Al Mayadeen English

  • Ar
  • Es
  • x
Al Mayadeen English

Slogan

  • News
    • Politics
    • Economy
    • Sports
    • Arts&Culture
    • Health
    • Miscellaneous
    • Technology
    • Environment
  • Articles
    • Opinion
    • Analysis
    • Blog
    • Features
  • Videos
    • NewsFeed
    • Video Features
    • Explainers
    • TV
    • Digital Series
  • Infographs
  • In Pictures
  • • LIVE
News
  • Politics
  • Economy
  • Sports
  • Arts&Culture
  • Health
  • Miscellaneous
  • Technology
  • Environment
Articles
  • Opinion
  • Analysis
  • Blog
  • Features
Videos
  • NewsFeed
  • Video Features
  • Explainers
  • TV
  • Digital Series
Infographs
In Pictures
  • Africa
  • Asia
  • Asia-Pacific
  • Europe
  • Latin America
  • MENA
  • Palestine
  • US & Canada
BREAKING
Local Syriana sources: Three mortar shells were fired randomly towards the city of Sweida, and explosions were heard throughout most of the city.
Putin: I propose resuming direct negotiations with Kyiv without any preconditions.
Russian President Vladimir Putin: Russia has made numerous ceasefire initiatives, but the Ukrainian side has rejected them.
Al Mayadeen's correspondent in occupied Palestine: Martyrs and wounded in an Israeli drone strike on a tent for displaced people in Khan Younis, south of the Gaza Strip.
Local sources in Syria: The death toll in Zama, northwestern Syria, has risen to 7, including a child, according to a preliminary tally.
Local sources in Syria: Four civilians were killed and several others injured by gunfire from militants in the village of Zama in the Jableh countryside, northwestern Syria.
US President Donald Trump: I am pleased to announce that India and Pakistan have agreed to a full and immediate ceasefire.
Indian Kashmir police: Five people were killed in the Indian Jammu region in attacks launched by Pakistan this morning.
Pakistani media: Pakistani spy planes arrive in New Delhi.
United States of America: US State Department: Secretary Rubio offered America's assistance in initiating constructive talks aimed at avoiding future conflicts.

'Liquid Modernity' Cannot Embrace the Palestinian Cause

  • Alastair Crooke Alastair Crooke
  • Source: Al Mayadeen Net
  • 28 Nov 2021 14:01
  • 4 Shares
10 Min Read

Biology no longer applies. Your gender is not what you thought: It is liquid, and can (and perhaps should) be changed.

  • x
  • Which side of the Maginot Line do the countries involved take?
    Which side of the Maginot Line do the countries involved take?

People today live in what the late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called 'liquid modernity'. All the traits that were once assigned to you by your community are now being redefined by woke doctrine, according to how you look, and according to fixed categories, irrespective of your sense of your own self, your own ethics, your biological gender, your education, your human merits, and the place and ties associated with your historic belonging.

Wokeism radically challenges the system: “‘You’ have not succeeded by your own efforts or merits. You have succeeded by virtue of your visible identity alone. That identity reaches back hundreds of years and precisely rests on opportunities deliberately denied to others. Therefore any semblance of success you have had in life is illegitimate. It is not deserved. And it is right to take it from you. Wokeism is truly hostile to history, culture, and tradition. They don’t respect it – and they insist they are right. It is not up for debate."

Biology no longer applies. Your gender is not what you thought: It is liquid, and can (and perhaps should) be changed. You are ‘white’ – therefore supremacist; you are ‘white’ – therefore racist; you are élite - therefore privileged.

On the face of it, this ideology should provide a perfect vehicle for the Palestinian cause. But it hasn’t. Yes, the Progressive Caucus of the Democratic party is notably more pro-Palestinian (albeit framed within strict limits), and increasingly young American university students no longer support "Israel", as they did in the past.  And yet … and yet, nothing really changes. The Establishment continues to lavish money and arms on "Israel"; the boycott movement is de-legitimized across many states; and Team Biden is clear: He will not spend any political capital he may still have on the Palestinian cause. Token support, but nothing more.

