Image by Brett Wharton.
“The thing that is to be supported, and the force that is to support it should stand in geometrical proportion to each other” cardinal Richelieu, cited by Henry Kissinger
“Nothing is thoroughly real, therefore everything is permitted” – Hassan I. Sabbah, Persian leader of the assassins, in Vladimir Bartol’s novel Alamut.
Even if it had the lifespan of a gnat, it was a miracle. A burgeoning antiwar movement had burst onto the scene over a year ago, marching into 2024 with frequent actions on college campuses and, more relevantly, in Washington DC. One of the more theatrical and creative of these was that near-Biblical river of artificial movie-set blood, unspooled by demonstrators in front of Anthony Blinken’s mansion, to pester the Secretary of State and his family by reminding them of the Gaza bloodbath he is responsible for. While Biden was off drooling on a Delaware beach, activists had choked the White house with symbols, encircling it with a Christo-like art display: the faux blood moat, suggested by a giant red cord snaking round capitol hill, symbolized the “red line” invoked by both Biden and his emasculated squire Blinken. The “red line” was that boundary that Netanyahu supposedly could not overstep in Rafa if he wished to keep receiving billions in artillery and support rolled out from the US benefactor. Such protest actions were unusually creative, considering where, and who they were coming from: the dreaded, and incestuously overlapping millennial, zillennial and jillennial generations. Prior to October 2023, Gen Z had been associated with the imaginative poverty of woke culture. Did they finally, suddenly wake up from woke? Center-right commentators like Bari Weiss have refused to acknowledge this metamorphosis, as they try unconvincingly to fit these protests for Palestinian rights back into the conceptual mold of the “woke” movement, applying the familiar labels which may have been apt in the recent past which now no longer stick.
What is woke? A neologism, “woke” is meant to identify a form of activism that makes no real demands, a brand of juvenile liberal hysteria. The sentimentality of “woke” accompanies an ideology whose tenets can only be understood as a superficial anticonservatism, one which paradoxically becomes equally or more reactionary than the conservatism it initially seeks to denounce (or, what is much more often the case, to provoke via antagonistic and needless confrontation of the broad public). Woke culture stems from a digital media environment of ineffective activism which is poor in thought, hostile towards literacy and history. “Wokeness” sweepingly and unequivocally condemns all of history as conservative, since history is the reservoir of all ills and worse oppressions than our own—therefore, better to erase history.
Of course, Palestine is also in a way history that refuses to be completely erased—this is where the embrace of the Palestinian cause becomes one of the more important internal contradictions of “woke” youth culture, a paradox which is happily absent from the politically correct world view of the Blinkens of this world.
The woke movement’s refusal to study history, make its militancy become ultimately harmful towards its own cherished progressive causes. Woke activism, though often sincere at heart, is driven by an energy and a dynamism that are nevertheless easily manipulated and diverted by its outside enemies: authoritarian forces such as the Democratic Party’s gerontocracy or Silicon Valley. The “Woke” folks had been happily servile and submissive to Biden and Pelosi up until October 8th of 2023.
Months into the war, when sentimental pleading proved insufficient to budge a nearly insentient Biden or an empty-headed Blinken, the popular frustration of students kindled an awakening. Faced with the horrors broadcast by Al-Jazeera—which, because of AJ’s journalistic credentials could not simply be banned from West and deleted like Russia Today—the shock of beholding executed Palestinian women and children forced an unexpected political maturation in Western youthful spectators.
But before we allow ourselves to be awed by these students—so reminiscent of their grandparents’ mobilizations over Vietnam in the 1960s – let us backtrack and freshen our memories. After Biden took office on January 20, 2021, his first presidential action, unauthorized by Congress and therefore unconstitutional, was a missile attack in Iraq—which went unprotested. Biden declared an emergency while swiftly avenging the death of a U.S. military contractor, precisely the sort of donor to whom Biden has devoted his long and venal career, and who had overwhelmingly influenced Biden’s foreign policy design throughout his half-century in Washington. Iraq, unlike Palestine, is itself a forgotten cause decades after the anti-Bush anti-war movement fizzled out with the christening of Obama.
The early decision by a then newly elected president Biden set the preamble for the endless and aimless wars in Ukraine as of 2022 and in the Middle East as of 2023, for which Biden would also repeatedly bypass Congress and the Constitution without facing any consequences or impeachment, while any suggestion of diplomatic intervention was undermined. But it was the lack of criticism of all his prior wars the world over—a culture of silence among left-leaning Americans and Europeans—which paved the way for the Gaza genocide we have been witnessing for over a year.
Between seas Red and Black, Biden officials followed a repetitive, if not symmetrical formula: uncritical support for largely irrational proxies (states that seem more like volatile mercenaries than allies) with unclear goals and undefined war aims.
Had an anti-war movement begun to organize on as late a date as January 20th, might we have been able to prevent this from the bottom up? This question should haunt all progressives.
