglophone left. Among his best-known publications is his 1978 book Policing the Crisis, written with four other scholars, which on the surface is a study of “law and order” politics in Britain in the late 1970s, but which is more deeply about ideology, conflict, control, and the effects of crisis on the state; Hall saw an increasingly heavy-handed British state rise up in the face of growing crisis. He also wrote dozens of articles and essays on everything from popular culture to ethnic identity and Thatcherism throughout his lengthy writing career.

Background

Hall spent the first part of his life in Jamaica. In his memoir, Familiar Stranger, he describes a middle-class upbringing in the capital city of Kingston. His father rose through the ranks of the (otherwise notorious) multinational United Fruit Company to become chief accountant; his maternal family considered themselves descendants of plantation and slave owners who admired the British (colonial) education system.[3] The young Hall was sent to the private secondary school Jamaica College, established in 1789 to educate the Caribbean colony’s elite children. There Hall received a “classically British formal education.”[4] A gifted student, in 1951 he received a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship and was admitted to Merton College at Oxford. The nearly 700-year-old college was one of the British Empire’s central elite institutions of higher education—and one of the oldest universities in the world, if not the oldest.

Later in life, Hall emphasized that although his time at Oxford had been a formative intellectual experience, he disliked the overall “spirit of Oxford”: The university’s position in the national, and therefore imperial, system of power troubled him. In later interviews, Hall emphasized how “Oxford connections” lifted people undeservedly into elite positions in British society.[5] Perhaps precisely because of his ambiguity concerning Oxford’s “intellectual and cultural power,” and the “nerve-racking experience” of encountering a form of (culturally imposed) “absolute superiority” that he encountered there, Hall was drawn to leftwing politics during his student years. It was on the left that Hall found his second home. His was assuredly not a Soviet-style Marxism, but a “non-aligned left,” or a leftism that refused to take sides in the Cold War.[6] In the mid-1950s, there were still high hopes for the so-called Non-Aligned Movement and the possibility of a “‘third force’ in global politics.”[7] In 1955, the first Bandung Conference took place—named after the Indonesian city that hosted it—where representatives from 29 African and Asian countries met to discuss the possible role of a “third world” caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of the U.S. and Soviet empires, respectively. But the “utopian” vision of nonalignment failed to produce lasting results: “We didn’t foresee at all how the global imperatives of the Cold War would overwhelm the liberatory promise of decolonization,” Hall wrote.

As a colonial subject, Hall could not fit into establishment institutions with the same ease as his fellow cohort of English students. Even in Jamaica, one of his editors writes, Hall was well aware of the fact that he was the “blackest member of his own family,” and he later developed the term pigmentocracy to describe the role of color gradations in the structure of power relations in Jamaican society. His sense of ethnoracial otherness was, of course, even stronger in largely white England:

Three months at Oxford persuaded me that it was not my home. I’m not English and I never will be. The life I have lived is one of partial displacement. I came to England as a means of escape, and it was a failure.[8]

Even within Oxford’s leftwing political sphere, Hall felt a lack of affinity with the postwar hegemonic British Labour Party: “The ethos of Oxford Labour politics was unremittingly white and English.”[9] Instead, Hall was drawn into a group calling itself The Socialist Club, a gathering of “ex-Communists, Trotskyists and assorted socialists, as well as a variety of independently minded Labour supporters.”

The second half of the 1950s was a dramatic time, with the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the Suez Crisis of the same year being two key events. Tariq Ali is careful to describe Hall not as a child of 1968—Hall was too old for the “year of revolution” to have played a formative role—but rather as a “1956-er,” when Western Marxists were forced to reckon with the Soviet invasion of Hungary but were also galvanized by the Suez Crisis and the British, French, and Israeli invasion of Egypt.

Hall became an important figure in what became known as “the new left,” which, among other things, attempted to chart out a course between Soviet communism and Western capitalism. For Hall, much of this meant throwing himself into intellectual activity. Journals remained important platforms. In 1957, together with Charles Taylor, later a renowned philosopher, Hall founded the journal Universities and Left Review (ULR). Two years later, ULR merged with another journal established by the historian E. P. Thompson, New Reasoner, to form New Left Review (NLR).

Collective Thought

Hall was an exceptionally community-oriented thinker. His book Policing the Crisis counts five co-authors. Hall was one of the co-founders of the influential research center, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in the 1960s. He led the center for a decade from 1969 to 1979 and made it the birthplace of the so-called ‘Birmingham School of Cultural Studies’; forming a ‘school’ demonstrates a willingness to enter into reciprocal relationships with others.

