"Armageddon" may be closer than you think

But it's not so much about World War III as it the sheer perversion of truth with the rise of a new, respectable anti-semitism

The trope may be shopworn and overdetermined, but the world in fact may be finally on this occasion facing down a real-life Armageddon.

The term “Armageddon” was regularly invoked by commentators after 1914 to characterize the unprecedented and inconceivable horrors of the Great War, or World War I, which killed 20 million people, a majority of whom were civilians.

Since 1945 the figure of speech has generally been affiliated in the popular mind with a nuclear holocaust, toward which the planet came within a hair’s breadth during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.  

In recent years it has been deployed to conjure up the specter of World War III, which would involve most or all of the major world powers and, according to some analysts, increasingly seems more than a distant possibility.

But the Biblical picture of Armageddon, found in chapter 16 of the Book of Revelation, is more opaque and far more understated.  It does not so much connote planetary devastation and unparalleled mass slaughter, although the second half of Revelation 19 in which the actual battle takes place hints of an appallingly bloody conflict.

What it does intimate is the gathering of “demonic spirits that perform signs, and they go out to the kings of the whole world, to gather them for the battle on the great day of God Almighty.”  (Rev.16:14)

In other words, Armageddon is really about the advent of a supreme historical moment of truth, one in which all the convenient lies we have all told ourselves, or all the presumptuous efforts we have made over the centuries to bend scriptural texts to our preferred political, religious, or moral prejudices, are exposed as fraudulent.

Since the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7, there have been countless victims, both Jews and Palestinians. But the one, incontestable victim has been the truth.

From the outset the war has consisted in a relentless, dark rain of distortions, half-truths, and outright lies as much as it has been a bombardment of missiles and munitions.   These lies have been accentuated by the prior proliferation of phony narratives cowering behind a certain respectable scholastic cachet that supposedly “explain” the motives and behavior of bad actors such as Hamas.

These “explanations”, nevertheless, turn out to be noisome apologies or vile excuses, primarily because they themselves torture and maim the evidence of history while subtracting all nuance and censoring any kind of counterfactual.  If they weren’t already so prevalent and persistent among the West’s corrupt intellectual elites, we would call them by their proper name – propoganda.

Let’s begin with the most noxious of the noxious – the claim that Israel is a “settler colonial” state. 

The theory of settler colonialism has evolved in just a quarter century from the key ideas laid out by Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe in a landmark book published in 1998 and entitled Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. 

Strikingly, however, the book did not preoccupy itself with characterizing so-called “settler colonial states”.  It was instead a strident and surgical assault on the manner in which European social sciences since the colonial era reified and institutionalized its own “claims to authority over indigenous discourse”.

Furthermore, it defined settler colonialism as a “structure” rather than an “event”.  The revisioning of indigenous language, practices, and values by framing them in terms of Western theoretical and explanatory paradigms was the nub of Wolfe’s critique.

Wolfe, of course, had in mind such obvious “settler colonial” sites as Australia and South Africa, but his arguments could also be extrapolated to encompass how Native American studies were long shaped by the same intellectual subterfuges.

Wolfe had the harshest words for what he termed “the whole Foucauldian line-up” of post-structuralist and post-colonial theorists who “have produced an incessant flow of knowledge about [indigenous peoples] that has become available for selective appropriation to warrant, to rationalize, and to authentical official definitions, policies, and programmes for dealing with” the colonial legacy.

Ironically, it is the very kind of academic malpractice that Wolfe excoriated that has been used (in his name) to discredit authentic Jewish claims to their ancestral homeland and to misrepresent the Palestinian cause as if it were straightforwardly equivalent to the shameful legacy of racial apartheid in twentieth century South Africa.

First of all, the adjective “indigenous”, which is crucial to even the most tendentious types of “settler colonial” discourse, has absolutely no meaning when deployed in reference to any contemporary facets of the Middle East.  

Within the scholarly literature “indigeneity” is a highly contested term, but historically it has been applied to certain ethnic groupings who have a clear and primordial identity, usually of a religious character, between people and land.

If we defer to the historical usage of the word “indigenous”, both Jews and Palestinians have equal claim.  And if parse these claims in accordance with their centrality to the respective religious world views, there is no serious comparison.  

