100 not ... oh, wait

Big day for Chomsky and Tom Lehrer, I guess.

Aesthetic

[Douglas] Murray is an aesthete turned political... His Spenglerian politics is simply the armed wing of his aesthetics, which finds the ugly, angry, sadistic grotesque Hamas raid to be, if you like, “dirtier” than “conscience-struck” Nazi killing. It’s the usual deal. Aesthetic politics is the back-channel to fascism. That lies at the heart of the general approach, which is an attempt to expel the radical evil of Nazism from the European right and attribute it to non-European “savagery”. Increasing numbers of Zionists and Israelis are doing it because of the historical adjacency of Zionism and European anti-Semitism, as entwined movements seeking communities of national purity as at the root of the good life. Claiming the savagery of intimate bodily torture and terrorism to be more evil than any amount of less procedurally sadistic killing is a way of legitimising killing through bombing with open-ended numbers.

Many of those who can see the evil of all this are non-Europeans of all ages across the West who know well the hypocrisy of imperialism and “Western civilisation” as justifying state killing on a mass scale. But they are joined by a much larger number of younger people... [who have] had an education in ... the great truth of the 20th century: that technical progress not only does not equate with moral progress, but makes domination and killing of humans easier by rendering it as a distanced process...

Leaving aside the simple deliberate amoral indifference of some, I suspect many of Israel’s older defenders truly cannot think their way into that moral truth. So they can look at the mass bombing of civilians, the wholesale killings of children, and simply not see that as the same sort of thing as stabbing someone to death no matter how many multiples of people are being killed. For those of us who do see it, Israel’s actions come out of a period of pre-Nazi morality, the 1920s in the 2020s, its passage into the present covered by the status of Jews as the core victims of the process of techno-amorality.

Silencing strategy

TIL!, "Stockholm syndrome" is not a thing, but was invented whole cloth by a police psychologist to discredit a hostage who publicly called him out as an incompetent cretin whose actions endangered her and her fellow bank employees:

After her ordeal was over, Kristin [Enmark] publicly slammed the police for putting her life in danger. She also refused to testify against both men in court.

Nils Bejerot, the police psychiatrist involved in the siege, never spoke to Kristin directly, but he diagnosed her with a condition he invented.

Calling the proposed condition "Norrmalmstorg syndrome," which came to be known outside Sweden as Stockholm syndrome, Bejerot claimed that Kristin in particular was brainwashed by her captor.

"It is to be expected that, after a point, a bond of friendship springs up between victims and their captors," he said in 1974.

Despite its fame, Stockholm syndrome has never been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

The handbook used by healthcare professionals in the United States and much of the world is considered the authoritative guide on the treatment of mental conditions.

Jess Hill, an investigative journalist who focuses on gendered violence, researched the origins of Stockholm syndrome for her book See What You Made Me Do.

"[Bejerot] made the assumption based purely on what he'd observed from an outsider's perspective, that they had a syndrome without there being any diagnostic criteria, without there being any type of study — and that's the basis upon which Stockholm syndrome is born."

"It's really easy to say, 'They must have Stockholm syndrome,' because it's comforting to think that there must be a syndrome that explains why victims act like this. And it's also a way of saying, 'I would never act like that.'"

Even Jan-Erik [Olsson, the bank robber] himself admits that by building a rapport with him, his hostages probably saved their own lives.

"They made it hard to kill. They made us go on living together day after day, like goats in that filth. There was nothing to do but get to know each other," he said a year after the robbery.

Dr [Allan] Wade[, a Canadian therapist who has spoken at length with Kristin about her experiences] does not believe Stockholm syndrome exists.

"Stockholm syndrome became a way of silencing an indignant, angry, exhausted, courageous young woman who was speaking about the realities of the events from her point of view," he said.

"It has nothing to do with the psychology of Kristin Enmark. It was a silencing strategy."

As you may have noticed recently.

See also, also, also.

Visible ponies

Keeping busy during the sitzkrieg.

Passive

(Source)

"This is what motivated the Nazis to find ways of circumventing the existential moral decay they were entering, and allowed them to get creative by using ... passive forms of mass annihilation..."

A supporter of the current murderous assault on Gaza posts this description of the Nazi genocides and misses entirely the obvious echo, being too focussed on praising the deranged supremacism of Douglas Murray. Perhaps if Murray had specifically labelled the people of Gaza as untermenschen as part of arguing their subhumanity, the gentleman who wrote the above would have a better comprehension of on which side of history he currently stands.