In the mirror of Gaza the Abyss looks back at us, and we are captives of the distorted funhouse images of Israel and America, vestiges of dreams as refuge of the outcasts and guarantor of our universal human rights, and the monsters we have now become.

     I can recognize nothing in the figures which confront us, and though I hurl defiance at the endless chasms of darkness my words find no limit and return no echoes, as if devoured by the Nothing.

     Yet I am neither defeated by the overwhelming force and terror of Authority nor subjugated by despair and learned helplessness, for this is the space where I live, this horror, this joy, this freedom.

     As Jean Genet said to me in 1982 during the Siege of Beirut, in a lost cause, in a burning house, in a time of great darkness; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”

     I hope that this remains true, for all of us as we struggle to emerge from the legacies of our history and seize our power from systems of oppression, for this is the great task of becoming human, in general and in this Rashomon Gate Event now unfolding in Rafah and elsewhere; to dream impossible things and make them real.  

    There are some things which should be true even if they never were, even if Keats was wrong and finding a thing beautiful does not make it so, even if Thomas Mann was right and love cannot redeem anything, even if as Tolkien feared we have arrived at the Black Gate with no bonds of brotherhood to unify us, even if as did Camus we must claw our way out of the ruins to make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.

    There are no Israelis, no Palestinians; only people like ourselves, and the choices they make about how to be human together.

     What are we worth, if we permit ruthless bandit kings to commit atrocities, plunder, and enslave others?

     What is western civilization worth, if we will not live up to our fine words?   And fine words they remain, such as these written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a synthesis and revisioning of ideas from Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

     What is America, if not a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world?

    What is Israel, if not a refuge for the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, among them the most demonized and persecuted people of human history, the Jews?

    Let us reply with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”

     Join us. 

     As I wrote in my post of March 20 2020, Fear and Despair: How Dancing With Our Darkness May Help Us to Learn, Grow, and Transform Ourselves and Our World; In this time of suffering and of fear and despair, of injustice and loss, violence and greed, isolation and loneliness, life disruptive events and cataclysms, of vast power asymmetries of patriarchy and plutocracy, and of the atavistic barbarisms of fascist tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil, we are confronted with the truth of the human condition in the darkness of its most negative aspects, but also liberated by these same empty spaces.

     When illusion is robbed of its power over us, and the echo chamber of lies is revealed for the hollow misdirection of rapacious predators that it is, a space of freedom opens into which we may grow beyond our limits.

    We are now all Edvard Munch’s figure in The Scream, overwhelmed with the horror of a world gone mad, our fear and despair made manifest in our cry for humanity and our lament for the brokenness of the world.

     And in this moment of Awakening we seize our power and reclaim ourselves, for the realization of our flawed nature and the wounds of our humanity opens us to the pain of others, confers transformative power and heralds the redemption of the world. Humans are beautiful not in spite of our flaws, but because of them.

     When all the evils have escaped the Pandora’s Box of authoritarian force and control, hope remains; for when all our gods and masters have been revealed as humbugs like Oz behind the curtain of their smoke and bluster, the realization that no one has any hold over us is swiftly followed by the terrible and wonderful awareness of our total freedom.

     We are the negative spaces of our fears and other demons, figures cast like  shadow puppets by the darkness which defines our limits and which we are able to embrace.

     Cherish your darkness, for the darkness will set you free.    

     As I wrote in my post of July 22 2022, Now Is the Time of Monsters; Hope and Despair On the Cusp of Change; The government of Italy has collapsed, an act of sabotage by fascist revivalists who have abandoned the political coalition which has thus far prevented it from tumbling off the edge of a precipice into the abyss, an existential threat to the survival of her peoples and the basic services of any state which include healthcare.

    But if the abyss holds terrors of a precariat held hostage by death and the material needs of survival, the abyss is also where hope lies, for here the balance of power may be changed in revolutionary struggle.

    In this liminal time of the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human, of seizures of power and the performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen, Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, let us look to our glorious past in the Resistance which was victorious in the Liberation of Italy on April 25 and the hanging of Mussolini on April 28 1945.

     As Slavoj Zizek’s favorite saying goes, a French mistranslation or paraphrase of Antonio Gramsci’s line in his Prison Notebooks “La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati”, literally “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”, as “Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres”, which introduces the idea of monstrosity, referential to the historical development of the idea in Michel de Montaigne, Michel Foucault, and Georges Canguilhem’s work The Normal and the Pathological, a dialectical process of mimesis which results in the form of the principle as; “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”

     Meanings shift, adapt, and change as they transgress boundaries, inhabit public and private spaces, and unfold over vast gulfs of time, and so must we.

     As I wrote in my post of December 20 2022, This Christmas, Confront the Meaninglessness of Life Not With Abjection, Despair, and Helplessness But With the Joy of Total Freedom;  As we enter the Christmas season, a time much of America will be consumed by orgiastic buying as displays of elite class membership and obligatory feasts often with people we don’t actually like or deeply know, adrift in a universe without imposed values living lives of random chaotic episodes of being which form no grand design, ephemeral and illusory, subjected to totalizing passions and caught in vast invisible systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization enslaved to authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege like Charlie Chaplin eaten by the gears of the machine he serves in The Factory, let us confront the meaninglessness of life and the terror of our nothingness not with abjection, despair, and helplessness but with the joy of total freedom.

     When there are no rules, there are no impossibilities.

    Merry Christmas, and don’t forget to run amok and be ungovernable.

     As written by Wendy Syfret, author of The Sunny Nihilist: : How a Meaningless Life Can Make You Truly Happy, in Aeon; “Exhausted by the modern pressure to squeeze meaning out of every moment? Here’s a radical way to reset your priorities.

     In theory, the pursuit of a meaningful life is noble. Foundational concepts of community, ethics, logic, morality, consciousness and equality were born from the investigation of meaning. From Aristotle and Plato to the entire oeuvre of John Hughes, the urge to wrestle with the point of it all has inspired great works of art, literature and film. But today something’s gone awry and the pursuit of meaning inspires more angst than awe. The search has moved from a private pursuit to a marketable product.

     The rise of meaningless meaning

    Let me demonstrate with a game, ‘spot the meaningless meaning’. Next time you’re at the supermarket, pharmacy or really any non-enlightened space of commerce, pay attention to what the products are attempting to offer. One might expect a barrage of quality and utility assurances: ‘these chickpeas are low sodium’, ‘this facemask is non-irritating’. But, increasingly, aspirations are higher. A chocolate bar isn’t skim (skimmed) milk powder and sugar, it’s a chance to create an intergenerational family moment. A lipstick isn’t a bullet of colour to light up a drawn face, but a weapon of radical self-expression.

     Rather than informing a population of philosophically fulfilled, elevated beings, the ubiquity of all this bite-sized meaning has had an adverse effect, fuelling our familiar, modern malaise of dissatisfaction, disconnection and burnout.

     The fixation with making all areas of existence generically meaningful has created exhausting realities where everything suddenly really, really matters. Daily newsletters flood our inboxes, prescribing never-ending tasks and goals to meditate over and mark as complete. In the shower, we listen to podcasts about making this day count, then towel off and cram in a few minutes of mindful journalling about what we managed to meaningfully achieve the day before.

     But as meaning moves from a long-term exploration to a daily metric, it’s creating new problems. When we’re not immediately able to locate meaning in our actions, jobs, relationships and consumer products, we’re left feeling like anxious, empty failures. The once-noble pursuit that built culture and helped us carve out rewarding existences becomes just another task on the endless checklist of a ‘good life’ that we’re never quite able to tick off.

     Nihilism as a solution

     So what’s the alternative? Is the answer to embrace a state of pointless, nihilistic chaos? Yeah, pretty much. At least that’s what’s worked for me.

     For the past few years, I’ve been consumed by nihilism. Reading that, it would be fair to assume things haven’t been peachy. But my descent into the controversial philosophy hasn’t been a grim road of despair and hopelessness. Quite the opposite. It’s become one of the most illuminating and fortifying parts of my life.

     Rejecting the urge to seek and denote meaning to all things has changed the way I assign value and spend time. It has challenged what I focus on and, most importantly, what I disregard. I’ve found that a kind of optimistic or ‘sunny’ nihilism highlights the delicate beauty of existence, the absurdity of life, and the exciting chaos of the everyday. But I’m getting ahead of myself. To understand the power of sunny nihilism, it’s necessary to begin with the philosophy itself.

     The broadest explanation of nihilism argues that life is meaningless and the systems to which we subscribe to give us a sense of purpose – such as religion, politics, traditional family structures or even the notion of absolute truth itself – are fantastical human constructs; inventions to make the randomness of existence feel a little more orderly. Or, as nihilism’s poster boy Friedrich Nietzsche put it: ‘Every belief, every considering something true, is necessarily false because there is simply no true world.’

     Breaking it down further, the American philosopher Donald Crosby divides nihilism into four main forms: moral, epistemological, cosmic and, perhaps the best-known, existential. Moral nihilism rejects fundamental ideas of right and wrong; epistemological nihilism takes issue with absolute truth; cosmic nihilism considers nature to be inherently indifferent and hostile; and finally we reach existential nihilism, in many ways the culmination of all these considerations, which probably keeps most people up at night – the basic idea being that there is no meaning to life, everything is pointless.

     Reading all that, it’s fair to argue that nihilism is kind of a bummer. These ideas do pose the risk of curdling into a kind of toxic nihilism that leaves the individual feeling despondent and overwhelmed. What’s the point of doing anything if nothing matters? If there is no inherent understanding of good and bad, why try to lead a moral life? If everything is pointless, why even get out of bed?

     The cleansing power of sunny nihilism

     While I’ll admit that the message that nothing matters – not your job, god, universe, certainly not what type of canned goods you buy – is an overwhelming thought, it doesn’t have to be. Set against this never-ending obsession with locating (or, too often, purchasing) meaning, it can be liberating.

     When I contemplate life’s pointlessness, I begin by remembering that, in the scope of all human history, I really matter very little (a rather cosmic approach). My issues and concerns are mute. My successes and failures will all be forgotten. As will the achievements and stumbles of everyone around me (existential nihilism at its finest).

     While I may feel dwarfed by the scope of endless and apathetic time, the smallest elements of my life begin to expand. If nothing matters long-term, my focus shifts to this moment. I understand that the present, however mundane, is as fleeting, temporal, fragile and forgettable as the greatest events in human history.