Hall is an example of what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called the “collective intellectual.” Bourdieu used the term in contrast with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of the “total intellectual,” who was happy to intervene, often on their own, in all manner of social and political issues. Bourdieu believed this was a fundamentally flawed way of conducting intellectual activity: The complexity of society demands associations of specialized thinkers, each of whom can shed light on a particular aspect of society. But more importantly, Bourdieu understood that powerful social forces were working to limit the autonomy of research; only research collectives would be able to “defend their own autonomy.”[10] Some of Hall’s former colleagues at CCCS refer to a feature of Hall that they call a “dialogical pedagogy” that was “fundamental to the work culture [Hall] established” at the Birmingham center.[11] Thinking happens along with others.

Interests

In the 1960s, Hall was a driving force behind what became known as cultural studies. In 1964, Hall cofounded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham University, which he also directed from 1969 to 1979. Later in his life, Hall explained the shift towards cultural studies with a confrontation with a shortcoming of the Marxism of the time:

I got involved in cultural studies because I didn’t think life was purely economically determined. I took all this up as an argument with economic determinism. I lived my life as an argument with Marxism, and with neoliberalism. Their point is that, in the last instance, economy will determine it. But when is the last instance? If you’re analyzing the present conjuncture, you can’t start and end at the economy. It is necessary, but insufficient.

In an early articles from 1959, “Politics of Adolescence?”, Hall shows an emerging interest in, and sympathy with, youth culture.[12] While the British establishment viewed with growing alarm a number of “subcultural” youth phenomena like the “teddy boys” or conflicts between “mods” and “rockers”—later studied by the sociologist Stanley Cohen in a classic book as an example of “moral panic”—Hall took a more positive approach. For him, there is a progressive potential to be unearthed in youth culture, especially of the working class: “Instinctively, young working class people are radical.” Rare in the context of the 1950s, Hall tried to understand young people on their own terms. He saw in the anti-nuclear movement, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a sign that young people were not apathetic, but instead politically engaged, albeit outside political party structures and so accorded less recognition by the left at the time.

Encoding and decoding

This openness to the new led Hall to become one of the earliest serious analysts of television. The article “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” has become a classic in the field of media studies, with over 16,000 citations on Google Scholar, a clear sign of its enormous influence. Hall’s main idea is that cultural messages are packaged, or “encoded,” by a sender and then unpacked, or “decoded,” by an audience, but that this is a potentially fallible process, where the receiver may choose, or at least end up, interpreting the message in a way that violates the sender’s wishes. A sender may want to encourage a particular reading, but all messages carry with them a chance of being misunderstood, misread, or—better yet—read against the grain of original intent. Against the idea that the masses are fed mass-produced cultural products and absorb them in zombie-like fashion, Hall allows for the possibility that audiences can form their own interpretations and opinions.

“Race” and ethnicity

In a series of lectures on race, ethnicity, and the nation, delivered at Harvard University in 1993 but not published until 2017,[13] Hall proposes a discursive theorization of the concepts of race and ethnicity. He explores how “race is a cultural and historical, not biological, fact” and in which ways “race is a discursive construct, a sliding signifier.” But “race” as such has no real, underlying biological reality; racial categories have no meaning or “reality” in and of themselves but are charged with various associations in different social contexts. Physical signs—skin color, nose and facial shape, hair type, and so on—are saturated with social meaning, creating differential distributions of resources and power in various social orders across history. Race remains, however, a “myth,” as the anthropologist Robert Sussman later notes, and is hence a profoundly “unscientific idea,” which nevertheless has sociological implications by virtue of the power placed behind racial divisions, or discursive formations, that different societies operate with.

Hall also argues that notions of cultural differences, or ethnicity, today play much the same role as racial differences did in times past, and that ethnicity with its seemingly harmless emphasis on cultural traits nevertheless tends to “slide” onto an essentializing track—what Hall calls a “transcendental fix in common blood, inheritance, and ancestry, all of which gives ethnicity an originary foundation in nature that puts it beyond the reach of history.”[14] In this way, Hall clearly gave witness to the rise of what is sometimes called cultural racism.

Thatcherism

In 1979, the Conservative politician Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of Great Britain. Until her resignation in 1990, she led the country out of the social-democratic era regnant since the Second World War, where the great popular mobilization, “the people’s war,” had been replaced by “the people’s peace,” involving major welfare-state reforms such as free health care under the National Health Service (NHS), the nationalization of key industries, comprehensive social welfare benefits and relatively strong redistributive policies. The Thatcher era signified the end of this form of social-democratic ascendancy; it was a polarized time marked by the triumph of political reaction, from the heightened patriotic sentiment against a common enemy during the Falklands War with Argentina to Thatcher’s targeted campaign against striking coal miners in 1984-1985 and the privatization of state-controlled enterprises, aided by Thatcher’s own “neoliberal” think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, which she had co-founded the previous decade.

