My favourite story about Spinoza concerns the time he lost his cool. A philosopher, a Jew and history’s finest defender of Enlightenment, Spinoza was normally a picture of quiet reason. But when he heard about the lynching of Johan and Cornelis de Witt he became gripped by an uncommon fury. The de Witt brothers were key political figures in the Dutch Republic, the enlightened new nation in which Spinoza enjoyed such great liberty to think and write. On 20 August 1672, at The Hague, they were set upon by a ferocious mob that held them responsible for the invasion of the republic by a French-English alliance. They were murdered, mutilated and clumps of their flesh were eaten.
Spinoza was enraged. He made a plan to visit the site of the mob’s savagery to hold a one-man protest. Think Greta Thunberg, but enlightened. He prepared a placard to hold up. But his landlord restrained him, fearing he too would be slain by the mob. And so history was denied the image of one of our great philosophers staging a lonely, angry protest. What did his makeshift placard say? It had two words on it. ‘Ultimi barbarorum.’ Rough translation: ‘You are the greatest of barbarians.’
This year more than any other I’ve understood how Spinoza felt. On numerous occasions in 2023 I’ve been tempted to go places with a placard saying ‘Ultimi barbarorum’. To the kibbutzim of southern Israel following Hamas’s fascistic savagery against the Jews there on 7 October. To George Washington University after students projected the words ‘Glory to our martyrs’ on the side of the library building: young Americans of unimaginable privilege taking pleasure in the butchery of Jews. To the lovely, leafy campus of Columbia in New York City where students planned to hold a meeting on Hamas’s stirring ‘counter-offensive’. To those ‘pro-Palestine’ marches in London at which the morally treacherous middle classes marched alongside individuals dressed as Hamas terrorists and extremists chanting for yet more slaughter in Israel: ‘Jihad, jihad, jihad!’
To New York University where students shouted, ‘We don’t want no Jew state / We want all of it’: a cry by the comfortable for Hamas to finish the genocidal job of eliminating Jews in the Middle East. To the streets of Manhattan where protesters shouted ‘Shame on you!’ at an Israeli woman whose daughter was kidnapped and brutalised by Hamas. Shaming the victims of racist terror – a low even for the unhinged woke. To any gathering of politically minded Gen Zers, to be frank, after polls found that huge numbers of them view Jews as an ‘oppressor class’ and believe Hamas’s pogrom was ‘justified’. And to the Sydney Opera House, where radical Islamists chanted ‘Gas the Jews’ and ‘Fuck the Jews’ mere days after Hamas murdered the Jews. Nazi-style parades, uncontained glee at genocidal violence, on the streets of a Western city.
At every place I’ve wanted to say ‘Ultimi barbarorum’. To call out both barbarism and its intellectual apologists. To express Spinoza-style disgust for these new enemies of Western civilisation. For make no mistake, that’s what they are. From Hamas to the radical Islamists in Europe who feel inspired by Hamas to the West’s own sons and daughters of privilege who make excuses for Hamas – all have proven themselves in 2023 to be the adversaries of truth, culture and reason. Surely no one will now deny that Western civilisation is under assault on two fronts: from without and within?
The West’s bourgeois left loves to larp as Marxists, often quoting the great Rosa Luxemburg: ‘Socialism or barbarism!’ This year we discovered which side of that clash they take – it isn’t Luxemburg’s. The apologism for Hamas in privileged circles has been mind-blowing. Hamas’s bestial violence against the Jews has been denied, downplayed or outright justified. A ‘day of celebration’ is how one privately educated pretend radical in Britain described the racist butchery of 7 October. This sympathy with barbarism, this receptiveness to acts of staggering dehumanisation, goes beyond Israelophobia. It speaks to more than the witless hate for Israel that’s been rampant in right-thinking circles for years.
It even touches on something deeper than the scourge of identity politics, though that politics no doubt shapes the infantile hot take that Jews are permanent oppressors and Palestinians are forever victims. No, the sympathy shown by woke Westerners for Hamas’s apocalyptic violence reveals a moral kinship between these two sections of global society. It exposes their shared contempt for Western civilisation, their shared indifference to human suffering, and their shared loathing of freedom.