     Nihilism makes me wonder about what I do and don’t pay attention to. Is what another person thinks of me imbued with greater meaning (or meaninglessness) as compared with a brush of jasmine tumbling over a neighbour’s fence? Not really. So why am I consumed by one while ignoring the other?

     By his own description, Nietzsche ‘philosophise[d] with a hammer’, breaking open large ideas and challenging his readers to see what could be reformed with the pieces. In this way nihilism, like all philosophies, is a tool to explore parts of our lives. As with any tool, it can be picked up and put down, used to create or destroy; outcomes and executions are dependent on the user’s intent. It is up to you to decide if you will fall into the destructive grooves of toxic nihilism, or opt for something a little lighter. You may not have a purpose, but you do have agency. It’s this reading of nihilism that I think about when considering a life without meaning.

     But how does one go about picking up such a tool and using it in a positive way? This Guide will help you embrace sunny nihilism and avoid its toxic alternative.

     Think it through

     Understand the difference between passive and active forms of nihilism

     The challenges posed by nihilism weren’t lost on Nietzsche, who had an elegant way of explaining how the philosophy can serve as a destructive or constructive force. According to him, passive nihilists absorb the messages of meaninglessness and are threatened. They fear the void so scramble to fill it by indulging in any offering of it. As Nolen Gertz wrote in Aeon in 2020, this form of blind self-protection is a ‘dangerous form of self-destruction’.

     He added: ‘To believe just for the sake of believing in something can lead to a superficial existence, to the complacent acceptance of believing anything believed by others, because believing in something (even if it turns out to be nothing worth believing in) will be seen by the passive nihilist as preferable to taking the risk of not believing in anything …’

     Which is how we end up back in the trap of meaningless meaning. Or standing in the supermarket aisle, trying to convince ourselves that a can of chickpeas really does matter.

     As a more constructive alternative, Nietzsche ushered individuals to evolve into active nihilists. That is, to stare into the abyss and see the absence of meaning not as a tragedy but as an opportunity. To consider it a space to fill with your own values, to define how you want to be in the world and what you believe to be true. An active nihilist isn’t intimidated by chaos, they recognise it as a chance to create something new and better.

     In my own journey toward sunny nihilism, I landed somewhere in the middle. I wasn’t horrified by a lack of absolute truth, but I also didn’t rush to write my own. Rather, I chose to pause, stare into the void, and consider the freedom of nothingness.

     Stay alert to meaningless meaning

     Whereas nihilism can prompt reflection and widen your view on existence, the commercial hijacking of meaning plays into the vulnerabilities of the passive nihilist, contributing to our era’s epidemic of self-obsessed selfishness. It not only encourages you to centre every action around yourself, but it deceptively presents this as a noble act. When you embrace this kind of personal mythmaking, you give yourself permission to spend a lot of time thinking about your own life, actions and experiences.

     Speaking to Politico magazine in 2020, Virginia Heffernan, the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art (2016), said: ‘the recent fantasy of “optimising” a life – for peak performance, productivity, efficiency – has created a cottage industry that tries to make the dreariest possible lives sound heroic.’

     To help you avoid this decadent trap, it is worth being vigilant of, and guarding against, the ways the world is trying to convince you that you’re partaking in a sacred act – by positioning every brand, product or service as somehow meaningful.

     Are those period undies really a symbol of rebellion, or just a convenient sanitary product? Does the bottle of hot sauce in my fridge truly mark me as an iconoclastic thrill-seeker, or just indicate a robust gut flora? Is my bank really helping me invest in family ?  While writing this article, I was conveniently served an advert for ‘Florence by Mills’, the new teen skincare range from the actress Millie Bobby Brown (I appreciate the algorithm recognising my youthful spirit). The entire range is clad in the familiar pastel colours and toothless message of ‘empowering young people through something something’ of so many personal care products. But the ‘Feed Your Soul Love U a Latte’ mask stood out in particular. Turns out it’s never too young to preach that enlightenment can be achieved in a 15-minute topical treatment.

     I hope that the young people browsing these products are resilient enough to not fall into such narratives; that they’re able to pause to ask what these cheap exchanges are calling on them to invest emotionally or financially. Will this purchase make them happy, or is it an example of what Heffernan cautioned against when she said we were out to make ‘the dreariest possible lives sound heroic’?

     Recognise the happy side of nihilism

     When promoting nihilism as the antidote to the commercialisation of meaning, I tend to meet the same repeated questions: if there’s no point, then why do anything? Why get out of bed? Wash your hair? Treat another person with kindness? Not fall into a quivering heap?

     I’m reminded of an episode of the Netflix sitcom The Good Place (2016-20). Chidi – a character who happens to be a moral philosopher – has the kind of existential crisis that inspires these queries. During his breakdown, he walks a classroom of philosophy students down the major paths where humanity has attempted to locate meaning and understand how to live an ‘ethical life’. After cycling through the arguments of virtue ethics, consequentialism and deontology, he finally declares that all these pathways to meaning lead nowhere (it’s worth watching the show to hear Chidi explain why) before concluding that nihilism is the only logical philosophical view – at which point he has a full meltdown.

     While I love Chidi, I find the scene frustrating for how narrowly it presents this cause and effect. Such a response has always puzzled me. After all, did you get out of bed this morning to search for the meaning of life or for a cup of coffee? Again, are such grand questions really bringing such grand comforts?

     In contrast to Chidi, another pop-culture figure shows how nihilism can inspire greater happiness. In the film The Beach Bum (2019), Matthew McConaughey plays Moondog, an epicurean, once-iconic, Florida-based writer. His is a woozy and colourful tale of excess and hedonism that involves a lot of drinking, drugs, avoided responsibility, and sex. All of which are indulged in with few consequences.

     Watching The Beach Bum, you feel you’ve seen this movie before, you know to wait for the fall, when Moondog will collapse under the weight of his shirked responsibilities and the system will catch up to him. Except the fall never comes. After seeing it at South by Southwest film festival, the critic Hazem Fahmy wrote: ‘Rather than simply not address these issues, the film goes out of its way to remind us that nothing in this strange dimension truly matters.’

     Moondog doesn’t care about anything, he lives for pleasure. Towards the end of the film, he outlines his life’s mantra to a reporter: ‘We’re here to have a good time.’ For all this destruction, and clear disregard for rules, values and consequences, Moondog isn’t punished. By the end of the film, he has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize and several million dollars. Although, true to form, he shows they’re meaningless too (I won’t spoil the finale).

     Moondog’s embrace of nihilism demonstrates that, when you stop focusing on a greater point, you’re able to ask simpler but more rewarding questions: what does happiness look like right now? What would give me pleasure today? How can I achieve a sense of satisfaction in this moment? Most of the time, the answers aren’t complex. They’re small delights already at hand – time spent with loved ones, a delicious meal, a walk in nature, a cup of coffee. Or, in Moondog’s case, a lot of booze and parties.

     Nihilism doesn’t have to spiral into selfishness

     Moondog’s experience sounds great to me, but it leads to a second concern surrounding nihilism. It might not make you miserable, but what about everyone who has to hang out with you? If nothing matters, you’re not part of some larger plan and you’re not held accountable by any rulebook. Motivated only by what feels good in the moment, what’s stopping you acting only for your own interests?

     Nietzsche was mindful of these pain points, writing in Beyond Good and Evil (1886): ‘He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’

     Nihilism asks us to toss out meaning and gaze into the void that’s left in its place. But rather than being a simple, terrifying black hole, a void can prompt reflection. It’s a space to be filled with whatever you want. In that way, nihilism can serve as a funhouse mirror, reflecting and distorting your own beliefs. Approach it with pain and fear, and those feelings will be magnified. Go to it looking for a way to excuse gross behaviour, and you’ll find it.

     Stare into the abyss

     Give it a go yourself. Take a moment to truly submit to your own smallness in the Universe. To admit you are meaningless. That you don’t matter. That your name, ego, reputation, family, friends and loves will soon be gone.

     This needn’t be a destructive experience. Once the discomfort passes, and your ego abates, stop to consider – how has your understanding of your own time and energy changed? Is your job really so important when coupled with the knowledge that even the greatest achievements in human history will eventually be lost to time? Are the issues, people or situations that cause you stress or pain actually worth the worry when you remember that no one will ever remember or really be impacted by them?

     The only real impact these earthly concerns have is on what they take you away from: things that may not ‘matter’, but at least bring you joy.

     Focusing on the scale of your own life, and how insignificant it is, also allows you to ask: OK, if I don’t matter, and neither do the issues that take up so much of my time, how does the world show itself differently? If I’m no longer the centre of my own universe, what takes that space?

    You might start wondering what you want to last after you’ve gone, and what needs to be protected and treasured.

     I considered these points recently while witnessing a widely affecting mass collision with nihilism – the delivery of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. The shots showed an inconceivable array of distant galaxies that existed billions of years in the past. It was an overwhelming view that crashed into any understanding we have of time, scale and distance – not to mention the potential for life and realities beyond our own. Responding to it, it felt like the whole world had a mass awakening to individual inconsequentialism.

     But the reaction wasn’t mass depression or hopelessness. It was awe. People wondered over the beauty and scale of worlds they could never truly comprehend. They saw how their own lives barely register on a cosmic level, that our own galaxy wasn’t even a blip. This sense of our own meaninglessness was humbling. It didn’t break people’s hearts but excited them, reminded them of the inconceivable beauty and majesty of existence. People felt thankful for being a dot in an endless sky, to be part of this cosmic tapestry, even if just for a meaningless moment.

     It takes guts, but you too might find that the abyss reframes your attention to things you hope will last for a little longer than yourself. Art, community, the people you love, their right to feel safe, respected and well. If you’re looking for somewhere to redirect all this formerly self-involved energy, start there. In place of existential angst, psychological annihilation or selfish abandon, you can find relief in larger causes.

     Try a light meditation on death

     When I’m overwhelmed, remembering that one day I won’t exist makes whatever’s stressing me appear small. Accepting this finality transforms the bland environs I’m ignoring into an overwhelming buffet of smells, sights and experiences that suddenly feel impossibly rare.

     This ‘mindfulness of death’ is central to the work of the artificial intelligence scientist and Buddhist teacher Nikki Mirghafori. To access this feeling, she counsels trying a form of ‘death meditation’ to help confront your fear of death, and experience the strange wonder that can come from that.

