Digital collage incorporating the anti-fascist photomontages of John Heartfield (BALM)
The following are a series of stream-of-consciousness aphorisms on the conjuncture, particularly pertaining to anti-Semitism/Judeophobia and anti-black racism, and the instrumentalization of both against the Sanders campaign and the Left. Those on the anti-capitalist Left, whether we are died in the wool realigners, dirty breakers, critical supporters of Sanders, those who have no dog in the hunt, or even those that think he’s an imperialist running-dog or a “Statist”, need to understand, as the great MC Rass Kass put it, “The Nature of the Threat.”.
Let us take the case of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, just over a decade ago. Objectively, he was well to Sanders’ right, though geopolitically he aligned himself with those daemonic Bolivarian Venezuelans. The local ruling class and its international partners did not like his stances on some moderate technocratic land reforms and called in its buddies in the CIA (with plausible deniability and weasely condemnations from Barack Obama to boot) to coup-it-up.
Do we think for a moment that the capitalist (to its bone) class is not doing the same thing right now? Leftists of all stripes must, to be a hackneyed sloganeer, say “Hands off the Sanders movement”. We can differ on Sanders, but this movement is a crystallization of a broad and uneven array of social forces within the multiracial American working class, many of whom, well, hate each other. The movement is being targeted not to stop Sanders – they’d be happy if he was hemmed in, though they’d rather elect Golden Don or Creepy Joe. Rather, as the coup against Zelaya was at its core about targeting Honduran social movements, “Operation Red Dawn” in the United States is serving the same purpose. And it is doing so in a dangerous fashion, a culmination of fishhook politics – a hidden occult affinity between liberalism and fascism coming into the open. Ten degrees to the left of centre in good times, to borrow from Phil Ochs, infinite degrees to the right of centre if their property or even perceived power is under threat.
Recent revelations of close Trump crony Erik Prince, formerly the Blackwater OG, sending ex-US intel agents to infiltrate mainstream liberal groups, unions and so on are likely the tip of the iceberg. Who knows what else they are up to? And whether there really is a “they” is immaterial. As there is always a they when “they” reveal themselves as being against “us.”
Purity of Essence
In the first scene of Costa Gravas’s masterpiece Z, a Greek bureaucratic/military figure shows what at first appears to be a slide show on agricultural policy to gathered civil servants. When the slide show is done, the general makes some offhand remarks about infections and sunspots caused by “isms”, casually rattling off pacisism, socialism, liberalism and communism. The general is part of a fascist conspiracy linked with those who collaborated with the Nazis. And those that concern him are those, followers of various “isms”, like a social movement-backed politician preparing to make a speech in Thessaloniki.
Costa Gravas’s Z
Dr. Strangelove
Just a few years earlier, Stanley Kubrick had satirized this mindset in Dr. Strangelove. General Jack D. Ripper, a general of some innocuous military base loses his shit over the communist conspiracy to fluoridate the water, which saps humanity’s “precious bodily fluids”. Ripper is an incel, primarily due to not wanting to share his precious bodily fluids. Ripper only drinks rain water or distilled water, and points out that “Russkies don’t drink water”, they drink vodka. So Jack D. Ripper decides to go rogue and send the launch codes for a nuclear attack to B52 bombers flying far above Soviet airspace. They cannot be recalled. Yet the nickel-and-dime bonkers, proto-pizzagate conspiracism of General Ripper was inscribed in the very plans of this “Plan R”. His view of the toxicity of the global communist conspiracy is not merely official US policy, but shared by the title character, a Nazi now working for the US deep state, who waxes erotic-utopian about the cleansed world of a post-apocalyptic future.
I will return to these two essential cultural artifacts….
The point here is to examine the universality of the concept of “toxicity” and its elective affinity with “the Paranoid Style in American Politics”. In the last decade it has been used by all sides in the context of political debate. Someone may be referred to as a “toxic person”, sometimes an innocuous point about a really mean human being, but more often a pathologization. Two years ago, my former union struck against York University but found themselves hemmed in by a narrative that the Left was “toxic”, the ongoing discourse from the right wing of the union. So you literally had people who surreptitiously met with management, recorded in-camera meetings and openly encouraged scabbing, accusing union activists of “toxicity”, much like the employer.
