The idea of questioning another’s “agency” is contrary to our common-sense perspective on human actions, which, aside from purely reflexive acts like pulling one’s hand out of a fire, are understood as having been mediated by one’s “conscience” or moral sense—the source of our intuition of the sacred. Of course we recognize that actions may be performed “under duress,” either by immediate threat of harm or simply by the fact of an obligation, contractual or imposed, to follow orders or obey laws. But the question of agency comes up more significantly in cases where there is no immediate coercion or threat, but where one’s circumstances are considered to be such that “one could do no other”: when my children are starving, stealing a loaf of bread, as in Les misérables.
What is curious is how the notion of acting without agency, or more precisely, without moral responsibility, is tacitly applied to such actions as those of the October 7 pogrom. Stealing the bread is a crime, but its purpose is clear: preserving the health of one’s family. Killing and raping and burning and torturing peaceful Jews, one might think, can hardly be given a similar justification. Yet it is striking, not to say paradoxical, that even if 80 or 90% of the American population was horrified by these acts, the reactions that had by far the most significant consequences were those of enthusiastic approval, as of responses to intolerable oppression whose cruelty could be measured by the very violence of the victims’ retaliation—and this is to speak of Israel’s closest ally, with the world’s second largest Jewish population.
That the victims of these acts were virtually all innocent of any prior violence of their own was immaterial; the number of those who shamelessly applauded the perpetrators suggests that for them, not only was the long-term humiliation suffered by the Palestinians far more cruel than the short-term horrors they inflicted in revenge, but it was the very violence of this revenge that proved it. In other words, the more barbaric the acts of vengeance, the less they should be judged by normal moral standards, and the more their perpetrators should be seen as deprived of agency.
I speak exclusively of the explanations of this behavior offered in the West. The Muslim world requires no such modulation, and indeed is happy to justify this behavior on its own terms with respect to enemies who are not merely oppressors but “sons of apes and pigs.” This position, at least, is wholly consistent with that of the perpetrators. But it is the Western, let us say, quasi-Christian, interpretation that is of interest here: we would never commit such acts, but we justify them, not, as do their perpetrators, as morally correct, but as all the more justified in that we cannot see them as morally correct, only as quasi-involuntary reactions to excessive suffering. In half-remembered Christian terms, these perpetrators are endangering their immortal souls, incurring lengthy stays in Purgatory, perhaps even Hellfire, for reflexively defending their honor against the humiliations inflicted by their oppressors. Who then deserves more sympathy?
Of course this analysis must remain in a penumbra and not be made explicit, which is why this way of thinking is particularly well suited to persons who, themselves incapable of carrying out acts of the sort committed on October 7, are all the more anxious to identify with the hatred they expressed. Victimary thinking has the virtue of allowing one’s identification with a victim group to marry “Christian” compassion for that group—as justified a posteriori by photographs of ruins and Hamas-supplied death statistics—with a self-righteous hatred for the oppressors fully consonant with the jihadist dehumanization of the enemies of Islam. We should note that although the first of these two attitudes is characteristic of Old Testament morality (care for widow and orphan…), the second is not; “sons of apes and pigs” is alien to the Hebrew tradition.
The new victimary form of resentment, “White Guilt,” or more generally, Wokism, that reconstructs the sacred around communities of victims, although vulgarly assimilated to Marxism, is quite far from Marx’s original conception of social morality. But as we well know, even the most deliberate implementations of Marxism have always been far from this conception. It is unfair to Marx to attribute to him the horrors of Soviet and all other communisms, even if attempts to implement his way of thinking can be said to have led inevitably to them. Chapter 32 of Das Kapital describes “capitalism” as so to speak evaporating on its own:
The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.
(https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm)
The source of our so-called Marxists’ political power is not a dream of revolution, but rather Wokism, the complex of White Guilt and its projection onto “deplorables”— which makes, for example, Taylor Swift as the icon of youthful respectability support Harris over Trump. An essential contributing factor to this respectibilization of resentment is the relative inability of the respectable bearers of non-Woke values, such as Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis, to energize the “deplorable” masses in the place of Trump—of whom my diagnosis as a tragic figure (see Chronicle 677) has never seemed to me more correct, even if his growing list of hopeful assassins hopefully fails to reach their goal.
One may indeed ask why the deserved prestige Trump acquired in 2016 as the one politically viable Republican candidate to call out what was then PC and has become Wokism required so much “baggage”—above all, the supreme reliance on his “instincts” that would prove over time dangerously inflexible. Would not a Thatcher or a Reagan—even a Bill Clinton—have had the same instinctive understanding of the danger of the victimary? What this suggests is that the epistemology of resentment has progressed to the point that there is no longer a reasonable center in American politics; in terms of both America’s interests and simple morality, respectability itself has become irrational.