The fallout from 7 October brought to the surface a crisis of Western civilisation that has been brewing for decades. It confirmed that when you socialise the young into a system of loathing for their own civilisation not only do you make them indifferent to the threats faced by that civilisation – you make them welcome such threats, to embrace them as necessary moral correctives to our own hubris and misplaced exceptionalism.
Having educated the young to view the West as a racist entity; to fear America and Britain as nations born in the sins of slavery and Empire; to ‘decolonise’ their own learning of those arrogant white men of Enlightenment; to eschew science as a Western conceit that negates more indigenous ways of knowing; and to doubt the existence of truth itself, we cannot now be shocked to find them so cavalier about a violent assault on this awful, unspeakable West. In this case, Hamas’s racist onslaught on the people of a state that is seen to embody Western values in the Middle East. For many today, ‘Western civilisation is synonymous with racism, oppression and exploitation’, as one academic puts it. So why not celebrate its violent humiliation? Why not revel in the degradation of those who enjoy its gains?
We cannot afford to underestimate how significant it is that many of our young sympathise with Hamas and view the Jews they butchered as oppressors. This must be a moral watershed for the West. In turning the young against civilisation, we’ve marched them into the arms of barbarism. We have lost them to Hamas.
The unholy marriage between wokeism and Islamism can no longer be denied. Both scorn the idea of Western civilisation. Both disavow Enlightenment as Western arrogance. Both dread the march of modernity, whether as a threat to Gaia or Sharia. And both hate Jews. One side views them as pigs and monkeys, the other as an oppressor class. Once again Jews have come to be seen as the embodiment of modernity, and therefore the enemies of modernity, whether that’s the civilisation sceptics of our own elite universities or the civilisation attackers of radical Islam, turn on them. Viciously. The woke dehumanise them as oppressors, Hamas dehumanises them with violence. Both are assaults not only on Jews but also on the civilisational conscience itself.
There is a reluctance, these days, to speak of a clash between civilisation and barbarism. It feels too old-world. And yet its existence can no longer be ignored. Today we face not merely a clash of civilisations, but, perhaps more importantly, a clash within Western civilisation. On one side, those who have abandoned reason, on the other those of us who wish to defend it. A movement in 2024 against the barbarorum of our times would be no bad thing.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer. This article was first published HERE
This year more than any other I’ve understood how Spinoza felt. On numerous occasions in 2023 I’ve been tempted to go places with a placard saying ‘Ultimi barbarorum’. To the kibbutzim of southern Israel following Hamas’s fascistic savagery against the Jews there on 7 October. To George Washington University after students projected the words ‘Glory to our martyrs’ on the side of the library building: young Americans of unimaginable privilege taking pleasure in the butchery of Jews. To the lovely, leafy campus of Columbia in New York City where students planned to hold a meeting on Hamas’s stirring ‘counter-offensive’. To those ‘pro-Palestine’ marches in London at which the morally treacherous middle classes marched alongside individuals dressed as Hamas terrorists and extremists chanting for yet more slaughter in Israel: ‘Jihad, jihad, jihad!’
To New York University where students shouted, ‘We don’t want no Jew state / We want all of it’: a cry by the comfortable for Hamas to finish the genocidal job of eliminating Jews in the Middle East. To the streets of Manhattan where protesters shouted ‘Shame on you!’ at an Israeli woman whose daughter was kidnapped and brutalised by Hamas. Shaming the victims of racist terror – a low even for the unhinged woke. To any gathering of politically minded Gen Zers, to be frank, after polls found that huge numbers of them view Jews as an ‘oppressor class’ and believe Hamas’s pogrom was ‘justified’. And to the Sydney Opera House, where radical Islamists chanted ‘Gas the Jews’ and ‘Fuck the Jews’ mere days after Hamas murdered the Jews. Nazi-style parades, uncontained glee at genocidal violence, on the streets of a Western city.
