That Sound, Bob, Is All The Hysterical Shrieking

It’s been two weeks since my last post (took a break, saw a friend, did some other bits), and I mean really, where to begin?

Objective reality continues to be inverted and denied, black is white, up is down, war is peace, and while they’re sending us insane with this bollocks we’re all boiling to death across two continents.

I’m writing this in my boxer shorts sitting about 3 inches from a fan as my dogs pant at me pleadingly as the temperature nudges close to 40 degrees Celsius (or 104F in Yankie units). I tell them I’m sorry, I can’t do anything, this is just the world that has been created. It predates me. Now it predates on us all. The cats meanwhile appear to luxuriate, one with paws akimbo on his back, the other stretched out maximally like a thing on a torture rack but it looks nice. Gloating bastards aren’t they, cats. One day I might tell you more about how I ended up here, hot boxing in a tiny house with four furry beasts, and where here is, exactly. Or roughly. But for now, I drip sweat. This is mine and your regularly scheduled reminder that eco breakdown is the reality which envelopes us and is, quite literally, redefining and reshaping our world.

And where it isn’t even that hot they’re all still melting down.

In the UK, a musician called Bob Vylan has conjured conservative fears by saying hurty words about a Nazi army. Vylan, as I’m sure you’ve seen, led thousands of people to chant ‘death, death to the IDF’ during his Glastonbury Festival set which, apparently, is antisemitic because all Jews are represented by an army committing a genocide. Which seems quite…..antisemitic? In the US, Zohran ‘globalise the intifada’ Mamdani’s victory in the New York mayoral primary has conjured Republican fears of an American caliphate from the Potomac to the Pacific. Chant that one, if you dare.

Both Vylan and Mamdani have triggered fully fledged scandals that have drawn in the British and American political and media class. It’s all completely absurd, but expected. Why? Because the victory of the right, in both the US and the UK, has been so utterly and completely total, over the last decade especially, that any visible and vocal opposition to their racist, insular, nasty, supremacist agenda is seen as a mortal stain on the fabric of the nations. A fabric always defined by the right, of course. I think this goes particularly for the UK, where organised left politics is deader than dead right now. At least Mamdani has a chance to wield some power. Bob Vylan is a rapper. Which, in the joyful reaction to his statement of defiance, tells you how starved of political power the British left is right now. (Saying that, culture is an important arena of political conflict, so this is certainly a good and necessary fight to have).

There’s also a couple of things that haven’t been much said but which are obviously true about both of these episodes. Firstly, that the vein-popping moral outrage over some words is entirely confected by racists who want Muslims to be mass murdered quietly. Supporters of Israel don’t just want their team to be able to do a genocide, they want them to be able to do a genocide with no opposition. Any opposition is interpreted, sometimes explicitly but often implicitly, through the racist ‘clash of civilisations’ narrative which essentially goes: everyone is Gaza is a terrorist and they represent all Muslims and all Muslims would rape and murder your (white) mum if they had the chance. So killing them is good and ergo there can be no such thing as genocide because that implies innocence and all the Muslims deserve it and Israel is protecting Euro-American whites by killing everyone in Gaza and you hate whites if you call it genocide.

Secondly, and I feel like we've been skirting around it for a while, but the only reality in which 'death to the IDF' and similar criticisms of Israel’s actions can possibly be considered antisemitic, (as both the cowardly Glastonbury festival organisers and the BBC have branded Vylan) is if we've reached the point where institutional power has decided it’s ok for Jews to commit genocide because they're Jews.

And, indeed, it seems that is where we're at.

You can’t say the Israel lobby hasn’t done an amazing job of capturing our politics and our media. Captured to the point of genocide denial. This, no doubt, is top work and big money. And it strikes me as particularly messed up and dangerous when an event birthed in anti-war counter culturalism joins a far right chorus condemning a musician for calling out an army that has been accused of genocide by literally every prominent genocide expert in the world.

But the good news is that all the hysterical shrieking over Vylan and Mamdani show us that Euro-American support for genocidal Zionism is now beginning to tear the west apart, and this is a necessary reckoning. They wouldn’t be shrieking if they were winning! (Of course one way to have avoided all of this would be for Israel not to have done a genocide, but no one ever seems to mention that as an option). But honestly, a genocide was the inevitable escalatory transition for an apartheid state. The reckoning that’s now here over Israel was always coming.

Can Mamdani help with the reckoning? Maybe. I’ve seen the discourse on him from the communists and the anarchists and while yes, he’s still the compromised product of liberal democracy, I think on balance we should still give it a go when we can sneak a candidate through but recognise the major limitations and not let it stop the more important work that will always need to be done anyway.

And while Bob Vylan made the headlines, another musician at Glastonbury told an uncomfortable truth about what that work looks like. Seun Kuti, the son of Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti, said that as great as it is that Europeans and Americans want to free Palestine, first we have to free ourselves. From racism, fascism, imperialism and colonialism. He’s not wrong. The situation in Gaza and the West Bank is merely an outgrowth of western isms and ideologies that have long dominated our politics and our societies. Palestine can’t be free, logically, until these dominant isms and political structures that support Israel in doing what it does to the Palestinians are torn down.

So keep calm, keep cool, globalise the intifada, death to the IDF, and carry on.