     To try it, she instructs meditating with the mantra ‘this could be my last breath’. The theory is that by doing so, you work through the terror a little at a time, observing what comes to the surface during the practice and confronting each fear until you eventually reach a place of peace.

     Mirghafori posits that, by accepting your own mortality and facing life’s impermanence, you can align the way you live with your truest values. It’s many people’s lack of interest in contemplating death – and as such, how precious and fleeting our lives are – that allows so many to waste their time.

     I can report that this is a terrifying exercise. It’s like rehearsing your final moments, inviting your mind to flood with fear, regret, longing, loss, love and gratitude. When you imagine each breath to be your last, each breath becomes a gift on arrival. Even after you’re done, it’s impossible to not enter the rest of your day with a degree of elation at being alive.

     Doing it, I’m reminded of what Epicurus once said: ‘Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.’ Epicurus didn’t believe in life after death, as either a punishment or a reward. He taught that life and all it could offer was happening to us right now.

     Just as nihilism has become associated with narrow-minded destruction, Epicurus is often synonymous with hedonism and a ceaseless pursuit of selfish pleasures. But in reality, he was certain this kind of living would usher people away from materialism and greed. His ‘pleasure principle’ championed being and doing good, arguing that, with one precious life to enjoy, not a moment should be wasted in guilt or anxiety over pain caused to others. The only way to feel truly good was to treat people well.

     Remember pointless pleasures

          I’d like to end by lightening things up a little. One way to refocus on the pointless pleasure that actually forms the bedrock of our lives is to start a ‘nice things’ list. Across the day, make an effort to jot down moments, people and events that make you happy.

     I’ve been doing this for years. Reviewing my own rambling lists, I’m always surprised by the simplicity of the entries: the smell of fresh basil, an excellent joke, two dogs meeting in the street. Alone they are innocuous (and usually overlooked), but together they flavour my days with endless sweetness. Learning to pay attention to them returns me to what actually provides solace in my day, training me to not overlook the now for the promise of the one day.

     So often in the pursuit of greater meaning we erase not only the joy of these forgotten delights, but also their collective power. Yes, a flock of galahs on my nature strip, or crying to a Paul Kelly song, or the spasmodic energy of Junior Bake Off (my most recent entries) are not life-altering – but, taking time to notice and appreciate them, they form the sum of their parts. A handful of treasured beats becomes a good day, a good week, a good year, a good life. Meaningless, sure. Precious, absolutely.

     Key points – How to be a happy nihilist

     The rise of meaningless meaning. The search for meaning used to be a noble pursuit, but it’s become commercialised and now inspires more angst than awe.

     Nihilism as a solution. This is the philosophy that says life is meaningless. Handled with care, it can be liberating.

     The cleansing power of sunny nihilism. This is a kind of optimistic nihilism that highlights the delicate beauty of existence, the absurdity of life, and the exciting chaos of the everyday.

     Understand the difference between passive and active forms of nihilism.          

     Passive nihilists scramble to fill the void with anything to hand; active nihilists are undaunted, and fill the space with their own values.

     Stay alert to meaningless meaning. To avoid passive or toxic nihilism, it pays to be vigilant of, and guard against, the ways the world is trying to convince you that you’re partaking in a sacred act.

     Recognise the happy side of nihilism. When you stop focusing on a greater point, you’ll find you can ask simpler but more rewarding questions, such as: what does happiness look like right now?

      Nihilism doesn’t have to spiral into selfishness. When you stare into the abyss, it reframes your attention to things you hope will last for a little longer than yourself.

     Try a light meditation on death. I can report that this is a terrifying exercise. But when you imagine each breath to be your last, each breath becomes a gift on arrival.

     Remember pointless pleasures. From the smell of fresh basil to an excellent joke, start a ‘nice things’ list. Meaningless, sure. Precious, absolutely.

     Why it matters

     The young philosophers embracing nihilism

     For uplifting and earnest examples of nihilism’s application, check out the way younger philosophers are exploring it. Two TEDx talks by teenagers stand out in particular. In 2018, Elias Skjoldborg, a student at Harwood Union High School in Vermont, used the platform to introduce his take on ‘optimistic nihilism’. In short, he argues that if life is meaningless – and we are not pinned to some greater existential task or goal – then we may as well focus on finding happiness during this brief, meaningless flash of consciousness we call existence.

     When he says ‘if you died right now, it wouldn’t really make a difference in the big picture. Had you never been born, nobody would really care,’ he presents it as good news. He adds: ‘That life has no meaning is not a reason … to be sad.’ Rather, he explains, if our lives are needless, then the only directive we have is to figure out how to find happiness in our momentary blip of consciousness. Skjoldborg suggested that his audience get hobbies, help others, solve problems rather than creating them, and just try their best.

     Skjoldborg is not alone in his observations. In his talk a year earlier, Siddharth Gupta, a student at Kodaikanal International School in India, also opened up about how nihilism has helped him. Giving his talk the title ‘Confessions of an Existential Nihilist’, he explained how his belief that life was worthless had given him the ‘opportunity to find meaning in all that I do’.

     Meanwhile, over on YouTube, Khadija Mbowe, a Gambian Canadian vlogger on sociology and media, recently looked at nihilism and absurdism in a video asking if life still had value if it was a meaningless random occurrence within an uncaring universe. Clad in a bright orange graphic T-shirt with matching statement makeup, Mbowe looked like any other luminous member of Gen Z, asking: ‘What does our life, our existence, mean when we don’t believe we’re put here for a reason?’ as easily as if they were reacting to a viral mukbang video. Drawing on references from as broad a field as James Baldwin and RuPaul’s Drag Race, Mbowe asks big questions that don’t lead to dense, depressing answers. Instead, this vlogger’s takes are thoughtful, exploratory and ultimately hopeful.

     Each generation has a tendency to make the case for why their set of circumstances is especially dire. But for young people coming of age during rolling crises of pandemics, climate catastrophes and quaking world economies, they might have a strong case for being particularly hard done by. Yet basking in the aforementioned reflections of these fresh-faced philosophers, one feels a little lightened, not only by their constructive interpretation of nihilism, but also by the resilience it appears to offer them.

     Links & books

     In my book The Sunny Nihilist: How a Meaningless Life Can Make You Truly Happy (2021), I explore not only the modern tendency to overinvest in meaning, but also the darker consequences of such a relationship. In particular, how it intersects with our notions of work, love, family, capitalism and politics. I also explore how people can detangle themselves, and how gratifying it is to do so.

     The literary darlings Ottessa Moshfegh, Melissa Broder and Lisa Taddeo all frequently return to themes of millennial nihilism in their work. Meanwhile, the writers Jia Tolentino, Susan Sontag and Jenny Odell are looking more broadly at our interest in meaning, worth and community in a way that intersects with these ideas. Their deep folios of writing are edifying reading – I suggest starting with Tolentino’s Trick Mirror (2019) and Odell’s How to Do Nothing (2019), both books are as digestible as they are illuminating (and have personally been reliable elevated small-talk fodder for the past few years).

     I already mentioned the TV show The Good Place (do check it out if you haven’t already), but nihilism is present in many of our other favourite entertainment offerings, such as BoJack Horseman (2014-20), a cartoon that follows a clutch of humans and anthropomorphic animals as they navigate Hollywood, fame, and their own cycles of ambition and destruction. One nihilistic moment involved Mr Peanutbutter, a lovable and dim-witted Labrador who is a successful TV actor, consoling his then-wife by tenderly reminding her: ‘The Universe is a cruel, uncaring void. The key to being happy isn’t the search for meaning. It’s to just keep yourself busy with unimportant nonsense and, eventually, you’ll be dead.’ I promise it’s funnier than it sounds.

     Nihilism has found its way to other screens too. The films Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) and Palm Springs (2020) both show how fun and bombastic these ideas can be. Although my personal favourite surprise nihilistic resource might just be SpongeBob SquarePants (1999-). If a chatty sponge can’t convince you of the chaotic charm of existence, I’m not sure what can.”

     As I wrote in my post of October 13 2023, Our World Is Destroyed and Recreated in This Ritual of the Black Sun Wherein Our Humanity Is Eclipsed By the Legacies of Our History; As the season of Halloween is signaled tomorrow by the new moon, it opens with a solar eclipse and the Ritual of the Black Sun as symbolized despair, abjection, grief, and fear, illuminated with great beauty and horror in Stanton Marlin’s study of the alchemical works of Jung in The Black Sun: the alchemy and art of darkness, William Blake’s Book of Urizen, and Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, my three primary references on this subject.

     And this ritual of transformative rebirth occurs in the wake of the war crimes and atrocities of the Hamas terror attack on Israel, which now conclusively from plans and orders found on its slain perpetrators includes the planned mass murders and abduction of school children.

     There are two possible replies to an event of this kind, which disrupts and fractures systems of order on the positive side and violates our humanity as degradation and dehumanization on the negative like a Janus coin of mirror reversals; with fear and its mad children rage and violence, or with love and its praxis as compassion and mercy.

     To bring harm or healing, enforcement of virtue and the tyranny and terror of wars of imperial dominion and conquest and the centralization of power to authority and carceral states of force and control, or solidarity as guarantors of each others universal human rights and democracy as co owners of the state in a free society of equals.

     If we choose war in this moment, and America sends military aid to Israel as a sponsor and collaborator in the genocide of the Palestinians in retribution for this vast war crime and atrocity perpetrated by Hamas to fasten their political control of the people of Gaza, the Age of Tyrants has begun.

     If we choose peace and send humanitarian aid both to the people of Israel and of Gaza in the war of annihilation which is coming as Netanyahu gathers his forces to invade, we may yet have a chance for a future democracy to emerge in the region and globally as a United Humankind.

     Our best chance to heal the legacies of our history and reunite the peoples of Israel and Palestine is if they turn their backs on those who claim to act in their name, both Netanyahu’s regime and that of Hamas, and refuse to kill each other in service to the power of those who would enslave us.

     Let us send no armies to enforce virtue, and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.

     As written by Sahar Vardi in The Times of Israel, in an article entitled Dual loyalty: It’s so hard to have humanity here. It’s exhausting, and it feels like time after time the world is just asking you to let go; “We on the left are often accused of dual loyalty. And on days like this, I really feel it. Even if loyal isn’t exactly the right word here, as I’ll explain, the sentiment is right.

