Moral bankruptcy: Why woke ideologists are excited about the October 7 Hamas attack

Neue Zürcher Zeitung Germany Moral bankruptcy: Why woke ideologists are excited about the October 7 Hamas attack Article by Edward Kanterian • 9 hours • 3 minutes reading time Biting coldness towards the suffering of Israelis: demonstrator during Pride 2024 in Washington. A few decades ago, postmodern philosophy wanted to free society from the alleged tyranny of absolute truths and rigid categories. In 1979, Jean-François Lyotard proclaimed the end of the great ideological narratives, while Gianni Vattimo, with a "weak thinking", said goodbye to the "strong structures" of Western metaphysics - be it God, morality or being. Interestingly, this opening in turn led to dogmatic hardening. Vattimo offers an example of this: In his writings he appears as a goblin-like "gay Catholic, communist nihilist," as he describes himself. When it came to Israel, he spoke differently. During the Gaza war of 2014, he wished to "shoot the Zionist scoundrels" and for the Europeans to buy better rockets for Hamas. When Vattimo died on September 19, 2023, Hamas lost a prominent advocate in the European intelligentsia. The freezing cold of the woke movement Many left-wing ideologues, especially from the woke camp, were enthusiastic about the massacre on October 7, summarizes Jens Balzer in his book "After Woke." Tariq Ali wrote in the British magazine "New Left Review": "The elected government in Gaza is striking back. It is breaking out of its open-air prison and [...] is standing up against the colonizers." Ismail Ibrahim said in the American magazine "n+1": "I felt the shock and the beauty of something unimaginable that had happened." Judith Butler, the star of queer feminism, was subtly dialectical: she argued that Hamas was protecting true Judaism, at its core an eternal, non-identitarian diaspora, from its national, identity-based misguided path. Balzer is harsh in his criticism of the woke movement's reactions to the largest massacre of Jews since the Shoah. He accuses it of being icy cold towards the suffering of the Israelis, even morally bankrupt, as it sympathizes with a terrorist organization "that cultivates a deeply patriarchal, misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic worldview." The author, who classifies himself as a left-wing postmodernist, pursues three goals. He very knowledgeably traces the history of the woke movement, tries to defend its core, and asks why it "took a wrong turn". Undermined by racist elements Jens Balzer locates the postmodern origins of wokeness in the works of black intellectuals such as Stuart Hall and Édouard Glissant. They formulated the idea of ​​a hybrid, fluid, heterogeneous cultural identity as a protest by marginalized groups against a repressive dominant culture. The roots of this resistance, Balzer shows, go back to the black emancipation movement in the 1930s. That was when the term "woke" came into use, initially as a warning from blues singer Lead Belly to beware of white lynch mobs and to remain vigilant. The word found its way into slang until it finally meant something like "questioning yourself and respecting others". This liberal-democratic maxim, according to the author, remains the good core of wokeness. Why then the misdevelopment? Because the movement was infiltrated by racist elements, such as the Afrocentrism of the Nation of Islam, which denounced the Jews as the true operators of the European slave trade. Postcolonialism was initially purely critical of European colonialism. Around the year 2000, it took a turn towards the indigenous and the idea that cultures and peoples untouched by Western modernity were authentic and flawless. According to the "Critical Whiteness Theory", however, all white people - including Jews - are "inextricably entangled in the history and present of racist discrimination simply because of their skin color." Well-known binary simplifications, in other words, with the opposite sign. Rigid narrative But Jens Balzer also fails at the core problem of postmodernism, the denial of a reality independent of our interpretations and social constructs. How do you construct something without a solid basis, without predetermined components? The liberalism that Balzer supports is an attempt to reconcile our vulnerability and our desire for freedom - two essential aspects of human nature. Balzer sees Israel's right to exist as being based on what he understands as a "longing for safe spaces, 'safer spaces', and for collective identification."