Poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric because no catharsis could be applied to Auschwitz. However, philosophy, for Adorno, lives on because the moment of its realization is missed. The conclusion refutes Hegel’s claim of fate being the arbiter of humankind’s sufferings while laying emphasis on Marx’s lamentation about the infatuations of the philosophers with the interpretation of the world rather than changing it through their actions.
For the Frankfurt Institute, the quote was taken out of context, yet Adorno’s nihilism sounds strange. Auschwitz was certainly one of the biggest guilts of human civilization, but not the only one of its kind. The Western civilization becoming hideous after Auschwitz is an understatement, if not an outright falsification. It decimated the native population everywhere from the US to Oceania to Africa to Indochina, not only during primitive accumulation but later during the realization of capital.
Even when Auschwitz was happening the French were brutally decimating the Algerians. Incidentally, it was the same period when the collaboration – a Devil’s Game as described by Robert Dreyfuss – between the Zionists and the Nazis had reached its peak. “Hitler will be forgotten in a few years,” Emil Ludwig, a Zionist biographer wrote, “but he will have a beautiful monument in Palestine, the coming of Nazis was a welcome thing” (Brenner).
Akin to the Zionist leadership that colluded with the German bourgeoisie, the handpicked West Bank bourgeoisie has also sold out its people.
It would be naïve to think that Adorno wasn’t privy to Zionism’s history. Balfour, the architect of Israel, was a strong anti-Semite. Chaim Weizmann, the head of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), and Balfour’s collaborator knew it and had to hide Zionism’s greatest patron’s anti-Semitism after the Holocaust. Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s close association with Mussolini was no secret. It’s equally inconceivable that Adorno belonging to the Marxist tradition was alien to the attitude of Soviet Jews, whose majority was either members of the Bolshevik Party or had sympathies with the communists, but none had any inclination towards Zionism or building a separate nation-state of Jews.
“The Jewish people,” Horkheimer wrote, “were not nationalistic at all, they were suffering for the sake of all humanity. Israel, on the contrary, is a nation-state, at its base structured like all others. Thus, the original messianic thought had to vanish for the sake of national existence”. When Eichmann once an ally of Zionists was kidnapped by Mossad – the old habits die hard, especially with Israel – from Buenos Aires, brought back to Israel, and ultimately sent to gallows everyone including Eric Fromm, Einstein, Hannah Ardent, and Horkheimer condemned the Israeli state, identifying its barbaric act with that of Nazism. Everyone knows” Horkheimer wrote “that Israeli totalitarian affectations, which recall Benito (Mussolini) and the Russians, were tolerated this time only with respect to New York” (HGS 6/348).
Promenading into history’s lanes one wonders if the writers of “Dialectic of Enlightenment” were not privy to the massacres of Sabra & Shatila, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians especially the Lydda Death March, when more than fifty- five thousand native Palestinians were pushed to Ramallah to die with exhaustion, having so much in common with the “Trail of the Tears” in the US history or the Holocaust itself. Before 1947-48 Jaffa was known as the “bride of the Sea”. “A cosmopolitan hub boasting over a dozen newspapers and magazines, a bustling port, renowned schools and hospitals, and a roaring citrus export industry,” Max Blumenthal writes. “Arabs from Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt flocked to Jaffa to toil in the port, build wooden crates for oranges, and join crews on fishing trawlers. The Palestinian entrepreneurs who oversaw the port’s operations took pride in their position of economic pre-eminence in the Arab world”. Before Jaffa was destroyed by the Zionist forces, Ben Gurion said, “When Jaffa falls into hell, I will not be among the mourners”.
Unfortunately, the hell continues to fall on the Palestinians with no respite. Gaza has become an inferno another Dresden, where the Allied forces had annihilated tens and thousands of German citizens only to gratify their libidinal sadism. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the victims of Bengal’s famine were a few other examples where, unlike blonde, fair-skinned Ukrainians, the subjects were ugly Asians, the children of a lesser god.
The genocide perpetrated by the Israeli state has surpassed the horrors of any holocaust conducted anywhere in the world. Nazis did not bomb the Jews into oblivion. They followed the hideous law of productivity. Those useful to the productive process lived others were left to die. Marx has already told us “To be led with success, the industrial struggle demands large armies they can concentrate at one point and decimate copiously”. However, as long as they lived, they had to produce surplus value for their jailors.
The people of Palestine whose country has been stolen and given to those who in the past suffered a capitalist holocaust to ensure the realization of profit for the dominant capitalist states have already been thrown out of the productive process. Akin to Auschwitz they have been concentrated into a twenty-five miles strip and left to die. But human is resistant and finds a reason to struggle against oppression even with his bare hands. Akin to the Zionist leadership that colluded with the German bourgeoisie the handpicked West Bank bourgeoisie has also sold out its people, but the people of Gaza are refusing to be escorted to the death chambers as the victims of Auschwitz did.
The overproduction and lack of realization of capital is one of the causes behind the indifferent callousness of the US and the West. They are doing no differently from what they did to the Jews during the holocaust. Lord Moyne turned his back to Joel Brand, and so did the US. The military-industrial complex and Wall Street make their fortunes when the empire inflicts war on its enemies. A part of the profit goes to elect the next president of the US.
(To Be Continued)
The writer is an Australian-based academic and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com
Recurring Nightmares – I
17
0
09.11.2023
Poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric because no catharsis could be applied to Auschwitz. However, philosophy, for Adorno, lives on because the moment of its realization is missed. The conclusion refutes Hegel’s claim of fate being the arbiter of humankind’s sufferings while laying emphasis on Marx’s lamentation about the infatuations of the philosophers with the interpretation of the world rather than changing it through their actions.
For the Frankfurt Institute, the quote was taken out of context, yet Adorno’s nihilism sounds strange. Auschwitz was certainly one of the biggest guilts of human civilization, but not the only one of its kind. The Western civilization becoming hideous after Auschwitz is an understatement, if not an outright falsification. It decimated the native population everywhere from the US to Oceania to Africa to Indochina, not only during primitive accumulation but later during the realization of capital.
Even when Auschwitz was happening the French were brutally decimating the Algerians. Incidentally, it was the same period when the collaboration – a Devil’s Game as described by Robert Dreyfuss – between the Zionists and the Nazis had reached its peak. “Hitler will be forgotten in a few years,” Emil Ludwig, a Zionist biographer wrote, “but he will have a beautiful monument in Palestine, the coming of Nazis was a welcome thing” (Brenner).
Akin to the Zionist leadership that colluded with the German bourgeoisie, the handpicked West Bank bourgeoisie has also sold out its people.
It would be naïve to think that Adorno wasn’t privy to........
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