     In Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market this morning, a street musician sang “Am Yisrael Chai” in a mournful register. The market itself was nearly empty and a woman was talking to her friend about her regular vegetable seller who was not allowed to come and open shop today. All stalls owned by Arabs are closed.

     On a street in the Rehavia neighborhood, families get out of two cars. Most of them were already crying, the rest with an indescribable sadness in their eyes, as they knock softly on the door of one of the houses. Family of someone who died? Of someone kidnapped?

     You open a video of a sanitation worker who was beaten in the city center because he is Arab and try not to avert your gaze.

     “Dual loyalty” is seeing both this and that with tears in your eyes.

     It’s that moment when you talk to a friend who doesn’t know whether their relatives are dead or kidnapped and what they should even hope for, and to see the helplessness, the fear, the deep pain. And a moment later, it’s talking to a friend from Gaza who can only say that every night is now the scariest night of his life; that he calculates his chances, and those of his daughters, of waking up alive the next morning.

     “Dual loyalty” is feeling the heartbreak of this and also of that.

    It is to hold this moment between the heartbreak and pain and shock over the total destruction of Nir Oz and to think about all the people there, and at the same time, to feel the horror over the impending total destruction of Shuja’iyya and to think about all the people there.

     It’s feeling the urge to donate blood and organize food packages for the south, and also to be in the West Bank village of Susia when settlers shoot any shepherd who dares to leave the village.

     Loyalty may not be the right word. It’s dual pain, dual heartbreak, care, love. It is to hold everyone’s humanity. And it’s hard. It’s so hard to have humanity here. It’s exhausting, and it feels like time after time the world is just asking you to let go. It’s so much easier to “choose a side” – it almost doesn’t matter which side, just choose, and stick to it, and at least reduce the amount of pain you hold. At least feel part of a group and less alone in all this.

     As if that’s really an option. As if we don’t understand that our pains are intertwined. That there is no solution only for the pain of Ofakim without a solution for the pain of Khan Yunis. And we know it and recite it, and feel the pain of it all over and over again.”

     As written by Mordecai Martin in Anti Racism Daily, in an article entitled How do I both condemn Hamas and support Israeli and Palestinian people?; “I started paying attention in earnest to Israel/Palestine politics when I went to study Hebrew on an Israeli kibbutz in 2005 before conducting religious study in Jerusalem for two years. I know deeply that Israel and Palestine are real places with real people, not a religious fantasy, political football, or exotic destination. I am sharing this response to hopefully get us closer to a world without violence in the Holy Land, where my fellow Jews are safely and happily living wherever they like, including in Palestine, and where the Palestinian people are doing likewise. It is an ambitious goal. I don’t really know if I believe my writing will have that outcome.

     But I will not begin with certain common cliches.

    I do not think it is necessary (or true) to say that I believe that the state of Israel, a state consisting primarily of Jews organized under the principles of Zionism, has any right to exist in the Holy Land. I don’t think that’s necessary to say because the Zionist state of Israel EXISTS regardless of my beliefs.

     I do not have to assert Jews’ right to self-determination. That right was exercised with the creation of the state of Israel. As an anti-Zionist Jew, I believe that the creation of a Zionist state that legally dispossesses Palestinian people was disastrous morally, culturally, and religiously. I spend my time in the Jewish community urging divestment from such a state.

     I do not think I have to condemn the murder of civilians by Hamas militants before considering condemnation of the murder of civilians by the colonial Israeli army. The universal condemnation of civilian deaths, regardless of the victims’ nationality, should be a given for us all, as it is for international law. International law is also clear that decolonization, including by armed struggle, is legitimate and that apartheid systems are not.

      There are also things I find necessary to say very clearly.

     We must take away the ability to kill civilians from any and all military actors, including Hamas and the Israeli army.

     I believe in the safety and well-being of all Jews, even those I disagree with. Because of my political beliefs, I am often accused in bad faith of not desiring safety for Jews.

     It’s necessary to say, “Free Palestine.” Palestinians, the people who have lived on the Holy Land from time immemorial, were forcibly removed from their homes for Jewish settlement. Palestinians are not free. They can not move about their country thanks to restrictions enforced by the Israeli army. They are dying the shocking deaths of those who live under apartheid. I demand their freedom and sovereignty in their land. Who do I demand it from? The only entity that currently claims political power, claims to represent my Jewishness, and receives the carte-blanche support of the United States government: the Israeli state.

      Many, many people hold space for both the victims of attacks by Hamas militants and the suffering civilians of Gaza. No one worth listening to says the human heart can only mourn for some but not others, that it’s only sad when Jews die, or only sad when Palestinians die. What we are really having a conversation about is the future of the Holy Land, whether it will grant democratic rights to all its residents, and what to do about the ongoing violence between the various parties that hope to benefit financially, politically, ideologically, from their “side” coming out on top.”

    Yet hope remains for transformative change, the fall of theocratic regimes and the emergence of secular democracy free from the legacies of our history, a history which in the bifurcated and fragmented states and national identities of the region divides one people into Israelis and Palestinians through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil in service to the power of tyrants and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, systems of oppression which are our true enemies.

    A massive people’s protest movement has erupted both locally and globally, and this gives me hope that we may yet escape the Age of Tyrants, which I predict will unfold as six to eight centuries of totalitarian empires and wars of dominion ending with the extinction of humankind; with 92 to 98 percent probability.

     But the chance to salvage something of our humanity and our civilization of democracy and universal human rights does exist, however fragile and unlikely, if we can unite and act in solidarity as each other’s liberators and guarantors of a free society of equals. 

     As written by Alex Lantier in the World Socialist Web Site of the Fourth International, in an article entitled Mass protests erupt internationally against Israeli war on Gaza; “A week after Palestinians initiated an armed uprising against Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, protests are erupting internationally against Israel’s war on Gaza.

     The fascistic regime of Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered 1.1 million Palestinians to flee Gaza City and go south, along roads bombed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Israel—which has now cut off Gaza’s water, fuel and electricity, and whose leaders call the Palestinians “human animals”—is targeting the Palestinians for genocide.

     As the scale of the crimes committed by the Israeli regime and its NATO allies has become clear, protests have erupted around the world in bold disobedience of media denunciations of Palestinians, police intimidation and protest bans.

     The most significant demonstration Friday took place in New York City, where thousands rallied to oppose the onslaught against Palestine, in open defiance of the unrelenting pro-Israel propaganda of the entire American political establishment and corporate media. In the center of world imperialism, home to the largest Jewish population of any American city, masses of people—including over 1,000 Jews—expressed their revulsion with the unfolding crimes in Gaza.

     Other protests on Friday involving hundreds of people were held in Pittsburgh, Portland and Washington D.C., with larger demonstrations planned across the US this weekend. Despite the efforts of the media and politicians to demonize all protests against Israel’s policies as “antisemitic” and to isolate those feeling sympathy for the Palestinians, opposition is building among workers and youth of all backgrounds. A 2021 poll found that one-quarter of American Jews consider Israel to be an “apartheid state” hostile to the Palestinians, a figure that will only continue to grow.

     Thousands also took to the streets in London once again on Friday, defying similar propaganda and threats from the British media and political establishment.

     A series of larger demonstrations also swept across the Middle East, involving hundreds of thousands of people. In Jordan, mass protests in Amman demanded the opening of Jordan’s border with the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Protesting crowds marched on the border with Israel, only to be turned back by Jordanian police.

     Large protests took place in Sanaa and Tehran. In Cairo, tens of thousands rallied outside the Al Azhar Mosque, chanting “Free Palestine.” Thousands defied a state ban to march in support of Gaza in Tunis. In Iraq, a country that has lost over one million lives after decades of US-led sanctions, war and occupation since the 1991 Gulf War, hundreds of thousands marched in Baghdad.

     Protesters in the Middle East are effectively opposing not only the Israeli regime, but also their own governments, which have betrayed the Palestinians for decades. The Arab bourgeoisie’s role is exemplified by the treachery of the Egyptian military dictatorship. Having signed a treaty with Israel in 1978, Egypt has now closed its borders to Palestinians trying to flee Gaza.

     In Israel itself, despite the ultra-reactionary political atmosphere fostered by Netanyahu’s government, which has now been joined by the official opposition, there is explosive discontent. Millions joined protests earlier this year against Netanyahu’s attempt to undermine the independence of the judiciary. The attack on the judiciary, as a letter titled “Elephant in the Room” from 3,000 predominantly Jewish intellectuals made clear, is intimately tied up with the conditions that led to the Hamas uprising.

     The letter states:

     (There is a) direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Palestinian people lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest. They face constant violence: this year alone, Israeli forces have killed over 190 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and demolished over 590 structures. Settler vigilantes burn, loot, and kill with impunity. …

     There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of the judicial overhaul is to tighten restrictions on Gaza, deprive Palestinians of equal rights both beyond the Green Line and within it, annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.

     All the major imperialist powers stand exposed by their support for Netanyahu and his war on the Palestinians. On Sunday, October 8, the heads of state of France, Italy, Germany, Britain and the United States pledged “steadfast and united support to the State of Israel,” and an “unequivocal condemnation of Hamas.” At a press conference in Qatar on Friday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken doubled down in condoning Israeli crimes.

     Asked by a reporter if Israel is “retaliating in a fury” and whether the US supports this, Blinken replied with total hypocrisy and double-talk: “What Israel is doing is not retaliation. What Israel is doing is defending the lives of its people. … I think any country faced with what Israel has suffered would likely do the same thing.”

     What message are the NATO powers sending? They aim to create on a global scale a new era of imperialist colonial rule. They brook no resistance to the Israeli state’s illegal, 16-year blockade of Gaza, its denial of food and medicine to the impoverished enclave, and its targeted assassinations of Gaza residents. If this united front of imperialist gangsters were to sum up its policy toward the Palestinian people in one phrase, it would be: “Slaves you were, and slaves you remain.”

     In a video released Friday, which has gone almost entirely unreported in the Western media, Hamas official Basim Naim summarized the background of Israeli oppression, which led to the October 7 rebellion.

     He said:

      We are speaking about a 75-year-old occupation that neglected and ignored all political and legal means to settle the conflict, where the Israeli enemy continued their policy of denial of the Palestinian people’s existence and their national rights. We have repeatedly warned during the past few months and years that the situation on the ground was not sustainable and that the explosion was only a matter of time.

