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The Sanction of the Victim
The “sanction of the victim” is the willingness of the good to suffer at the hands of the evil, to accept the role of sacrificial victim for the “sin” of creating values.
Leonard Peikoff,
The Philosophy of Objectivism lecture series, Lecture 8
Then I saw what was wrong with the world, I saw what destroyed men and nations, and where the battle for life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality—and that my sanction was its only power. I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it. Just as the parasites around me were proclaiming their helpless dependence on my mind and were expecting me voluntarily to accept a slavery they had no power to enforce, just as they were counting on my self-immolation to provide them with the means of their plan—so throughout the world and throughout men’s history, in every version and form, from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collectivized countries, it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and for their own values—the impotence of death. I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win—and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was “No.”
Galt’s Speech,
For the New Intellectual, 165
Every kind of ethnic group is enormously sensitive to any slight. If one made a derogatory remark about the Kurds of Iran, dozens of voices would leap to their defense. But no one speaks out for businessmen, when they are attacked and insulted by everyone as a matter of routine. What causes this overwhelming injustice? The businessmen’s own policies: their betrayal of their own values, their appeasement of enemies, their compromises—all of which add up to an air of moral cowardice. Add to it the fact that businessmen are creating and supporting their own destroyers.
The sources and centers of today’s philosophical corruption are the universities . . . It is the businessmen’s money that supports American universities—not merely in the form of taxes and government handouts, but much worse: in the form of voluntary, private contributions, donations, endowments, etc. In preparation for this lecture, I tried to do some research on the nature and amounts of such contributions. I had to give it up: it is too complex and too vast a field for the efforts of one person. To untangle it now would require a major research project and, probably, years of work. All I can say is only that millions and millions and millions of dollars are being donated to universities by big business enterprises every year, and that the donors have no idea of what their money is being spent on or whom it is supporting. What is certain is only the fact that some of the worst anti-business, anti-capitalism propaganda has been financed by businessmen in such projects.
Money is a great power—because, in a free or even a semi-free society, it is a frozen form of productive energy. And, therefore, the spending of money is a grave responsibility. Contrary to the altruists and the advocates of the so-called “academic freedom,” it is a moral crime to give money to support ideas with which you disagree; it means: ideas which you consider wrong, false, evil. It is a moral crime to give money to support your own destroyers. Yet that is what businessmen are doing with such reckless irresponsibility.
“The Sanction of the Victims,”
The Voice of Reason, 153
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The End of Critical Thinking Could Destroy Israel
The game the Biden regime is playing about the Israel-Hamas war is SO obvious. Only in an era where critical thinking has almost become extinct could anything like this be happening.
On the surface, the Bidenistas get to have it both ways. “We support and stand by Israel,” they say to the news media, none of whom will ask the Bidenistas why they’re still advancing billions of aid to Iran (the exact same as advancing billions to Hamas).
That way, they appease their anti-Jewish wing of the party while still leading inattentive Jewish Democrats into thinking that they’re as pro-Israel as America has always been. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth, and it’s easily provable by the Bidenistas’ own actions. They count on people not paying attention; and it seems to work! That fact is almost as horrible as the atrocities taking place against the Jews in Israel at this moment. Because without this inattentiveness, Israel would perhaps already have won the war.
If anyone other than Netanyahu were in charge, I would consider Israel relegated to the ash heap of history. However, Netanyahu has shown the moral courage in the past to stand on principle. The only principle the Americans offer — under our viciously anti-Israel, anti-freedom occupation government — is certain defeat, while pretending it’s not a defeat at all.
In its own way, this is even more sickening than the Nazi Germany era. At least the Nazis ultimately lost. And at least America was on the side of the good guys, not the bad guys.
Hamas and Iran face only one opponent: Israel itself.
If Israel prevails, it will be 100 percent Israel’s doing. And it will be in spite of America, not because of it.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
Why the Woke Support Hamas
October 14, 2023
In the wake of the barbaric attack on Israel, many Americans have been shocked, angered, and disgusted to see woke organizations express anything other than condemnation for Hamas. On campuses and in our communities, students and organizations like Black Lives Matter have expressed support for the butchers of Jews. Meanwhile, all too many campus leaders, formerly so quick to condemn even the hint of racism, can barely muster even weak condemnation of such savagery. Many Americans find themselves shaking their heads in dismay.
