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.