     We have warned repeatedly about the Israeli continued violations in Al-Aqsa Mosque and their attempt to change its status quo in an apparent plan to divide the holy mosque spatially and temporally. We have also warned about the state terrorism implemented by the fascist settlers across the occupied West Bank. We have warned about the forceful expulsion of our people from Jerusalem. We have also warned about the systematic crimes against our prisoners, including women and children, in Israeli jails.

     And lastly, we have warned about the Israeli siege on Gaza for more than 17 years, which is a war crime that turned Gaza into the biggest open-air prison on earth, where a whole generation has lost all kind of hopes. But unfortunately, no one listened to these warnings, and the international community, especially the Western countries, continue to give Israel the cover at all levels to continue committing its crimes.

     In prosecuting their war against Gaza, the Israeli government and Western imperialist powers aim to obliterate this historical background and numb the population with wall-to-wall atrocity propaganda.

     While the deaths of Israeli civilians are undoubtedly tragic, the violence that took place occurred in the context of a massively oppressed people rebelling against a heavily armed oppressor. Even if one were to accept all the accounts of Palestinian violence, it only raises the question—what could lead to such violence?

     History judges differently the violence of a population rising up against oppression and the calculated resort to mass murder by capitalist state machines armed with vast military and financial resources. The imperialists have always claimed that the resistance of the oppressed to colonialism justifies their savage retribution. In exacting this retribution, they have always portrayed the oppressed as savages and murderers.

     In 1899, the Boxers revolted against the division of China into imperialist spheres of influence. Citing the Boxers’ killings of Christian missionaries and their seizure of foreign property, eight imperialist powers sent armies to sack Beijing and massacre the Boxers. Mounting conflicts between these powers over the division of the spoils in China led ultimately to the bloody Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s, which cost nearly 20 million lives, provoking the 1949 revolution that ended colonial rule over China.

     In 1904, the Herero people in Namibia rose up against German colonial rule, killing more than 100 German settlers. The German army responded by carrying out the first genocide of the 20th century against the Herero, forcing them into deserts where they died of thirst, or imprisoning them in death camps prefiguring the extermination camps of the Nazi regime. In 2015, German officials formally acknowledged the genocide and offered a state apology.

      Netanyahu’s regime and its imperialist allies are resorting to similar methods against Gaza. However, the great anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century that broke out after the Russian revolutions of 1905 and October 1917 did not take place in vain. Among masses of workers and youth internationally, Netanyahu’s barbaric methods provoke outrage. This opposition will grow as the monumental scale of the crimes being planned and committed against Gaza become evident to ever broader layers of workers and youth throughout the world.

     The NATO powers’ other justification for backing Netanyahu’s crimes—that they are defending Jews and opposing antisemitism—is collapsing. In reality, they are supporting Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in a close alliance with political descendants of the forces that carried out the Holocaust.

     As the capitalist ruling elites plunge into barbarism, a mass movement is emerging in the international working class. Protests against imperialism and Zionism are erupting amid mounting global struggles of the working class. Strikes against exploitation, austerity, inflation and police violence shook all the major imperialist powers this year and will intensify in the weeks and months ahead.

     The liberation of Palestine is only possible in the context of the growth of a powerful socialist movement of the international working class, including within Israel itself. This will create the conditions for the overthrow of Zionist chauvinism and the unity of Palestinian and Israeli workers. The struggle against the war in Gaza must acquire a clear, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist character, mobilizing the working class in a struggle for socialism across Palestine and the Middle East and internationally.”

       In juxtaposition with this internationalist and revolutionary lens of vision are forces of reaction born of fear and trauma weaponized in service to power, the siren call of armed might and retribution as a form of security, but security is an illusion, and only love can reconcile these conflicted identities of Israeli and Palestinian and heal the systems of division and unequal power which are at the heart of this war which threatens to swallow us all.

    As written by Yuval Noah Harari in The Guardian, in an article entitled Israelis and Palestinians are facing their moment of greatest danger since 1948: There is still a slim chance of peace if wiser counsels prevail and other major powers intervene in a coalition of the willing; “Israel has just experienced the worst day in its history. More Israeli civilians have been slaughtered in a single day than all the civilians and soldiers Israel lost in the 1956 Sinai war, the 1967 six-day war and the 2006 second Lebanon war combined. The stories and images coming out of the area occupied by Hamas are horrific. Many of my own friends and family members have suffered unspeakable atrocities. This means the Palestinians, too, are now facing immense danger. The most powerful country in the Middle East is livid with pain, fear and anger. I do not have either the knowledge or moral authority to speak about how things look from the Palestinian perspective. But in the moment of Israel’s greatest pain, I would like to issue a warning about how things look from the Israeli side of the fence.

     Politics often works like a scientific experiment, conducted on millions of people with few ethical limitations. You try something – whether increasing the welfare budget, electing a populist president or making a peace offer – witness the results, and decide whether to proceed further down that particular path; or you reverse course and try something else. This is how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has unfolded for decades: by trial and error.

     During the 1990s Oslo peace process, Israel gave peace a chance. I know that from the viewpoint of Palestinians and some outside observers, Israeli peace offers were insufficient and arrogant, but it was still the most generous offer Israel has ever made. During that peace process, Israel handed partial control of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority. The outcome for Israelis was the worst terror campaign they had experienced until then. Israelis are still haunted by memories of daily life in the early 2000s, with buses and restaurants bombed every day. That terror campaign killed not only hundreds of Israeli civilians, but also the peace process and the Israeli left. Maybe Israel’s peace offer wasn’t generous enough. But was terrorism the only possible response?

     After the failure of the peace process, Israel’s next experiment in Gaza was disengagement. In the mid-2000s, Israel unilaterally retreated from the entire Gaza Strip, dismantled all settlements there and returned to the internationally recognised pre-1967 border. True, it continued to impose a partial blockade on the Gaza Strip and to occupy the West Bank. But the withdrawal from Gaza was still a very significant Israeli step, and Israelis waited anxiously to see what the result of that experiment would be. The remnants of the Israeli left hoped that the Palestinians would make an honest attempt to turn Gaza into a prosperous and peaceful city state, a Middle Eastern Singapore, showing to the world and to the Israeli right what the Palestinians could do when given the opportunity to govern themselves.

     Sure, it is difficult to build a Singapore under a partial blockade. But an honest attempt could still have been made, in which case there would have been greater pressure on the Israeli government from both foreign powers and the Israeli public to remove the blockade from Gaza and to reach an honourable deal about the West Bank as well. Instead, Hamas took over the Gaza Strip and turned it into a terrorist base from which repeated attacks were launched on Israeli civilians. Another experiment ended in failure.

       This completely discredited the remnants of the Israeli left, and brought to power Benjamin Netanyahu and his hawkish governments. Netanyahu pioneered another experiment. Since peaceful coexistence had failed, he adopted a policy of violent coexistence. Israel and Hamas traded blows on a weekly basis and almost every year there was a major military operation, but for a decade and a half, Israeli civilians could go on living within a few hundred metres from Hamas bases on the other side of the fence. Even Israel’s messianic zealots showed little zeal to reconquer the Gaza Strip, and even rightwingers hoped that the responsibilities involved in ruling more than 2 million people would gradually moderate Hamas.

     Indeed, many on the Israeli right saw Hamas as a better partner than the Palestinian Authority. This was because Israeli hawks wanted to go on controlling the West Bank, and feared a peace deal. Hamas seemed to offer the Israeli right the best of all worlds: relieving Israel of the need to govern the Gaza Strip, without making any peace offers that might dislocate Israeli control of the West Bank. The day of horror Israel has just experienced signals the end of the Netanyahu experiment in violent coexistence.

     So what comes next? No one knows for sure, but some voices in Israel are veering towards reconquering the Gaza Strip or bombing it to rubble. The result of such policy could be the worst humanitarian crisis the region has experienced since 1948. Especially if Hezbollah and Palestinian forces in the West Bank join the fray, the death toll could reach many thousands, with millions more driven from their homes. On both sides of the fence, there are religious fanatics fixated on divine promises and the 1948 war. Palestinians dream of reversing the outcome of that war. Jewish zealots like the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich have warned even Arab citizens of Israel that “you are here by mistake because Ben-Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister] didn’t finish the job in ’48 and didn’t kick you out”; 2023 could enable fanatics on both sides to pursue their religious fantasies, and re-stage the 1948 war with a vengeance.

     Even if things don’t go to such extremes, the current conflict is likely to put the last nail in the coffin of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The kibbutzim along the Gaza border have been socialist communes and some of the most tenacious bastions of the Israeli left. I know people from those kibbutzim who, after years of almost daily rocket attacks from Gaza, still clung to the hope of peace, as if to a religious cult. These kibbutzim have just been obliterated, and some of the last peaceniks are either murdered, burying their loved ones, or held hostage in Gaza. For example, Vivian Silver, a peace activist from Kibbutz Be’eri who for years has been transporting ailing Gazans to Israeli hospitals, is missing and likely held hostage in Gaza.

     What has already happened cannot be undone. The dead cannot be brought back to life, and the personal traumas will never completely heal. But we must prevent further escalation. Many of the forces in the region are currently led by irresponsible religious fanatics. External forces must therefore intervene to deescalate the conflict. Anyone who wishes for peace must unequivocally condemn the Hamas atrocities, put pressure on Hamas to immediately and unconditionally release all the hostages, and help deter Hezbollah and Iran from intervening. This would give Israelis a bit of breathing space and a tiny ray of hope.

     Second, a coalition of the willing – ranging from the US and the EU to Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority – should take responsibility for the Gaza Strip away from Hamas, rebuild Gaza and simultaneously completely disarm Hamas and demilitarise the Gaza Strip.

     There are only slim chances that these steps will be realised. But after the recent horrors, most Israelis don’t think they can live with anything less.”

    As I wrote in my post of October 17 2023, Chaos Is the Great Hope of the Powerless: Case of the Hamas-Israel War; A wise friend has questioned my valorization of Chaos as a principle of change in the context of Black Saturday, a term which describes the Hamas attack on Israel and the immense forces of terror, death, destruction, fracture, grief, rage, and revenge it unleashed, becoming a single tide of darkness.

     Thank you once again for your kindness and your wisdom.

     In this moment of tragedy I am thinking of Chaos as a disruptive force of fracture and change which has stripped us bare of our ideologies to reveal the fragile humanity beneath, and may be leveraged for liberty or tyranny by how we respond as a species and global civilization. As Guillermo del Toro writes in Carnival Row, Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.