Where does this blindness come from? Why are so many people who think of themselves as crusaders for justice so misguided?
It is a complicated story. But one key part of that story is the way that civil rights, which began as a cause, became an ideology. Eventually that ideology metastasized into “anti-racism,” a radical legal doctrine that scholar John McWhorter suggests is nothing less than a secular “religion.” The once-noble cause of civil rights changed. No longer merely about ending specific acts of discrimination in voting, employment, and public accommodations, it became a crusade to rectify the wrongs of slavery, Jim Crow, and the lingering legacy of institutional racism. In the view of 21st century progressives this entailed transforming America and the world. It is a reminder that even good things if done in the wrong way, or carried to excess, can turn bad.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act makes it illegal to discriminate against someone due to their “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” In subsequent decades we have added more categories, notably sexuality, disability, and gender identity. Those categories are “protected classes” in law. But it didn’t take long for the legal category to be transformed into a moral category. Certain people were regarded as having special protections. In the decades since 1964 we have created an ever-expanding and ever more influential bureaucracy of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) workers dedicated to this task.
But there is a problem, especially as the number of protected classes grows, and as the number of non-white Americans grows. (When the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed, whites were roughly 88% of the population. They are roughly 60% today.) What to do when a member of one protected class mistreats or discriminates against another? To cite one infamous example, early civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael said that “the only position for women in the SNCC [Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee] is prone.” So Carmichael was both a fighter against segregation and a sexist pig.
When a member of one protected class discriminates against another or endorses bigotry against another, it threatens to undermine the larger framework according to which “oppressors” are always, essentially, Bull Connor. It would undermine the DEI approach to civil rights law enforcement that focuses upon cases of individual discrimination rather than upon the large push to transform racial power disparities. That’s why the civil rights ideology seized upon the idea of “intersectionality” – the recognition that a given person might be oppressed from more than one angle (African American, Asian, Hispanic, female, lesbian, trans, etc.). In any given situation who is to be protected? Presumably, it’s the person with the most intersectional points, as if that’s a rational way to organize a society – or could ever be an objective scale. Moreover, the woke DEI has fostered doctrine that assumes all protected classes are on the same side of history, ignoring the tensions beneath the surface.
Earlier this year progressives were shocked when the Muslim majority city council of Hamtramck, Michigan banned the display of Pride flags on city property. That one protected class might not support another doesn’t compute from the woke perspective. Yet, given mainstream Muslim doctrine regarding sexuality, no one should be surprised. In other words, woke progressives support Muslims not because they are Muslim, but because they have assigned to them the role of the “oppressed.” Ending their oppression is the “right side” of history. They were apparently surprised to find that history is complicated.
Hence, turning to the Hamas slaughter of Jews in Israel, the idea that Palestinians can be moral monsters is in and of itself an idea at war with the woke view of progress. The reason Jews ceased to be treated as minorities – that is to say, as people who can be on the wrong side of discrimination and oppression – is because Jews are doing so well in the post-Holocaust world. (A parallel process is happening to Asian Americans today.) As the Palestinians check off more oppression boxes than Jews, it must be the case that Hamas, and the people who voted them into power, cannot be responsible for crimes against humanity, notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary.
The woke movement’s larger hope is to transform America, and the world, fundamentally. The historical record is a sad one, full of barbarism, tragedy, and savagery. One can hardly blame people for wishing the future might be less bloody than the past. But if the tragic side of human life is due to the inevitable contradictions in the human condition, such idealism always tends to cross over into misanthropy. There is a deep moral lesson in the story of Satan being a fallen angel. If moral calculations will always be complex, and if many important political decisions will always be tragic (justice for one entailing injustice for another), the historical record is likely to remain in the future as it was in the past. From the perspective of an outsider looking at the history of the Middle East, both Jews and Muslims have a claim to Jerusalem (as do Christians). But from the perspective of each, any solution that is truly satisfactory to the one will inevitably seem like surrender to many in the other group. In time, almost inevitably, any compromise will break down, perhaps violently. Such is the tragic dimension of politics.
