Undead Signifier
A friend of mine once said: “Please stop invoking Hitler as a point of comparison — he’s what Roland Barthes would have called an exhausted signifier.” Good line, that.
And yet, clichéd arguments linking Nazis to Zionists have the lamentable advantage of being true. Back when Fb was still popular, I watched a viral video of Israeli soldiers using attack dogs against some 16-year-old boy, another Palestinian child in prison for “throwing stones” (the standard charge). As IDF goons held and taunted their victim, they joined dubious company. Barthes and all the good taste on earth couldn’t stifle public discussion. Or make anecdotes and hard facts about Holocaust(s) past and present disappear.
Close to a decade ago, according to my own strictly amateur research, Haaretz reported that (brace yourself) 99.74% of all legal cases brought against Palestinians ended in conviction. We heard one dodge after another defending The Hollow Land, with dozens of laws diminishing historical Palestine’s native population, even within the old borders. Why deny it? Apologias, passive or otherwise, lie in the domain of scoundrels, lunatics and moral imbeciles. Here, I’m speaking to those Brand-Loyal Democrats who spent decades falsely equating Israel’s ethno-state with democracy, willing collaborationists in what Francesca Albanese now calls “a genocide foretold.”
I extend precisely as much respect to Biden voters, who harp on the Holocaust while pulling a lever for his outrages in Gaza, as I would to dead Nazi supporters. Less respect in fact, because Biden voters have more context for genocide and aren't facing death by the state for speaking up. The banality of evil is itself, thanks to Dem Scum, a banal idea. Were they alive today, German citizens under Hitler would see America as an advanced nation.
Heads up: your political enemies are graduating from institutions of higher learning where you called the cops on them, remember? Us older folks on the actual Left (escapees from your social engineering project) have joined this new anti-imperialist generation. We have already begun dismantling all that you stand for, while your craven eyes focus on Trump. Indeed, Biden appointees and international humanitarian rights lawyers accuse YOU of dismantling your own legal apparatus; they’re resigning from government and United Nations posts with a single-digit salute to the abuse of Holocaust Memory, your insidious version of “Never Again.”
By Daniel Riccuito