     What do I hope for now, for the peoples of Israel and Palestine?  That both may unite to free each other, but first we will need universal humanitarian aid to any one on either side of these lines of division, and a Reckoning for the war crimes of both Hamas and Israel. For Israel took the bait, and gave Hamas the victory; they are now equal as war criminals without legitimacy.

    Israel took the bait, and the world is calling them out for war crimes; this may be end of the Netanyahu alt right regime and the dawn of a new Middle East. I was absolutely expecting Biden and allies to enable Israels Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem; in this I rejoice to be wrong about human nature. Maybe the idea of human rights is not dead. As my mother used to sing to students who asked her to make authorizing statements about anything, artifact of a Shakespeare in Thirty Minutes theatrical show that toured nationally with some of her students in it, bouncing her open hands left and right; Maybe, maybe not, Maybe, maybe not.

     No one seems to have noticed publicly that this means Israeli intelligence has been infiltrated. It is also possible that unknown puppetmasters have infiltrated and seized control of both Hamas and Israel, for purposes which are unclear and antithetical to the interests and well being of either. We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, friends.

      What Reckoning, for crimes against humanity by an organization of terror which has long been a vanguard of anticolonial revolutionary struggle under the imposed conditions of Occupation, slavery, and a genocidal Blockade?

      Not the totalization of the general population of Palestinians in a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing as Netanyahu wishes and Hamas intends as a strategy of delegitimation of the Israel state in the moral equivalence of terror, for if Israel, her patron America, and the international community accept the terms of struggle offered by Hamas they too become organizations of terror, and Hamas wins.

     This is a decolonial revolution, and victory goes to the side who can establish the legitimacy and moral supremacy of their story. As my father taught me, Never play someone else’s game.

     Hamas also wishes in this provocation to weld the peoples of Gaza to them; this is a primary strategy of fascism and tyranny, to make the people in whose name you claim to act complicit in unforgiveable crimes. Always beware those who claim to speak and act in your name as a strategy of your subjugation.

     A third layer of meaning here is the ambiguity of the geopolitical and world-historical forces beyond the Holy Land; Russia, her ally Iran and the Iranian Dominion of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, especially the Assad regime of Syria which has sent forces into Israel as a client state of Russia and Iran, and Hezbollah, which offers many of the social services of a government and may be in the process of emergence as an independent state, or a true empire in the transnational sense like the Holy Roman Empire. The great question here is; has Russia opened a new front of her plan of global conquest and made this a theatre of World War Three?

      How does one answer all of this? How bring a Reckoning for the terror of Hamas without authorizing and becoming complicit in the greater terror of Israel’s looming genocide of the Palestinians?

       The forms that might take give me pause, for they will determine our future, and though I know what I myself must do I do not like it, and am calling out here in my journals, where I work through the consequences of my decisions before acting on them, for unknown possibilities I myself cannot envision.

     Yes, my friend, Chaos has profoundly destructive forms; death among them, ruin and civilizational collapse, the negation of all we have claimed as our identity, but all are also measures of the adaptive range of systems, and can give birth to new forms from this liberated energy. And as you point out, all forces operate in opposite directions at once, creating their own opposition. These are not moral forces in balance, but ambivalent forces which contain each other in recursion.

     So, while our nations try to shatter each other’s truths with overwhelming force and mass terror, I must find a path of least force to salvage what I can of our humanity, and I hope I will not fail as I did at Mariupol and Panjshir.

    This may be all we have as humans lost in chasms of darkness and a Wilderness of Mirrors, this refusal to abandon each other to dehumanization, but like our refusal to submit to authority it is a power which cannot be taken from us, even in imposed conditions of struggle designed to produce abjection and learned helplessness, or rage and tribalization as identity politics and the manufacture of consent to be fed into engines of death for the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites and tyrannies.

     Such ephemeral and insubstantial things, like whispered prayers to abyssal unknowns, figments of love, hope, faith, which belong to the shadows, the delusions of grandeur of beasts harnessed to systems of oppression by others who yet dream that we might become more.

    Dream with me.

     Embrace our absurdity as flawed things wrestling with immense forces of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization in a mad quest to become human, under imposed conditions of struggle typified by atrocities designed to produce abjection, learned helplessness, and despair, as we are consumed by the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege whose primary weapon is division and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness as identity politics and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

     Against all of this we have only our solidarity with each other, the redemptive power of love, our refusal to submit or to believe and trust authority which frees us as Unconquered and self created beings and Living Autonomous Zones, and our poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves. Powers which cannot be taken from us, and which can seize the power of those who would enslave us.

     This is why I practice the art of believing impossible things, but only those I myself have chosen or created. And crucially, act to make them real. And in this case we must bring a Reckoning to the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity regardless of who they may be or in the name of what cause they act, and silence the drums of war.

     Dream with me, but act in solidarity to make it real.

     As the Mad Hatter says to Alice; “That is an excellent practice, but right now you might want to focus on the Jabberwock.” 

    Just so. 

     As I wrote in my post of March 10 2023, On Hope and Despair: Surviving Life Disruptive Events; To a friend with suicidal ideation and facing multiple trauma, life disruptive events, and institutional catch 22s which include class and patriarchal oppression enforced by rentier capitalism and the political theft of our right to life through failure to provide the universal healthcare which is its precondition,  I have written this brief message:

     Now is the time to reach out, make connections, and build community. Isolation is dangerous in the extreme for you in this moment. A sea of fellow humans surrounds us, all of whom must wrestle with the flaws of our humanity as imposed conditions of struggle. I hear you in this message, and am afraid. Choose life, my friend, as precarious and filled with pain and fear as it may be; our stories can always change, regardless of the limits of our scope of action and agency.

     It may now become possible to reclaim the life which has been stolen from you, and begin to heal and reinvent yourself. May you find peace and joy in this terrible world, my friend.

     All I have to offer in this are words, ephemeral and impermanent as leaves taking flight in the wind; a poor substitute for the golden coins which should be laid upon our eyes to bear us to unknown shores where we may be free from the limits of our form and the material basis of our lives under unequal power as imposed conditions of struggle.

      We must struggle against such authoritarian forces of coercion as a universal process of becoming human, and against tyranny and terror our best defense is solidarity, loyalty, mutual aid and interdependence, faith in each other, and our duty of care for each other. If these should fail, those who would enslave us win.

     A maker of mischief, I; and a bringer of Chaos, bearing songs of liberation. I cannot free us from the systems of unequal power which entrap us, but I can illuminate their limits, flaws, and internal contradictions which will inevitably bring about their collapse, and if we all of us act together we may seize our power to reimagine and transform our possibilities of becoming human and the choices we make about how to be human together.

     And maybe one thing more; a spell, if you will, or a wish; I reach once more into Pandora’s Box to problematize and interrogate hope as a balance for despair.

     As I wrote in my post of September 27 2020, What Do We Need Now to Forge A Future For Humankind?; We live in interesting times,  a phrase attributed in popular culture as Chinese but coined by the father of Prime Minister Chamberlain in a speech of 1898, possibly a paraphrase of the line “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos” in a short story of 1627 by Feng Menglong; beset by complex and interdependent problems; existential threats to democracy and to our survival as a species, and confronted by a political crisis of identity driven by pervasive and overwhelming fears and the modern pathology of disconnectedness. This is a moment of decision, with extinction and civilizational annihilation hanging in the balance, of the wonder and terror of total freedom, and our choices will gloriously expand the possibilities of becoming human or cast us into oblivion.

     History begins with us, or ends with us.

     What do we need now if we are to forge a future for humankind?

      So I asked the question three years ago, which I revisit now to recontexualize the praxis of hope as historical and political as well as personal and psychological, one which shapes us both as individuals and as nations.

      Here follows a Book of Hope, to balance against despair in surviving life disruptive events, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.

        What is hope, and how is it useful?

       Hope is power, an inherent and defining quality of human being, and a primary force of our reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization.

      Hope dances with faith and love as parts of us which cannot be taken from us, a final space of free creative play which escapes the darkness and those who would enslave us, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and resistant to our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and their carceral states of force and control.

     Hope is also a fulcrum of change not only for ourselves in becoming human, but also of seizures of power in revolutionary and liberation struggle, a form of poetic vision which allows us to see beyond the limits of our material and social conditions to diagnose systemic flaws and contradictions and find new ways of being human together.

     These aspects of hope as recursive processes of change, adaptation, and growth in living systems, social, political, and psychological as well as biological ecologies which construct us, make of hope a kind of freedom inborn in us, and interconnected with ideas of agency, autonomy, and liberty.

     How can we find the will and power to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival? This has been the great question of my life posed by existential threats in the first three Last Stands which created and defined me; when the police opened fire on the student protestors my mother and I were among at Bloody Thursday in People’s Park Berkeley 1969, when I was nearly executed by police bounty hunters in Brazil in 1974 for refusal to stand aside from the street children they were authorized to kill for being who the system made them, and in Beirut 1982 when I was given the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet as we refused to surrender to the soldiers who had just set fire to our café and expected to be burned alive.

     In my very long journey to becoming who I am now, I began from the position of Camus regarding hope that it is an instrument of our subjugation to authority through faith weaponized in service to power and the falsification of lies, illusions, rewritten histories, authorized identities, and alternate realities; the Wilderness of Mirrors, to use Angleton’s iconic metaphor. Hope for me then must be abandoned if we are to become free; with time I began to see instead hope as a form of freedom, one crucial to our defiance of authority and seizures of power.

      First, here is the place from which I began, as I wrote in my post of August 20 2019, On Becoming Human; This morning I was rereading my favorite stories by H.P. Lovecraft on his birthday and writing some thoughts about his work in my literary blog, sister site to this one, when I realized that his surreal mythology illuminates the existential crisis of meaning and values which confronts us in America today and in the world at large in what is rapidly becoming a post-democracy global tyranny under the Fourth Reich, and that we have faced similar peril after both World Wars as western civilization destroyed and recreated itself; how can we go on when the values of the Enlightenment, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, have failed us? It is as if we looked to the heavens for signs and portents of guidance, only to find writ large the words, “I do not exist.”

     One’s interpretation of a universe empty of meaning and value except for that which we ourselves create, a Nietzschean cosmos of dethroned gods as explored by Sartre and Marx or a Lovecraftian one of Absurdist faith, referential to classical sources, of mad, idiot gods who are also malign, tyrannical, and hostile to humanity, ideal figures of Trump and his lunatic presidency of Absurdist-Nihilist Theatre of Cruelty, rests with our solution to the riddle of Pandora’s Box; is hope a gift, or the most terrible of evils?