In other words, todays wokesters combine the hatred of racial discrimination with a radical desire for a utopian future. And Jews are in the way of that project. That is hardly a novel turn in history. Hitler called the Holocaust the “Final Solution.” It was, more exactly, “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Like today’s progressives, Hitler had hope for a better future: “I believe in a conclusive understanding among peoples which will come sooner or later. There is no point in bringing about co-operation among nations, based upon permanent understanding, until this Jewish fission-fungus of peoples has been removed.” Karl Marx said something similar. In his essay on “The Jewish Question,” Marx said that progress would not take place until Jews stopped being Jews. The Hamas Charter expresses a similar version of the Muslim apocalypse. All would be peace, plenty, and harmony on earth were it not for those meddling Yids.
To allow religious and ethnic diversity is to allow a world in which tragic divisions and choices remain fundamental to politics, with the terrible consequences they necessarily entail. To recognize the necessity of a Jewish Israel is to reject comprehensive progress through merely human (as opposed to divine) means. Rather than admit that, many American progressives choose to shoot the messenger, or, as in this case, to back those who will.
Richard Samuelson is an American historian who is an associate professor of government at Hillsdale College, Washington, D.C., campus.
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Netanyahu is Finished
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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, ISRAEL / PALESTINE, POLITICS, RELIGION AND FAITH
‘Netanyahu is finished’
The Bibi doctrine—his belief that he could control Hamas—compromised Israeli security and has now begat a bloody war.
Decades ago I spent three years writing The Samson Option (1991), an exposé of the unstated policy of American presidents going back to Dwight Eisenhower to look the other way as Israel began the process of building an atomic bomb. The right or wrong for Israel, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, was not the point of the book. My point was that what America was doing was known throughout the Third World, as it was then called, and our duplicity made our worries about the spread of nuclear weapons another example of American hypocrisy. Since then others have undertaken far more comprehensive studies, as some of the most highly classified Israeli and US documents have become public.
I chose not to go to Israel to do my research in fear of running afoul of Israeli national security law. But I found Israelis living abroad who had worked on the secret project and were willing to talk to me once I indicated I had information from American intelligence files. Those who worked on such highly classified materials have remained loyal to Israel, and a few of them became lifelong friends of mine. They have also remained in close touch with former colleagues who stayed in Israel.
This is an account of the past week’s horrific events in Israel, as seen by a veteran of Israel’s national security apparatus with inside knowledge of recent happenings.
The most important thing I needed to understand, the Israeli insider told me, is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is finished. He is a walking dead man. He will stay in office only until the shooting stops . . . maybe another month or two.” He served as prime minister from 1996 until 1999 and again, as leader of the right-wing Likud Party, from 2009 to 2021, returning for a third stint in late 2022. “Bibi was always opposed to the 1993 Oslo Accords,” the insider said, which initially gave the Palestinian Authority nominal control over both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When he returned to office in 2009, the insider said, “Bibi chose to support Hamas” as an alternative to the Palestinian Authority, “and gave them money and established them in Gaza.”
An arrangement was made with Qatar, which began sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the Hamas leadership with Israeli approval. The insider told me that “Bibi was convinced that he would have more control over Hamas with the Qatari money—let them occasionally fire rockets into southern Israel and have access to jobs inside Israel—than he would with the Palestinian Authority. He took that risk.
“What happened this week,” the insider said, “was a result of the Bibi doctrine that you could create a Frankenstein and have control over it.” The attack by Hamas was a direct result of a decision Bibi made, over the protest of local military commanders, “to allow a group of Orthodox settlers to celebrate Sukkot in the West Bank.” Sukkot is an annual fall holiday that commemorates the ancestral journey of Jews into the depths of the desert. It is a weeklong festival that is observed by building an outdoor temporary structure known as a sukkah in which all could share the food that their predecessors ate and viscerally connect to the harvest season.
The request came at a time of extreme tension over another West Bank incident in which Jewish settlers, according to the Associated Press, “rampaged through a flashpoint town” on October 6 and killed a 19-year-old Arab male. The youth’s death, the AP report added, “marked the latest in a surge in Israeli-Palestinian fighting that so far has killed nearly 200 Palestinians this year—the highest yearly death toll in about two decades.”