Yet “toxicity” is not a floating signifier. In the era of Covid-19 and anxious preppers, virus metaphors having become part of the everyday parlance of information technology with its disposability of human beings through the logic of the social industry. “Toxicity,” on one hand, could be shorn of meaning. On the other hand, it can be seen as going beyond de-humanization in order to render a human being as a walking contagion – in other words, as a Jew. And more to the point, a Jew who has not gone through the bourgeois-style assimilation of diction lessons to lose the “sing-songy” voice that middle class Jews in the fifties and sixties tried so desperately to lose. A Jew like Larry David, who like Dave Chappelle (in his pre Transphobia years, at least), people perhaps cringed at for the wrong reason. Or a Jew like Bernie Sanders. Or the many Jews who were for Jeremy Corbyn and specifically targeted – by other Jews no less – as “anti-Semites”. This reaches its apotheosis when German curators ban Jewish speakers for being in favor of the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions (BDS) movement. In many ways, the very existence of Left-wing Anti-Zionist Jews (Deutscherites, if you will) allow Zionists, Jewish or otherwise, to participate in the grand game of anti-Semitism by shifting around its meaning. Zionism is predicated, after all, on a sort of “Judeo-Pessimism” not dissimilar to the implicit Afro-Pessimism that was a factor in the older black vote for Joe Biden.
Anti-Semitism from online Elizabeth Warrens supporters. Where is the hue and cry?
After all, as Terry Southern implies in his script for Dr. Strangelove, anti-communism predicated upon toxicity is a refraction of anti-Semitism. And the way it has been used against Jewish presidential candidate Sanders and the “Bernie Bros” is openly anti-Semitic, the most classic example being the CNN chyron asking whether Bernie Sanders or the fucking Coronavirus could be stopped. That this anti-Semitism isn’t obvious speaks to a broader issue both external to and internal to American Jewish communities in general, and the fissures developing between American liberalism and the Left. On the same night that a Nazi waved the Nazi flag at a Sanders rally in Arizona, the well-known fraud Elizabeth Warren was on the aforementioned network venting to Russiagate’s answer to Glenn Beck, Rachel Maddow, about “Bernie Bros”, making lurid allegations. Indeed, she sounded just like a Massachusetts-liberal version of the fascist military figures in Z and Dr. Strangelove. Not to mention that the animus of the online “Bernie Bros” never approached the gross level of anti-Semitism and anti-black racism often directed towards the Sanders campaign itself.
CNN 2020
Nazi propaganda from occupied Poland: “Jews, Lice, Typhus”
A Sidetrack on “Standing”, Hilary Rosen + the telos of White Moderate Liberalism
A few days after this sordid episode, Democratic Party operative and Biden supporter Hillary Rosen was on CNN alongside Sanders campaign co-chair Nina Turner. As most readers know, Rosen proceeded to have the unmitigated chutzpah to tell Ms. Turner that she was wrong about King’s indictment of “white moderates” in his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” What is more, Rosen told Ms. Turner she didn’t have the standing to “criticize Joe Biden using Martin Luther King”. In the self-serving myopia of former BP lobbyist Rosen, the white moderate was not to be feared so much as “brought around” from his “silence”. Thus Martin Luther King is magically transformed into a preacher of respectability politics. In reality, of course, King was pointing out that, in the grand scheme of things, the KKK may have been an immediate risk but white liberals who just wanted things to be “normal” were a greater barrier to emancipation. In what was referred to as an apology on Twitter, Rosen called Turner an “angry black woman”, later to delete the Tweet and tweet out another apology, pathetically drawing attention to herself by claiming Turner wouldn’t take her phone call.
Rosen evidently thinks she has “standing” to question a Black woman’s right to invoke Martin Luther King against Joseph Biden. What is this “standing” that Rosen is speaking of anyway? Is it the a “standing” that only Black folks unaligned with the Russia/Trump/Commie/Fidelista/Bernie Bro candidate have? How is this related, for example, to Joy Reed’s anti-Semitic use of a “body language” expert to prove that Bernie is objectively disgusting? Or MSNBC contributor and Root editor Jason Johnson who had the audacity to call Black supporters of Sanders the equivalent of k**e lovers from the “island of misfit Black girls”? Of course this echoes the recently departed Chris Matthews who compared Sanders’ victory in Nevada to the Nazi occupation of France which happened during the eclipse of the French Popular Front, in when the French state had been governed by Leon Blum, a Jewish social democrat.