     Hope is a two- edged sword; it frees us and opens limitless possibilities, but in severing the bonds of history also steals from us our anchorages and disempowers the treasures of our past as shaping forces. Hope in its negative form directs us toward a conservative project of finding new gods to replace the fallen as we so often do with liberators who become tyrants, or like T.S. Elliot of gathering up and reconstructing our traditions as a precondition of faith. This is why the abandonment of hope is vital to Sartrean authenticity and to the rebellion of Camus; we must have no gods and no masters before we are free to own ourselves. The gates of Dante’s Hell, which bear the legend “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” lead to ourselves and to our own liberation.

    True freedom requires disbelief. Freedom means self-ownership and the smashing of the idols.  

      Freedom can be terrible as well as wonderful. Among the most impactful stories I ever heard from my mother was how she went to the grocery store after my father died and experienced a full stop lightningbolt awakening, thinking, “What do I want? I know what my husband wanted, what my children want, but I don’t know what I want.”

     It is in this moment in which we claim our nothingness that we free ourselves of all claims upon us, a transformative rebirth in which we become self-created beings.

     Now imagine humanity after civilization destroyed itself twice in the last century’s world wars facing that same awakening to freedom and to loss, wherein our old values have betrayed us and must be forged anew, and we are bereft of signposts in an undiscovered country, exactly the same as a widow on her first trip shopping for dinner for no one but herself.

     Our responses to this awakening to possibilities tend to correspond with one of the primary shaping forces of historical civilization; the conserving force as exemplified by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O’Connor, and the revolutionary force as exemplified by Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Jean Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett.

     Everyone possesses and uses both forces just as all organisms do in terms of their evolution. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity, or ruptures to our prochronism, the history of our successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.

      For both nations and persons, the process of identity formation is the same. We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human. This individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their connections. And this tertiary principle, which concerns our interconnectedness and social frames, can produce conflicts with the secondary principle of memory and history.

     This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership and control of identity or persona, a term derived from the masks of Greek theatre, between the masks that others make for us and the ones we make for ourselves.

    As I wrote in my post of January 20 2021, The Turning of the Tide: With Inauguration Day Comes the Return of Hope; I have a complex relationship with the idea of hope, with the ambiguity, relativity, and context-determined multiple truths and simultaneity of meaning which defines hope, that thing of redemption and transformative power which remains in Pandora’s Box after all the evils have escaped, as either the most terrible of our nightmares or the gift of the miraculous depending on how we use it.

      As the Wizard of Oz said of himself it’s a humbug, but it is also a power which cannot be taken from us by force and control, and like faith of which it is a cipher holds open the door of our liberation and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.

    As we believe, so we may become.

    Human being, meaning, and value originate in this uniquely human capacity to transcend and grow beyond our limits as an act of transformation, rebirth, and self-creation, and as a seizure of power over our identities. Among other things it allows us to escape the flag of our skin and inhabit that of others; to forge bonds through empathy and compassion and enact altruism and mercy.

    This is what is most human in us, a quality which defines the limits of what is human, and which we must cherish and conserve as our most priceless gift.

     Hope is the thing which can restore us to ourselves and each other, unite a divided nation and begin to heal our legacies of historical inequalities and injustices, and it can be wielded as an instrument which counters fear. Hope is the balance of fear, and fear is a negative space of hope; and because fear births hate, racism, fascism, hierarchies of elite privilege and belonging and categories of exclusionary otherness, hope is a power of liberation and of revolutionary struggle.

     As I wrote in my post of July 26 2020, Explaining Badly What I Do, For Even I Am Not Altogether Certain: a Confession; One day I crossed beyond our topologies of meaning and value and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden into the unknown, the blank places on the maps of our becoming marked Here Be Dragons, and never returned. I live now where the dragons dwell, and I wouldn’t trade a moment of the life I have lived for any treasure on earth, for I am free.

     It happened like this; one day I was driving from my fun job teaching high school to my real work counseling at my very elegant office in San Francisco, and I thought, Why am I doing this? I don’t need to do this. So I took a wrong turn to the airport and bought a ticket to the other side of the earth. I had no idea where I was flying to, and when I arrived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia I found a bus station with a map that showed all the routes ending in the mountains, which were an enormous empty space along the spine of the country. So I took a bus there and got off at the end of the road, where a dirt track led into the forest of the Cameron Highlands, and began walking.

    Sometimes my quest found only death and loss, sometimes triumph and illumination, but the struggle itself was always a seizure of power in which something human could be wrested back from the claws of our nothingness.

     Among the prizes and exhibits of my memory palace are heroes and rogues, allies and enemies of whom only I, like Ishmael, live to tell the tale; others became legends. So also with the causes for which we fought.

     What if we told students what life is really like, that its full of blood and horror and in the end means nothing at all, and the best you can do is survive another day and maybe save someone from the darkness before it swallows us all? I’ve looked into the darkness since 1982 in Beirut, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance before his capture and imprisonment by Israel, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me.

      Yet I will struggle with the darkness and cease not, and so remain unconquered in defiance of unjust authority and in refusal to submit, though I have long forgotten why. At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom, beyond hope of victory or even survival.

     Pandora’s Box bears a last gift which is also a curse; we cling to it when it is all we have, and because it cannot be taken from us. I have never been able to decide if this is a good thing or not. Why has this strange gift been given to us?

     Maybe it’s only this; that so long as we get back to our feet for yet another last stand, there is hope.

     And so I open the Forbidden Door to the unknown and step through as I have many times before, a nameless shadow among countless others who await in welcome all those who dare to transgress the limits unjustly imposed on us, a realm of shadows and of the unconquered, and like lions we roar our defiance into the fathoms of emptiness beyond.

     Tonight the shadows dance, wild and free, bound by no rules but our own; come and dance with us.

Leonard Cohen – Hallelujah (Live In London)

This Day We Fight: Aragorn’s Speech at the Black Gate

Confronting the Jabberwock

‘We all share the same pain’: can the Israeli-Palestinian peace movement rebuild after 7 October?

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/may/21/peace-reconciliation-dialogue-activism-middle-east-7-october-gaza-israel-palestinians-west-bank?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1td0uO4WYMH0JNJ0K_NHgdndksFdt49CgTMqvRZh0P5LCCQ4W2w-vruTM_aem_Adklpi2sb5YEqseXMCZd-G51eUMnMSKznxtG4hwDOgNrcXIAd6-PEU1Gt92geMaXRIbGtbtsBdxUzCSooEjvBEoN

Exclusive interview: ICC prosecutor seeks arrest warrants against Sinwar and Netanyahu for war crimes over October 7 and Gaza

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/20/middleeast/icc-israel-hamas-arrest-warrant-war-crimes-intl/index.html?utm_term=171620239172341558b3ece1e&utm_source=cnn_Breaking%20News&utm_medium=email&bt_ee=RmxkS2K632swOcJ%2FRncf1hXcgSBdY6cFVGlaLeUV4fjqDWzPKZy9sNJALhMyQZah&bt_ts=1716202391725&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0DIMq2VgtoICsFXK9ujOuX89ebDp6jD4j5R7VEwwsXZJqBL7_uHpYMPnw_aem_AdnO6XkxEtDr_CSzhkaYkvy2XXDQ2X477lEyA1NiAp6Gx5if_Os89_wqIUIwtcVKMWZyRPfcplQ5wESJY1u_zRLs

Biden is dramatically out of touch with voters on Gaza. He may lose because of it

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/21/biden-gaza-2024-election?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3vxRyjhWn9t0rtZrCUz9JaVeojcdOywQtzRIU5pf68SyBDDTjGz8GVjm0_aem_Adltnw5VDPaoZ5bo1S11qBYcKd9vMh9J2i9KjzAunHcxOSwgOTq6krl1FQQtzcxnu8i48skVvBh_iaNJ6Z4eLxma

Standing up for Palestine is also standing up to save the west from the worst of itself, by Moustafa Bayoumi

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/17/israel-palestine-hamas-gaza-west-leader-view?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR0cXGCXpC7LboVqZIx_q94MyjixweAImbytVhttlwmoMcYJ6AiFXjxm2cc

US legal scholars urge Biden to seek immediate ceasefire from Israel

Letter signed by 178 members of US’s most prestigious law faculties calls Israeli reaction to Hamas attack ‘a moral catastrophe’

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/17/letter-biden-israel-ceasefire-legal-scholars?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR3ATKVNKVzeIaIczBHQpmI2D4eKMFAPmYJRJXk7yEJiDoN_Yk8jqi3UPs4

‘He’s unfit’: Israel fiercely divided over Netanyahu’s hostage response

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/17/hes-unfit-israel-fiercely-divided-over-netanyahus-hostage-response?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR2HobYTO0KQcObLWO2I3EhDEqQYotdReejFkqV7te1-VB22p2OAWnvLraQ

Gaza Draws Closer To Total Collapse With Humanitarian Aid Blocked At Egyptian Border: As Israel prepared a likely ground offensive into Gaza that would mean deadly house-to-house fighting, fears rose over the conflict spreading.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gaza-strip-water-food-shelter_n_652cc904e4b00565b62098ac?utm_campaign=share_facebook&ncid=engmodushpmg00000003&fbclid=IwAR2R8YcCRSBeLO64wlLgyqkHDbcODI_sBWrGXy4IckFXjxuLXWyQDpJ2QKk

The peril now facing us: Israel invades, Iran intervenes – and this war goes global, Simon Tisdall

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/16/israel-invades-iran-intervenes-war-global?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR3EieRVPfrSwJdGTLxMqty_M6b0ZUx7XAeyH7mdKhI7KBvZY4wXsXND_TA

Dual Loyalty, Sahar Vardi

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/dual-loyalty-2/

How do I both condemn Hamas and support Israeli and Palestinian people?, Mordecai Martin

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/WhctKKZGhLtjLsWvxsFtmwMxmBrtRGZGSLfFJpNfLtqlskrChCvLxhxxdTbWqXXRxCSTpqB

Mass protests erupt internationally against Israeli war on Gaza

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/10/14/kiuo-o14.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws

Israelis and Palestinians are facing their moment of greatest danger since 1948,

Yuval Noah Harari

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/12/israelis-palestinians-greatest-danger-since-1948?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR3hH2KBlYLSa3N5kHP_zZo4rqsFK-jJQiRHLb7teb9tKZGDY2w3CSrt3h4

The Black Sun, Julia Kristeva                    

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JFdZI1n6F9iwJFItPFfcMsGrzy_xCgHo/view?usp=sharing

The Black Sun: the alchemy and art of darkness, Stanton Marlan

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1J-mjBLJhRwsqVvkjVQguUIEpTF9XevkF/view?usp=sharing

The Book of Urizen, William Blake

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JIVqya6uqyru-8yOLC8WxOWZ-yEa-aqG/view?usp=sharing

Images of the Black Sun: Notes on the relationship between Heinrich Heine and Gérard de Nerval, Ralph Häfner

https://www.cairn.info/revue-de-litterature-comparee-2006-3-page-285.htm

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-find-the-sunny-side-of-nihilism?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=f0d6d81922-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_12_05_01_16&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-f0d6d81922-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

The Sunny Nihilist: A Declaration of the Pleasure of Pointlessness, Wendy Syfret

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58506039-the-sunny-nihilist?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=jmtBhgvpZI&rank=1

     Our friend, the Abyss, and my Kit For Hope; a reading list

     At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom.