In Policing the Crisis, published the year before Thatcher came to power, Hall and his co-authors studied an apparently narrow criminological question: Why did a series of muggings in Britain become the subject of heated public debate, frenzied media reporting, and a subsequent tightening of the screws of criminal justice?[15] But the analysis burrowed deeper down to the root of the British state and social order.

Amid economic crisis, young black men came to constitute the “perfect” targets in this political moment, concentrating racialized and class-inflected fears around a potent category of social denigration, far beyond the real or “objective” threat muggings might pose to public safety. But Hall and his colleagues saw in the emergence of what they called a “racialized law and order politics”[16] the contours of a new social order, a new conjuncture, radically different from the social-democratic communitarianism characterizing the “golden age” of the welfare state in the three decades post-1945. In the moral panic surrounding street crime perpetrated by young black men, Hall and his colleagues saw the emergence of what they termed authoritarian populism. The book was prophetic, too, in its predictions of “the collapse of the social democratic consensus” and “the rise of the radical right.”[17]

Social democracy had been a successful political-economic arrangement, allowing broad sections of society to take part in economic productivity gains, while tamping down social contradictions; but as this order began to break down, it became increasingly clear that various “populist” moral crises—often revolving around crime and punishment—were being mobilized in its stead. With the essay collection, The Hard Road to Renewal, published in 1988, it is clear that “Thatcherism” stands for Hall as a key sociopolitical concept. Hall views Thatcher as an authoritarian populist: Thatcher seemed to need the heavy hand of the state to bolster her fluctuating popularity. The concept of authoritarian populism probably remains underspecified, which Hall also acknowledged. But the concept captures something essentially true, still relevant today: “It’s not quite fascism but it has the same structure as fascism does.”[18]

States today solve many of their problems by selecting an external enemy, or an internal enemy that is externalized, to hammer away at, either symbolically or materially, whether that means forcibly detaining families in camps on the Mexican border (under Trump), or deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda (advocated by three consecutive Tory Prime Ministers—Johnson, Truss, and Sunak), or engaging in repeated cycles of tough-on-crime rhetoric and law-and-order policies. Hall was an early and articulate exponent of this peculiar political dynamic, which seems to manifest itself all the more aggressively as states cede control of instruments of economic intervention.

Contradictions and Post-Neoliberalism

Hall had a unique social trajectory. He embodied a series of tensions and outright contradictions, related to class (a relatively privileged middle-class background in colonial, impoverished Jamaica), colonialism (a Caribbean immigrant in white Britain), ideology (a socialist amidst the Oxford intelligentsia), and theory (a culturally-oriented theorist stressing contingency among orthodox Marxists).

But contradictions can be productive. Hall remained a prolific, innovative intellectual for over half a century. He also combined the political and the academic in a way that runs counter to the ethos of contemporary academe. In times of political reaction, we should return to Hall—as someone who forged a way through academic spaces with his ideals not only intact but his intellectual tools sharpened, honed, and refined.

Towards the end of his life, Hall joined with others to publish The Kilburn Manifesto, an attempt to think beyond both Thatcherism and Blair’s New Labour. As in his writings in the late 1970s, where Hall sensed the withering away of social democracy, Hall here seemed to foretell the ways in which neoliberal dogmas would no longer seem quite so self-evidently true by the 2020s. Virtually no other political commentator was writing as early as the year 2015 about a world “After Neoliberalism?”, to quote the manifesto’s title, published at a time when neoliberalism seemed to reign supreme. Once again, Hall was five or ten years ahead of his time.

Although Hall searched for patterns and structures in the social order and was painfully aware of the crushing weight of power and domination in capitalist modernity, he nevertheless believed in the fundamental openness of history and the possibility of political change. For him, a conjuncture was always characterized by contingency. As Hall noted in one of his lectures: “If you don’t agree that there is a degree of openness or contingency to every historical conjuncture, you don’t believe in politics. You don’t believe that anything can be done.”[19] The world can always be remade.

Even when Hall presented his apparently bleak analyses, he often seemed to do so with a gleam in his eye and a faintly ironic smile—as if to suggest that even if everything is impossible, the situation is still far from hopeless.