Both Washington and Kremlin bureaucrats are deniers of history, who shirk any diplomatic language as they in rhetoric invoke the second world war while comparing each other to the Nazis; neither of these regimes proved sufficiently imaginative to originate a new language or symbol-system that would effectively motivate any young man with intellect and dignity to want to fight these struggles. The Biden administration had attempted to incorporate the symbolism of the “woke” militant anticonservative movement in US, which has thrived on campus and online for over a decade, into its own foreign policy propaganda: by depicting Putin as a last bastion of villainous conservatism—a reputation which Putin and his apologists find all the more flattering. But American progressives never needed to look further than a mirror to find puritans and Victorians bent on imperial war abroad and incrementalist reform at home: the welfare-warfare state that was criticized by American dissidents like Murray Rothbard and Randolph Bourne (known for having said “War is the health of the state”) a century ago.
Since 2021, the activists led by icons like AOC integrated quickly into a new culture of quietism and of disciplined and docile support for Biden’s warmongering policies. The young had acquiesced to be silent when it came to Biden’s senility, (which translates into the inability to process complex information about the shifting sands of geopolitics) and anti-constitutional wars, but had free reign to continue commenting on domestic cultural and sexual politics—within set parameters. The payoff was Bidenomics’ trickle-down bonanza, and the promise of a few concessions to a watered-down version of the Green New Deal. This social contract, or covenant, was agreed upon with reluctance by bitterly opposed flanks within progressive culture, who were united only by their fear of the Trump and the chaos he represents.
But that culture of silence ended with the havoc in Gaza after October 8th 2023 as former accomplices finally saw that the urgency of an antiwar movement was far greater than the need for reliable anti-Trump shock troops. The realization was overdue. The realpolitik of such an amoral covenant of silence, once maintained in place by groups like the Democratic Socialists of America and its informal sympathizers and foot-soldiers, erupted into a forestalled scream —all this patient strategic waiting in the effort to impress the gerontocracy with our generation’s willingness to be “adults in the room” had all been in vain. AOC’s lack of character when the time came to step up to the plate and call for oversight to the funding of the war in Ukraine (remember the Squad’s withdrawn letter?) or Biden’s unchallenged decision of recycling of Trump’s foreign policies of maximum pressure on Cuba, had not translated into the bold key leadership required to keep the DSA’s Green New Deal project alive on life support. The mass mobilization required to have a “green industrial revolution” is wholly incompatible with the Democrats’ tradition of resolving America’s partizan tensions by reliance on the welfare-warfare state model. Biden maintained his characteristic grin of octogenarian indifference while facing the wave of resignations by State Department experts expressing their dissent and incomprehension over Middle East policy. Consequently, those officials went on to experience the very same cancel culture Democrats had previously disregarded as a right-wing talking point.
Let us remember that sanguine red rope, lassoed by indignant young people around the bone-colored White House dome months ago. Wasn’t it merited during the years of Obama’s second term? But no matter. The antiwar youth could have had its late awakening the day Biden, one week into his presidency, lobbed rockets into the Kurdish city of Erbil in Iraq in 2021. It should not have taken until October 8th of 2023. But the cultic silence surrounding Biden’s bellicosity and senility— two factors were no less intertwined than the danger between Trump’s emotional instability and his access to a nuclear arsenal—had remained sacrosanct, the unmentionable whale on the living room floor. That culture of quietism among progressives in the West is to blame for the Gaza genocide. It is never too late to rise, when it is. Those who could no longer bear being the impotent witnesses of American post-democracy are in a sense also hostages, like the hundred Israeli captives whose safe return is Netanyahu’s lowest priority. They are now seeking an expiation through screams, dignity through protest. The culture of silence was not, as is currently depicted, only or merely a taboo on critique of Israel that has recently been broken, which is a less thorny problem. Rather, the silence was part of a social contract that preemptively suppressed critical thought or commentary on any aspect of the Biden era’s foreign policy. With Trump on his way to inauguration, will progressives return to ignoring the role they have played in the legitimation of the war-machine?
As Trump picks and consecrates cabinet members, it seems the antiwar movement has already faded and shows signs of regressing back into yet another anti-Trump movement, like its ancestor which erupted in 2016 and which had believed Russiagate’s fabulism, making it the first Western anti-fascist movement that openly agitated for war with Moscow.
Hopefully we can return to the awakening light in which student protesters acted, once they discovered their mature voices, and understood that Biden was never the lesser malice when it came to foreign policy, even if Biden’s domestic and infrastructural efforts has improved the lives of American workers and youths to an extent. The rejection of this covenant which is the welfare/warfare state, was best summed up in the words of the young Palestinian-American protester Saba Saed when she shocked her CBS interviewer during the midterm elections by nonchalantly saying “it would be hypocritical of me to use reproductive rights as a way to justify voting for Biden when Biden is sending military aid to Israel which is air-striking Gaza and blocking humanitarian aid, leading to women there who are pregnant (…) getting c-sections without anesthesia”.
The ability for young progressives to keep still when it came to foreign geopolitical injustices of the Biden administration, and to sit back, relax and enjoy the beneficial reforms of Bidenomics, was sold to them as the litmus test of their political coming of age: if you could agree to accept the welfare/warfare state while forfeiting allegedly trivial concerns about war, you were no longer a child, was the message given not only by Pelosi to AOC, but by the gerontocracy to an entire generation. It was a fallacy: the Latin root of the word infant, “infantem” means “one not able to speak.” To defend the innocent—be they abroad, in Gaza, or at home—we must exit this age of innocence, we must put an end to the culture of silencing ourselves and others: this was never true strategy, neither in the long nor in the short term of mediocrity.