The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91950.The_Myth_of_Sisyphus?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=6ISWbpEs5r&rank=2

The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2165.The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=iTaMbSyDEH&rank=1

The Trial of Socrates, by I.F. Stone

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51330.The_Trial_of_Socrates?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=QivgRzbt57&rank=2

Invictus, by William Ernest Henley

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9465133-invictus?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=JE5kLoFGEX&rank=2

Hebrew

1 במאי 2024 אימה ייאוש מאכזב: לשרוד את טרור האין שלנו ביקום ללא משמעות או ערך

     במראה של עזה התהום מביטה אלינו לאחור, ואנחנו שבויים בדימויי בית השעשועים המעוותים של ישראל ואמריקה, שרידי חלומות כמקלט של המנודים והערבים לזכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו, ושל המפלצות שהפכנו להיות עכשיו.

      אני לא יכול לזהות דבר בדמויות העומדות מולנו, ולמרות שאני מטיל התרסה על תהומות החושך האינסופיות, המילים שלי אינן מוצאות גבול ואינן מחזירות הדים, כאילו נטרפות על ידי הכלום.

      ובכל זאת אני לא מובס על ידי הכוח המכריע והאימה של הסמכות וגם לא כפוף על ידי ייאוש וחוסר אונים מלומד, כי זה המרחב שבו אני חי, האימה הזו, השמחה הזו, החופש הזה.

      כפי שאמר לי ז’אן ז’נה ב-1982 בזמן המצור על ביירות, במטרה אבודה, בבית בוער, בתקופה של חושך גדול; “כשאין תקווה, אנו חופשיים לעשות דברים בלתי אפשריים, דברים מפוארים.”

      אני מקווה שזה יישאר נכון, לכולנו בעודנו נאבקים לצאת ממורשת ההיסטוריה שלנו ולתפוס את כוחנו ממערכות דיכוי, כי זו המשימה הגדולה של להיות אנושיים, באופן כללי ובאירוע שער ראשמון הזה עכשיו נפרש ברפיח ובמקומות אחרים; לחלום דברים בלתי אפשריים ולהפוך אותם לאמיתיים.

     יש כמה דברים שצריכים להיות נכונים גם אם הם מעולם לא היו, גם אם קיטס טעה ומציאת דבר יפה לא הופך את זה לכזה, גם אם תומס מאן צדק ואהבה לא יכולה לגאול שום דבר, גם אם כפי שחשש טולקין הגענו. בשער השחור ללא קשרי אחווה שיאחדו אותנו, גם אם כמו קאמי, עלינו לצאת מהחורבות כדי לעשות עוד עמדה אחרונה, מעבר לתקווה לניצחון או אפילו הישרדות.

       אין ישראלים, אין פלסטינים; רק אנשים כמו עצמנו, והבחירות שהם עושים לגבי איך להיות בני אדם ביחד.

      מה אנחנו שווים אם נאפשר למלכים שודדים חסרי רחמים לבצע זוועות, לבזוז ולשעבד אחרים?

      מה שווה הציוויליזציה המערבית, אם לא נעמוד במילים היפות שלנו? ומילים יפות הן נשארות, כמו אלה שכתב תומס ג’פרסון בהצהרת העצמאות ב-1776, סינתזה ותיקון של רעיונות מהובס, לוק, מונטסקייה, וולטייר ורוסו; “אנו מאמינים כי האמיתות הללו מובנות מאליהן, שכל בני האדם נבראו שווים, וניחנו על ידי יוצרם בזכויות מסוימות שאינן ניתנות לביטול, שביניהן חיים, חירות והרדיפה אחר האושר.”

      מהי אמריקה, אם לא ערבה לדמוקרטיה ולזכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו, ומגדלור של תקווה לעולם?

     מהי ישראל, אם לא מקלט לחסרי הכוח והמנושלים, המושתקים והנמחקים, כל אלה שפרנץ פאנון כינה עלובי האדמה, ביניהם העם הדמוני והנרדף ביותר בהיסטוריה האנושית, היהודים?

     הבה נשיב במילים שנכתבו על ידי J.R.R. טולקין בין 1937 ל-1955 בדמיונו המחודש והזוהר של מלחמת העולם השנייה בנאום האיקוני של אראגורן בשער השחור ב”שיבת המלך” המאחד אתוס, לוגו, פאתוס וקאירוס; “ייתכן שיבוא יום שבו אומץ לבם של בני אדם ייכשל, בו אנו נוטשים את חברינו ונשבור את כל קשרי האחווה, אבל זה לא היום הזה. שעה של זאבים ומגנים מנותצים, כשעידן הגברים מתרסק, אבל זה לא היום הזה. היום אנחנו נלחמים”.

      הצטרף אלינו.

Arabic

21 مايو 2024 الذل واليأس الرعب: النجاة من رعب العدم في كون بلا معنى أو قيمة

     في مرآة غزة تنظر إلينا الهاوية، ونحن أسرى الصور المشوهة لإسرائيل وأمريكا، وبقايا أحلام ملجأ المنبوذين والضامنة لحقوقنا الإنسانية العالمية، والوحوش التي أصبحنا عليها الآن.

      لا أستطيع التعرف على أي شيء في الأشكال التي تواجهنا، وعلى الرغم من أنني ألقي التحدي في هوة الظلام التي لا نهاية لها، فإن كلماتي لا تجد حدودًا ولا ترد أي أصداء، كما لو أن العدم يلتهمها.

      ومع ذلك، فأنا لم أهزم من قبل القوة الساحقة ورعب السلطة، ولم أخضع لليأس والعجز المكتسب، لأن هذا هو الفضاء الذي أعيش فيه، هذا الرعب، هذا الفرح، هذه الحرية.

      وكما قال لي جان جينيه عام 1982 أثناء حصار بيروت، في قضية خاسرة، في منزل محترق، في زمن ظلام دامس؛ “عندما لا يكون هناك أمل، نكون أحرارًا في القيام بأشياء مستحيلة، أشياء مجيدة.”

      آمل أن يظل هذا صحيحًا، بالنسبة لنا جميعًا ونحن نكافح للخروج من تراث تاريخنا والاستيلاء على قوتنا من أنظمة القمع، فهذه هي المهمة العظيمة المتمثلة في أن نصبح بشرًا، بشكل عام وفي حدث بوابة راشومون الآن وتتكشف في رفح وأماكن أخرى؛ أن نحلم بأشياء مستحيلة ونجعلها حقيقية.

     هناك بعض الأشياء التي يجب أن تكون حقيقية حتى لو لم تكن كذلك أبدًا، حتى لو كان كيتس مخطئًا والعثور على شيء جميل لا يجعله كذلك، حتى لو كان توماس مان على حق والحب لا يمكنه تعويض أي شيء، حتى لو كنا قد وصلنا كما كان تولكين يخشى عند البوابة السوداء مع عدم وجود روابط أخوة توحدنا، حتى لو كان علينا، كما فعل كامو، أن نشق طريقنا للخروج من الأنقاض للقيام بمواجهة أخيرة أخرى، بعيدًا عن الأمل في النصر أو حتى البقاء.

      لا يوجد إسرائيليون ولا فلسطينيون؛ فقط الأشخاص مثلنا، والخيارات التي يتخذونها حول كيفية أن نكون بشرًا معًا.

      ماذا نستحق إذا سمحنا لملوك قطاع الطرق القساة بارتكاب الفظائع ونهب واستعباد الآخرين؟

      ما قيمة الحضارة الغربية إذا لم نرتقي إلى مستوى كلماتنا الجميلة؟ وتبقى كلمات جميلة، مثل تلك التي كتبها توماس جيفرسون في إعلان الاستقلال عام 1776، وهي عبارة عن تجميع ومراجعة لأفكار هوبز، ولوك، ومونتسكيو، وفولتير، وروسو؛ “إننا نعتبر هذه الحقائق بديهية، وهي أن جميع البشر خلقوا متساوين، ومنحهم خالقهم حقوقًا معينة غير قابلة للتصرف، ومن بينها الحياة والحرية والسعي وراء السعادة.”

      ما هي أميركا إن لم تكن ضامنة للديمقراطية وحقوق الإنسان العالمية، ومنارة أمل للعالم؟

     ما هي إسرائيل، إن لم تكن ملجأ للضعفاء والمحرومين، والمُسكتين والممحيين، وكل أولئك الذين أطلق عليهم فرانز فانون اسم “المعذبون في الأرض”، ومن بينهم أكثر الناس شيطنة واضطهادًا في تاريخ البشرية، أي اليهود؟

     دعونا نرد بالكلمات التي كتبها جي آر آر. تولكين بين عامي 1937 و1955 في إعادة تصوره المضيء للحرب العالمية الثانية في خطاب أراجورن الشهير عند البوابة السوداء في عودة الملك الذي يوحد الروح، والشعارات، والشفقة، والكايروس؛ “قد يأتي يوم تفشل فيه شجاعة الرجال، ونتخلى عن أصدقائنا ونكسر كل روابط الصداقة، لكن هذا ليس هذا اليوم. ساعة الذئاب والدروع المحطمة، عندما ينهار عصر البشر، لكن ليس هذا اليوم. هذا اليوم سنقاتل.”

      انضم إلينا.