This essay is an abbreviated, translated version of an essay forthcoming in Norwegian in an edited volume titled Sosial teori (Social Theory).

Book Recommendations

·       Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays (Duke University Press, 2017). An excellent synoptic overview over Hall’s political interventions and analyses.

·       Familiar Stranger. A Life between Two Islands (Duke University Press/Penguin, 2018). A moving portrait of a life lived in parallax between “two islands”: Jamaica and Britain. 

Footnotes

1 Gilbert, J. (2019). “This conjuncture: For Stuart Hall.” New Formations, 96(1), 5-37, p. 5.

2 Hall, S., Segal, L., & Osborne, P. (1997). “Stuart Hall: Culture and power.” Radical Philosophy 86 (Nov/Dec): 24-41.

3 For a full autobiographical account, see Hall, S. (2017). Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands. Durham: Duke University Press.

4 Morley, D. (2019) “General introduction.” In: Morley, D. (ed.), Stuart Hall: Essential Essays Vol. 2: Identity and Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 1.

5 Jaggi, M. (2009). “Personally speaking: A long conversation with Stuart Hall,” p. 19.

6 Hall, Familiar Stranger, p. 235.

7 Hall, Familiar Stranger, p. 232.

8 Williams, Z. (2012). “The Saturday interview: Stuart Hall.” The Guardian, February 11, 2012.

9 Hall, Familiar Stranger, p. 253.

10 Bourdieu, P., Sapiro, G., & McHale, B. (1991). “Fourth lecture. Universal corporatism: The role of intellectuals in the modern world.” Poetics Today, 12(4), 655-669, p. 660.

11 Hall, S. (2019). Essential Essays, Volume 1: Foundations of cultural studies (Morley, D., ed.). Durham: Duke University Press Books, p. 339.

12 Hall, S. (1959) “Politics of adolescence?”. Universities & Left Review, 6 (Spring 1959), 2-4.

13 Hall, S. (2017). The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

14 Hall, The Fateful Triangle, pp. 108-109.

15 Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., & Roberts, B. (1978/2013). Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (2nd ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

16 Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, p. 396.

17 Hall, S. (1985). “Authoritarian populism: A reply to Jessop et al.” New Left Review May/June I/151: 115-124, p. 116.

18 Jaggi, “Personally speaking”, p. 35.

19 Media Education Foundation (2021). “Studying the Conjuncture - Stuart Hall: Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life” [video transcript].

Ontocide: The Despair of Gaza

Gaza is being decimated. There are reports of polio virus found in Gaza’s sewage by the World Health Organization (WHO). Mountains of garbage are piling up as basic services have collapsed. The UN reports that clearing 40 million tons of rubble may take 15 years, with housing stock not rebuilt until 2040 at an estimated cost of $40 billion. And as of July 2024, some 39,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. The real body count may prove much higher, given the significant destruction of civil infrastructure by Israel’s armed forces, making recovering and registering fatalities difficult, with thousands likely buried beneath the rubble of the bombed-out enclave.

That the War on Gaza may one day be classified as genocidal by the International Criminal Court (ICC) seems increasingly likely as international legal institutions dare to condemn Israel’s government. Recently, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN’s top court, determined that Israel’s “continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” was “illegal” and should end as “rapidly as possible” (even as the Court limited their scope to East Jerusalem and the West Bank). In May 2024, the ICC prosecutor applied for arrest warrants against Hamas’s leadership as well as Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

The Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling has described Israel’s policies as a form of politicide, involving the “gradual but systematic attempt to cause Palestinians’ annihilation as an independent social, political and economic entity.” If politicide involves the denial of statehood and/or destruction of the basic trappings of an autonomous polity (including, as Max Weber pointed out long ago, the right to collect taxes which serves as the fiscal basis of the state), then genocide is the deathly acceleration and lethal concentration of a state’s firepower against the Other, the maturation of a still-nascent germ at the core of politicide.

Less commented upon than the “polity-destroying” (politicidal) or “people-destroying” (genocidal) nature of war and occupation, however, is the Gaza War’s deeply damaging effects on the continued belief in existential meaning and hope. This overwhelming destruction of meaning can be said to constitute what we can call ontocide (from the Greek, ὄντως [ontos] or “being”): Like any besieged, bombed, and starving population, Gazans are not only being killed and displaced in the thousands but are also facing a destruction of belief in the future, of meaning-in-existence, and of certainty that their personhood will advance into the future, under reasonably safe and secure conditions, respectful of their human dignity. Ontocide is the killing of belief in existence as such, the destruction of faith that the world, and the people who live in it, will go on, achieved through the concentrated intensification of multiple, overlapping agonies. Needless to say, ontocide is a terrible crime, because it tends to grind down the survivors—and all genocides in modern history have left survivors to pick up the pieces.