But the 10/7 pogrom also poses an inevitable second question to Western civilization: could this have happened to any group other than the Jews?
Can the hatred of the Palestinians for the Jews be understood as merely the hatred of the “colonized” for the “colonizers”—even as the unique indefinite prolongation of their “refugee” status to the third generation and beyond signals the unique position of the Jewish nation in a world opinion that in this particular case is unwilling to challenge the Islamic doctrine that what has once belonged to the Waqf must never be separated from it? Is it not evident that the Hamas pogrom provoked throughout the West, on the one hand, little retrospective remorse for the centuries of similar behavior, and on the other, a great deal of sympathy from people one would not previously have suspected of Jew-hatred? Certainly none of the usual Western contingent of victimary classes have in recent memory sought to perpetrate such vengeance on their purported oppressors.
Rather, the volume and vehemence of the positive reaction to 10/7 suggests not merely that the paradigm of “White Guilt” was applied to the Palestinian “rebellion” against Israel, but that Jew-hatred was really its originary model. All those well-financed and -planned campus and big-city demonstrations were and are expressions of a latent age-old antisemitism for which Hamas’ barbarism supplied the pretext for revival.
Antisemitism is most simply defined as the hostility of the other Abrahamic religions toward their Jewish “elder brother,” whose seniority with regard to the sacred commands a respect that they experience as a humiliation—and the only truly satisfactory response to which remains Hitler’s “final solution.”
An important nuance that we might add to this description is that White Guilt, the ostentatious repentance through which the Woke display by example their contempt for the “deplorables” of their race, is denied to the Jews. For Jews, mere sorrowful admission of their sinful status—as in the “land acknowledgements” now commonly heard on university campuses—is insufficient. Rather they must demonstrate active hostility to Zionism—in the present case, support for the 10/7 “freedom fighters.” Or at the very least, lest they be accused of supporting “genocide,” Jews must declare their full support for the “two-state solution”—which we all know the Palestinians will always reject but gladly use as a pretext. This must of course be rigorously denied, so that their constant refusal of Israeli offers be taken not as a sign of obstinacy but rather of Jewish hypocrisy in providing “unsatisfactory” proposals. The Democratic Party’s support for this position, along with its unchallenged “generosity” to Iran, has endured ever since Barack Obama took control of the party in 2008.
Rather then coming to Israel’s defense in the current crisis, the vast majority of the world’s nations have been happy to side with the terrorist armies that constantly attack her with both missiles and individual acts of terror. UN resolution GA/12626, dated 18 September 2024, self-described as “a historic text demanding that Israel brings [sic] to an end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” (i.e., the entire “West Bank,” including the Old City of Jerusalem!), passed 124-14, with 43 abstentions. Of major Western nations, only the US and Hungary voted against, and most voted for the resolution, including Belgium, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Norway, Portugal, and Spain.
The UN has long been hostile to Israel, but its membership’s overall willingness to support this resolution at a time when Israel is fighting one of its most crucial battles is a sign of not just the persistence of antisemitism but its near-universalization. Thus the question of agency with which I opened this essay must be understood in a “cosmic” sense: the most intrinsically evil acts, the rape, torture, and murder of helpless victims that took place on October 7, 2023, provide evidence to the vast majority of the world’s nations that the nation whose citizens were the victims of these acts is the veritable source of the world’s evil.
I do not think it suffices to treat the persistence of Jew-hatred as mere inertia. It is clearly integral no longer merely to the Western but to the global world-view—as broadly shared by America’s allies as well as its enemies, along with the dominant faction of what is currently her ruling political party.
Thus the ingenuity with which the recent beeper-walkie-talkie explosions were organized can be seen as just one more demonstration of the sinister agency of the Jews, one that obliges us to excuse and sympathize with the crude “acting out” of the frustrated Hamas torturers and rapists. How else could we expect “normal persons” to react to evil so ingeniously implemented? Here then is a chance for the whole world to come together, capitalists and communists united in resolve to protect the martyred Palestinians from the people who have served once more as the world’s ever-renewed source of evil.
In closing, we should note that what now seems globally evident was only potentially so a generation ago, and reflect on the fact that the actualization of this potential could only have been the product of a world-historical will.
Postscript: But the news isn’t all bad. On September 24, as Biden at the UN called for peace between Israel and its enemies without taking sides, I was pleasantly surprised to read that Hillary Clinton, a figure of what we can now call the “old liberalism,” spoke out against the anti-Israel protesters at Columbia; Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer defended her Jewish Attorney General against what she characterized as Rashida Tlaib’s “antisemitic” allegations—and the Muslim mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan endorsed Donald Trump for president!