The Sukkot celebration, held near a Palestinian village known in Hebrew as Haware, would need extraordinary protection, given the tension over the latest violence, and the local Israeli military authorities, with the approval of Netanyahu, ordered two of the three Army battalions, each with about 800 soldiers, that protected the border with Gaza to shift their focus to the Sukkot festival.
“That left only eight hundred soldiers,” the insider told me, “to be responsible for guarding the 51-kilometre border between the Gaza Strip and southern Israel. That meant the Israeli citizens in the south were left without an Israeli military presence for ten to twelve hours. They were left to fend for themselves. And that is why Bibi is finished. May take a few months, but he is over.”
The insider called the attack in southern Israel “the great military failure in Israeli history” and pointed out that “only soldiers were killed in the ’73 war”—the surprise attack on Yom Kippur in which Israel was briefly overrun by Egyptian and Syrian troops. “Last Saturday twenty-two settlements in the south were under control of Hamas for hours, and they went house to house slaughtering women and children.”
There will be a military response, the insider said, noting that 360,000 reservists have been called up. “There is a big debate going on about strategy. The Israeli Air Force and Navy special forces are ready to go, but Bibi and the military leadership have always favored the high-tech services. The regular army has been used primarily as security guards in the West Bank. . . . The reality is that the ground forces are not trained for combat. Don’t misunderstand—there is confidence in the spirit of the troops but not in their ability to succeed in the ‘special situation’ that the soldiers would be facing in a ground assault” in the ruins of heavily bombed Gaza City.
The reservists are now undergoing crash training and a decision of what to do may come by the end of this week, the insider said. Meanwhile, the current bombing of civilian targets—apartment buildings, hospitals, and mosques—no longer includes a token civilian safeguard. In prior attacks in Gaza City, he said, the Israeli Air Force often would drop a small bomb on the roof of a civilian facility to be targeted—it was called “a knock on the roof”—that would theoretically alert noncombatants to flee the building. That is not happening in the current round-the-clock bombing raids.
As for a ground attack, the insider told me that there is a brutal alternative under consideration that could be described as the Leningrad approach, referring to the famed German effort to starve out the city now known as St. Petersburg during World War II. The Nazi siege lasted nearly 900 days and the death toll was at least 800,000 and possibly many more. It is known that the Hamas leadership and much of its manpower “live underground,” and Israel’s goal is to destroy as much of that manpower “without attempting a traditional house-to-house attack.”
The insider added that some Israelis were “made anxious” by the initial statements from world leaders in Germany, France, and England who avowed, in one case through an aide, their total support for an immediate response but added that it should be guided by the rule of law. President Biden reinforced that point in an unscheduled appearance at a White House conference of Jewish leaders Wednesday by pointedly saying that he had recently told Netanyahu: “it is really important that Israel, with all the anger and frustration and just—I don’t know how to explain it—that exists is that they operate by the rules of war—the rules of war. And there are rules of war.”
The option now under consideration, the Israeli insider told me, is to continue the isolation of Gaza City in terms of power supply and the delivery of food and other vital goods. “Hamas now only has a two- or three-day supply of purified water and that, along with a lack of food,” I was told, “may be enough to flush all the Hamas out.” At some point, he said, Israel may be able to negotiate the release of some prisoners—women and children—in return for food and water.
“The big debate today,” he said, “is whether to starve Hamas out or kill as many as 100,000 people in Gaza. One Israeli assumption is that Hamas, which has received as much as $1.6 billion from Qatar since 2014, wants to be seen as a sovereign that takes care of its people. He went on: “Now that President Biden says they are a terrorist state, Hamas may have reason to want to be seen as less hostile and there might be a chance for calm and rational discussion about prisoners—and a release of some of its Israeli hostages, beginning with women and children.” The other prisoners will be treated like prisoners of war, he said, and their release could be negotiated, as has happened in the past.
But, the insider added, “the more we all see” of Hamas brutality on TV and “the more Hamas is seen as another ISIS, time gets short.”
The reality, he said, is that Hamas is not rational and is incapable of any negotiations, and Qatar will not intervene. And, barring some international or third-party intervention, there may be a general ground invasion with untold deaths to all sides and to all prisoners.
The decision to invade in full force is Israel’s, and it has not yet been made.
First published by SEYMOUR HERSH October 12, 2023
SEYMOUR HERSH
Seymour Hersh is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
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