At every place I’ve wanted to say ‘Ultimi barbarorum’. To call out both barbarism and its intellectual apologists. To express Spinoza-style disgust for these new enemies of Western civilisation. For make no mistake, that’s what they are. From Hamas to the radical Islamists in Europe who feel inspired by Hamas to the West’s own sons and daughters of privilege who make excuses for Hamas – all have proven themselves in 2023 to be the adversaries of truth, culture and reason. Surely no one will now deny that Western civilisation is under assault on two fronts: from without and within?
The West’s bourgeois left loves to larp as Marxists, often quoting the great Rosa Luxemburg: ‘Socialism or barbarism!’ This year we discovered which side of that clash they take – it isn’t Luxemburg’s. The apologism for Hamas in privileged circles has been mind-blowing. Hamas’s bestial violence against the Jews has been denied, downplayed or outright justified. A ‘day of celebration’ is how one privately educated pretend radical in Britain described the racist butchery of 7 October. This sympathy with barbarism, this receptiveness to acts of staggering dehumanisation, goes beyond Israelophobia. It speaks to more than the witless hate for Israel that’s been rampant in right-thinking circles for years.
It even touches on something deeper than the scourge of identity politics, though that politics no doubt shapes the infantile hot take that Jews are permanent oppressors and Palestinians are forever victims. No, the sympathy shown by woke Westerners for Hamas’s apocalyptic violence reveals a moral kinship between these two sections of global society. It exposes their shared contempt for Western civilisation, their shared indifference to human suffering, and their shared loathing of freedom.
The fallout from 7 October brought to the surface a crisis of Western civilisation that has been brewing for decades. It confirmed that when you socialise the young into a system of loathing for their own civilisation not only do you make them indifferent to the threats faced by that civilisation – you make them welcome such threats, to embrace them as necessary moral correctives to our own hubris and misplaced exceptionalism.
Having educated the young to view the West as a racist entity; to fear America and Britain as nations born in the sins of slavery and Empire; to ‘decolonise’ their own learning of those arrogant white men of Enlightenment; to eschew science as a Western conceit that negates more indigenous ways of knowing; and to doubt the existence of truth itself, we cannot now be shocked to find them so cavalier about a violent assault on this awful, unspeakable West. In this case, Hamas’s racist onslaught on the people of a state that is seen to embody Western values in the Middle East. For many today, ‘Western civilisation is synonymous with racism, oppression and exploitation’, as one academic puts it. So why not celebrate its violent humiliation? Why not revel in the degradation of those who enjoy its gains?
We cannot afford to underestimate how significant it is that many of our young sympathise with Hamas and view the Jews they butchered as oppressors. This must be a moral watershed for the West. In turning the young against civilisation, we’ve marched them into the arms of barbarism. We have lost them to Hamas.
The unholy marriage between wokeism and Islamism can no longer be denied. Both scorn the idea of Western civilisation. Both disavow Enlightenment as Western arrogance. Both dread the march of modernity, whether as a threat to Gaia or Sharia. And both hate Jews. One side views them as pigs and monkeys, the other as an oppressor class. Once again Jews have come to be seen as the embodiment of modernity, and therefore the enemies of modernity, whether that’s the civilisation sceptics of our own elite universities or the civilisation attackers of radical Islam, turn on them. Viciously. The woke dehumanise them as oppressors, Hamas dehumanises them with violence. Both are assaults not only on Jews but also on the civilisational conscience itself.
There is a reluctance, these days, to speak of a clash between civilisation and barbarism. It feels too old-world. And yet its existence can no longer be ignored. Today we face not merely a clash of civilisations, but, perhaps more importantly, a clash within Western civilisation. On one side, those who have abandoned reason, on the other those of us who wish to defend it. A movement in 2024 against the barbarorum of our times would be no bad thing.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer. This article was first published HERE
9 comments:
Sounds like Stockholm syndrome on a generational scale.
Perhaps all the well-off, privileged, educated young Westies should ask themselves why a good chunk of the Middle East and North Africa are willing to risk life and limb to get here.