The Jews inhabited the land and built flourishing nation-states there long before the Arabs, who conquered it with armies in the seventh century under the banner of their new faith they called “Islam”, were even a minimal presence.

Even after they were driven out of Palestine by the Roman emperor Hadrian in the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-135 CE, a tiny minority of Jews trickled back into the Levant and by 1900 were about .5 percent of the population.   The sizable majority of Jews who emigrated to Israel since that time have come not from Europe, but Middle Eastern countries that expelled them because of their religion.

Despite the “settler colonial” canard, only about 30 percent of present day Israelis were from Europe, and most of them were survivors of the Holocaust, or refugees who had experienced systemic persecution in neighboring Islamic countries. 

These are the same countries by the way that have been stoking “anti-Zionist” hatred for decades and even collaborated with the Nazis’ efforts at exterminating the Jews during the early 1940s.

As Barry Rubin and Wolfgang Schwanitz document exhaustively in their brilliant and erudite historical study Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and many state actors aligned with, or deferential toward, them are in a direct ideological line of succession with the Third Reich, which created the social and political infrastructure that would supposedly finalize the “Final Solution” long after Hitler’s Germany had been defeated.

Modern Israel is the product of forced migration in exactly the same way as one can construe the rapid growth of the Hispanic population of the United States, or of Muslims in Europe, since the turn of the millennium.    

The trend toward demonizing Jewish migration as “settler colonialism” is strong evidence of the deep anti-semitism of the progressive left in the West, which ironically allies closely with the narratives that, according to Rubin and Schwanitz, were deliberately seeded over 80 years ago throughout the Middle East by Joseph Goebbels and his propaganda machinery of the “Big Lie”.

The Big Lie has not only impacted international politics, it has now saturated America’s higher educational system, in particular elite schools who historically have functioned as standard bearers for our present day knowledge-based society and its digitally advanced engines of economic production.

The American right has long been critical of the dominance of identity politics with its subdivision of the social order into “oppressed” and “oppressors”, which it has wrongly termed “cultural Marxism”.   

Real historical Marxism, irrespective of its historical atrocities and disasters, has at least championed the cause of the economic underclass. 

But as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò in his book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) stresses, the original identitarian impulse of progressive movements was to single out racial, ethnic, gender, and cultural differences for the sake of mobilizing coalitions who might actually make a difference, to “do the hard work of changing the world”.

“Elite capture”, however, has had the result, according to Táíwò, of exploiting actual marginalization and real suffering to bolster the power and prestige of the new progressive neoliberal ruling class who commandeers the “factories” of the post-industrial economy, that is, the universities.  I have written extensively about how this all works.

In the last two weeks the bitter fruits of progressive neoliberal hegemony along with the toxic ideology that infects the minds of the minions in American higher education have been brutally evident in precisely the same fashion as it has historically manifested in times of social stress and global crisis – in anti-semitism!

But now it is no longer political conservatives but many on the center-left side of the political spectrum have come to realize that identity politics is not simply a distortion of democratic pluralism, but an extremely rarified and covert variant of hard-core fascism. 

Indeed, as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke suggests, the more virulent types of contemporary neo-Nazi extremism, have their origin in this modality of thinking.

As Jason Willick writing in The Washington Post observes, identity politics is a game Jews can never win, because it was never designed for them.  “Jews”, he argues, “never made a good identity-politics client group. So when Jews demand that universities acknowledge a cause near to their hearts as readily as they acknowledge other causes, they are pulling a familiar lever on a broken machine”.

The entire Armageddon imaginary can be traced back to the ancient Persian Zoroastrian belief that all of world history is a dramatic struggle between the Truth and the Lie.

Today’s dominant cognitive elites, which includes not only academia but all educational professionals as well as the communications industry with its commentators and influencers,  claim both their legitimacy and their freedoms from the political presumption that they are committed to the pursuit of truth.

When they goes over to the dark side and traffick shamelessly in the great moral abomination of anti-semitism, it has forfeited not only its respect, but its very legitimacy.

It is at this point that a real existing Armageddon, not merely a metaporhic one, looms ever larger.