Rosen, who is often billed as a “Democratic operative” is a perfect example of American liberalism’s degeneration. A founder of “Rock the Vote,” a proud insider who humblebrags about it this status in her official bio, she is a backroom dealer of capitalist realism. She has achievements to her credit, as an early advocate of funding AIDS research, a power broker behind the opposition to George W. Bush’s attempted constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Yet simultaneous to that, she helped destroy the music industry and give birth to “the age of Spotification”. She was head of the Recording Industry Association (RIAA) during the dying days of musicians being able to draw an income from their craft and presided over a massive shift in power from labour to capital. It is no accident that under her helm, music, well, started to suck. As Dave Marsh points out in Rock and Rap Confidential, “under Rosen's watch, the RIAA launched its vicious war against music fans, making the words "file sharer" synonymous with "criminal." Rosen shepherded the draconian Digital Millennium Copyright Act through Congress.”
Nina Turner
So what it is that gives Rosen the standing to basically call Nina Turner “uppity” is her experience “doing politics” the way liberals believe one does politics. Rosen sits in her lofty perch as someone who succeeded followed up her destruction of the music industry with lobbying for British Petroleum, Facebook, Viacom, and TransCanada Corporation, among other shady global criminal masterminds. The liberal establishment, indeed even the “left” or Warrenish wing of liberalism, is deathly afraid of any form of politics from below. In turn, they can make a living off other people’s suffering. But they see this just as another part of the “human condition” and thus they can “do right” by becoming a “progressive insider” – the kind who ends up in the tank for Biden after openly participating in an anti-Black, anti-Semitic and anti-communist campaign against the Sanders movement. Rosen, a queer Jewish woman and “lean-in” feminist, is allying with forces that, even on her own terms, don’t serve the “causes” of her Sorkinesque liberalism.
This is due to her standing as a power broker. She attained this by subsuming some of the artisanal privilege musicians had into a new cultural accumulation regime, and then later sold her oratorical skills to the world’s worst polluter. This kind of standing allows her to walk among these thugs, knowing that in the wilderness of mirrors that constitutes “Washington, DC” as a totality, it’s thug life – but seriously. And the only way to really improve the lot of one’s community, the liberal thug tells themselves, is to be among the thugs and build transactional power, and insofar as that works for everything from progressive social issues and anti-censorship, AIDS funding, and the like, Rosen aligned themselves, to the NRA, Christian Fundamentalism, every intelligence service in the world, oil, fast food, etc. The wilderness of mirrors, or the “deep state” if you will, as I point out in Salvage, can be understood in the sense of Marx’s statement on the state as the the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. But this, as Marx points out, is akin precisely the the Hobbesian war of all against all, that together constitutes capital’s vanguard as a whole. And thus, there will be intrigues within this vanguard, different interests at play, but one has to be a part of it in order to have “standing”. They don’t see it as selling their souls. They are nowhere near as honest as the likes of Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney, relishing power for its own sake.
They think they are saving the world. And they think anything our side puts forward will inevitably end up in “totalitarianism”. Even if they share “policy goals”, obviously their political horizons differ even from the right-wing of social democracy in a profound sense. They don’t represent capital. Rather, even more so than the cynics around Trump, they personify capital.
So it’s perfectly OK for them to rile up popular anti-Black or anti-Semitic – or homophobic, Islamophobic, generally racist, even regionalist - sentiment to make their point. As it’s just throwing harmless people red meat. They’re not like TRUMP, who is far too flagrant. They just aren’t above instrumentalizing sentiment, while perhaps financially supporting a group like, say, the ADL or the Human Rights Campaign to assuage their guilt.