Ontocide is taking place in Gaza. By April 2024, after 200 days of war, some 75,000 tons of explosives had been dropped on Gaza—more than the bombing of Dresden in 1945. The result of this atrocity is pure negativity and despair: As someone has written on the walls of Gaza’s European Hospital: “We don’t care anymore about anything.” And who can blame them? The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has collected eyewitness testimonials from Gaza’s population, which vividly demonstrate the deep despair into which the enclave’s civilians have been thrown. One 30-year-old man “recounted how his entire family was killed while sheltering in a Rafah warehouse, after repeatedly being displaced”:

Since then, I’ve been alone in the world. I lost my family. I have no home and no future. I cry every day. I go to sleep alone and wake up lonely and lost…My mother really wanted me to get married. We hoped the war would end and we’d go back to our lives, but they killed my mother, my father and everyone else in my family. They killed everyone…My life is black now. I don’t think I’ll ever get over the trauma.

The Doctors without Borders psychologist Davide Musardo has recorded similarly harrowing eyewitness accounts from the ground:

Children maimed, with burns or without parents. Children having panic attacks, because physical pain triggers psychological wounds when pain reminds you of the bomb that changed your life forever. […] ‘I haven’t had a glass of fresh water for months. What kind of life is this?’ another patient asked me…I have seen people break down when receiving news of another evacuation order. Some people have changed places as many as 12 times in eight months. ‘I won’t move my tent anymore, I might as well die,’ I have heard people say. […] In Gaza, one survives but the exposure to trauma is constant. Everything is missing, even the idea of a future. For people, the greatest anguish is not today – the bombs, the fighting and the mourning – but the aftermath. There is little confidence about peace and reconstruction, while the children I saw in the hospital showed clear signs of regression.

To repeat: “Everything is missing, even the idea of future.”

Despair is a weapon of war, and ontocide is a tool for destroying hope and meaning, instilling existential emptiness in the Other.

Are not Gazans today slowly being turned into a kind of “living dead,” husks of humanity for whom little remains but bleak despair, with those fortunate enough to survive the 500-, 1000- or 2000-pound bombs, mostly supplied by the United States, left to attempt to reconstitute fragments of meaning in a totally abyssal, meaningless world? For these seemingly lucky ones, trauma is too weak a word; for them it is as if the world itself has ended.

For the survivors of genocide, the problem of existential meaning can prove intractable. Adorno famously wrote that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Finding or reclaiming meaning after the destruction of meaning—the subjective experience of ontocide—is among the primary difficulties facing survivors. There can be great cruelty in having survived the guns and bombs—only to find that nothing matters, that “we don’t care anymore about anything,” as the anonymous graffiti in the Gazan hospital writer phrased it. Speaking to B’Tselem in February, a 45-year-old Palestinian mother of nine said: “We’re exhausted. We’re broken and have no strength left…I don't know where else we can run. We’ve been displaced four times. I don’t know what fate awaits us.”

When 24-year-old Muhammed Bhar, a Gaza resident with Down’s syndrome, was bitten by an Israeli army dog during a military raid on his family’s apartment, according to a BBC report, and found two weeks later, dead and on the floor by his displaced family, the question of despair naturally sets in: We find ourselves thrown into an abyssal horror story, that of a totally defenseless, innocent disabled person mauled in the course of a military raid. As his brother Nabila described to the BBC: “This scene I will never forget…I constantly see the dog tearing at him and his hand, and the blood pouring from his hand…It is always in front of my eyes, never leaving me for a moment. We couldn't save him, neither from them nor from the dog.”

Reclaiming existence after existence as such has been shattered is a near-insurmountable task. Think only here of Samuel Beckett’s famously paradoxical phrase: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

Politicide smooths the way to genocide, and genocide naturally pairs with ontocide—its natural consequence for those escaping lethal destruction. The triplet of politicide, genocide, and ontocide might even be said to constitute the dark triad of occupation: destroy the state, destroy the people, destroy meaning as such.

Faced with this “dark triad,” the question confronting the international community is raised poignantly by two volunteer medical doctors returned from the Gaza Strip: “We must decide, once and for all: are we for or against murdering children, doctors and emergency medical personnel? Are we for or against demolishing an entire society?”

To this we can add: Are we for or against the destruction of belief in meaning as such? How can those who must go on, still go on? And what chance for poetry “after Gaza”?