I mean, if it's so bloody awful what's the great attraction.
I'll tell you. Freedom! Freedom of speech and choice and opinion. Somewhat eroded in recent times, but still a damn sight better than everywhere else. Something all the countries they're getting away from don't have to the same degree, if at all.
But, after getting here, many stick to their old ways and revert back to the restrictive practices and oppressive religious conventions that inspired them to move.
And what's more, expect us to change our way of life and culture to accommodate them. Something their own countries would not even contemplate.
Why don't we bring back a form of National Service. Between the ages of 18 and 30, people expressing disgust and moral outrage with the West are sent to a country that they claim is better than us. 2 years should do it.
They'll come whimpering back and with any luck we'll never hear a peep out of them again.
Brendan, it is a gift to be able to write this way. This is a truly exceptional piece of writing that captures the inevitable end point of the woke nonsense that has so infected the West. Wokeism is a dangerous, toxic, and barbaric cult dressed in pretended virtue, but devoid of intelligent reflection and simple decency.
Who would have thought that the most free and privileged generations in the history of the world would have turned so readily on the ideas and institutions that gave them their privilege and their freedom ... they are worse than medieval.
This essay should have very wide distribution ... it has very broad application.
Thank you, Brendan. With you all the way.
Brendan perfect piece. Once again I find myself agreeing with DeeM. Let's send these 'sympathisers' over there....if they manage to return alive they will really appreciate what the west has...
Obligatory reading.
The reality of division in NZ is often ignored or downplayed. There will be consequences.
When one hears new NZers describing themselves as " Muslims in NZ" not "NZ Muslims".... then priorities are clear.
i suspect social welfare, free education, free medical, old age pension, all extendable immediately or soon to all manner of relatives and pretend relatives is more the motivating factor. And many have been here long enough to also recognise the wonders of sick leave, paternity/maternity leave, various employment compensations, accident compo etc.
Maybe a visit to the death camps and crematoria of Auschwitz and other Nazi torture chambers would help these callous youth to understand what antisemitism can lead to. Deliberate murdering of millions of men, women and children, the Nazis did not do what less calculating murderers would do but saw through to the bottom of their philosophy which declared that not only were these lives not worth keeping alive but they were valuable for their raw materials when dead,just like an animal's body. Not only were gold teeth removed from the corpses, but the Nazi's used the hair of their victims and rendered the fat in their flesh to make soap. They even used the skin of their victims to make lampshades and other decorative objects.
Most people do not leave these Nazi camps unchanged. It is that same hatred of the Nazis that fuels these woke youth. The horrors of the camps motivated the original founding of Israel.
The heritage of Judaism , of course, is not known by these woke youth , who know nothing of the science, music, literature, freedoms and social justice
created by this culture. The number of Nobel prizes, for example, won by Jews is phenomenal when considering their small proportion of the world's population.
The Nazis shipped their victims to death camps. The Israelis will ship their victims to squalid refugee camps in countries outside of Israel. Israeli leaders are also cynically advertising the proposed ethnic cleansing as voluntary and a humanitarian gesture to solve the catastrophe they created.
The Holocaust was weaponized from almost the moment Israel was founded. It was bastardized to serve the apartheid state. If we forget the lessons of the Holocaust, we forget who we are and what we are capable of becoming. We seek our moral worth in the past, rather than the present. We condemn others, including the Palestinians, to an endless cycle of slaughter. We become the evil we abhor. We consecrate the horror.
It's too late! Look around you, watch the news and note that in America, Land of the free, home of the brave, every even-semi-Liberal town or city has a minority Mayor, a minority DA a minority-led Police Force etc. Every one of them seriously racist! The time to act was 20 years ago when clowns were pushing "affirmative action".
Other parts of the civilised world are as bad.
The horse has bolted and the only action available is to start again, building from the ground up.
That will require drastic measures,
some of the not overly nice.
Won't happen!
Brendan, I would like to think in a future century - your essay will be discussed in a civilisation with a refreshed enlightenment......... with the incredulity I am reading this today. Peter
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