Joe Biden runs interference for Clarence Thomas against Anita Hill in 1991
Joe Biden, after all, is exceptionally vulnerable on issues popular to the Democratic base far beyond Sanders’ supporters. Biden is not pro-choice, he is weasely about it and has been on record far more often criticzing Roe vs. Wade then staunchly supporting it. Whether he would enact such changes is less important than the fact that he doesn’t believe abortion is a choice. He, like many liberals, wants to limit abortion. There is no doubt of the legitimacy of Biden’s Black support, but as Elie Mystal points out in The Nation, it is largely due to transactional relationships with power brokers and a certain “celebrity” charisma. It cannot be denied that there is symbolic valiance to a white man who was willing to play second fiddle to a Black man.
Rosen is the personification of capital in 2020. One doesn’t have to say “they’ll help elect Trump” as who knows, maybe that piece of shit Biden can beat the guy. Though I reckon he can’t. But in instrumentalizing the language of toxicity rooted in anti-Semitism, all the while attacking people of colour in and around the Sanders movement, including “The Squad”, they are contributing to a dangerous situation, a situation that threatens far more than the Sanders movement. They exist in a dyad with the Bannons and Stones of this world, each one accusing the other of collusion with this or that power, each riling up the popular racism, misogyny, homophobia and anti-Semitism of their various social bases and/or pandering to bourgeois sentiment within said clusters. The one thing they all agree on is the most important, the maintenance and continuation of capitalist social property relations.
Ain’t No Fooling Around
Leftists like to point out how absurd this all is, a politician with an objectively better record on gender, and certainly on abortion, is denounced strongly by NOW in spite of the high grades they gave him, higher than Biden on some measures. “People are in camps at the border and I can’t pay for my insulin but Bernie Bros were mean to me on the internet” or something along these lines. But it goes beyond that. The animus to Bernie and the people around him, for those who are responsible for, buy into, and thus reproduce the slanders about the Sanders movement is predicated on popular racism and anti-Semitism. Since Bernie is just a “white man”, one does not examine why his gruffness evokes discomfort. One is encouraged to feel this discomfort with his gruffness, yet this gruffness is proletarian gruffness in general, and Jewish gruffness in particular. And the same goes with Turner and “the Squad”, their ascribed identity being absolutely co-constitutive with their embodiment of the proletarian or at least downwardly mobile petit-bourgeois majority of Americans.
This is why Sanders supporters on the internet are genuinely seen as a bigger deal than a swastika, or even the bombing of mosques, synagogues, churches, abortion clinics, Jewish Community Centres, labour union halls and so on. If you are willing to talk about Trump with regards to these shootings but unwilling to squarely examine the constitutive violence of the American system, it is not that you are “intentionally” as bad as they are. Rather you have signed what the late Marxist theorist Norman Geras called the “Contract of Mutual Indifference”. You are prepared to acknowledge tragedy but are afraid or unwilling to fight it when the species itself is at stake.
There is implicit naturalization of Nazis interrupting Sanders events and white supremacist violence throughout society, even an implicit naturalization of Trump’s most xenophobic policies, like his concentration camps for migrants or the Muslim ban. All of these things are objectively more preferable to liberals, than electing Bernie Sanders, a moderate social democrat.
So this absurdism is only absurd insofar as our reality is absurd, a context that the artist Anupam Roy suggests is impossible to represent. But it is an internal logic that in the “fishhook” theory that objectively unites liberals with fascism. This affinity is merely less hidden now. Even if it is disavowed.
To return briefly to Z, the politician emblematic of “toxicity” is assassinated by a fascist conspiracy with tentacles deep inside the Greek state, even if individual actors in the conspiracy were often no more than useful idiots.
Nazi unfurls swastika at Sanders rally before the crowd takes it away and he is ejected from the rally. (2020).
The classic era of right-wing thuggish movements from below instrumentalized by powerful forces has given way, for now, to the era of stochastic violence. The more anti-Semitic innuendo and coding there is about Sanders and his supporters, the more one should become concerned. These dynamics raise serious questions about his safety in the context of right-wing and fascist stochastic terrorism and state intrigue alike.
But Bernie Bros were mean on the internet.
Jordy Cummings is a cultural critic, independent scholar and adjunct based in Toronto, Canada. He is an editor at Red Wedge and has contributed to Jacobin, Salvage and Le Monde Diplomatique, among other outlets. He is a toxic Judeo-Bolshevik and heckin’ proud of it!