Well, one factor is oligarchic capitalism - the Élite’s control of assets and money is both the anvil and hammer on which western narratives of political ‘reality’ are forged. They ‘beat out’ each successive ‘reality’.

Speaking in early 2020, Steve Bannon asserted that the information age makes us less curious, and less willing to consider worldviews unlike our own. Digital content intentionally is served up to us, algorithmically, so that with the ensuing cascade of like-minded content, we ‘dig-in’, rather than ‘open up’. Anyone who wants to – of course – can find alternative viewpoints online, but very few do. This meant, in Bannon’s view, that the Trump campaign, and politics generally, henceforth must be centered around mobilization politics, rather than persuasion.

Because of this trait, the notion of politics by argument or consensus is almost entirely lost. And no matter what our political or cultural perspective, there is always someone creating content tailored to suit us. This – the magnetism of like-minded content – represented the psychic ‘quirk’ that turned the tech oligarchs into billionaires (Twitter, Facebook, Tik Tok, etc.).  

At the same time, the Democrats reinvented their erstwhile ‘blue-collar’ constituency, as a party of the Liberal, creative, professional-managerial class: The party of the credentialed meritocracy; the party, above all, of the winners.  So, yes, as a matter of course, the Democrats have been taught to be openly hostile to the non-Metro 'Bobo' (Bohemian Bourgeoisie) half of America: taught to see them as - bottom line here - losers with a big ‘L’.

“The liberals, the bien-pensants (as Thomas Frank has called them) — the ‘winners’, that is — who read The New York Times and The Washington Post and listen to NPR and watch MSNBC and CNN, who went to good colleges and got all kinds of professional credentials, are certainly well-informed enough to know that the future is all about global capitalism. And they know that, if they play by the rules, global capitalism has a place for them. Furthermore, they know (or could easily figure it out), that global capitalism does not have a place for life’s losers. But that’s just tough shit, isn’t it?”   

Much of that coastal Metro-Élite is highly sympathetic to the Zionist narrative and sees Palestinians as ‘losers’, who if they cannot reconcile to the fact of Israeli decisive power, should get out of the way.

On the other side of the divide, the significance of the Tech Boom was different. It was more than just the Metro-Class suddenly becoming hugely wealthy. Rather, it was becoming obvious that persuasion and argument were not significant in shifting the allegiance of the marginal voter. 

But what could shift it (this was Bannon’s key insight) was not to read meta-data for its trends (as advertisers did), but rather, to invert the whole process: To read up from the stratified data, to craft specially-conceived, like-minded messaging to readers that would trigger (i.e. ‘nudge’) an unconscious psychic response -- one that potentially could be led in a particular political orientation.

This politics of crafted, credentialed meme-politics was here to stay – and now it is ‘everywhere’. It has crossed the divide. And the point here is that the mechanics of meme-mobilization is being projected abroad -- into American ‘foreign policy’ (so-called) too.

Related News

Trump 2.0: One hundred days of institutionalizing injustice

Star power or superpower? When politics becomes a reality show

Just as in the domestic arena, where the notion of politics by suasion is being lost, so the notion of foreign policy managed through argument, or diplomacy, is being lost too.

The foreign policy then becomes less about geo-strategy, but rather, about ‘big issues’ such as China, Russia, or Iran, that are given an emotional ‘charge’ to mobilize certain ‘troops’ in this US domestic cultural war, so as to ‘nudge’ domestic American psyches (and those of their allies) to be mobilized behind some issue (such as more protectionism for business against Chinese competition), or alternatively, imagined darkly – in order to delegitimize an opposition or to justify failures. 

This is a highly risky game, for it forces a resistance stance on those targeted states – whether they seek it, or not. It underlines that politics is no more about considered strategy: It is about being willing for the US to lose strategically (even militarily), in order to win politically. This is to say gaining an ephemeral win of having prompted a favorable unconscious psychic response amongst American voters. 

This shift to seeing foreign states in this psychic-propagandist mode has forced targeted states to respond. Russia, China, Iran are but ‘images’ prized mainly for their potential for being loaded with ‘nudge’ emotional charge in this western cultural war, of which these states are no part. The result is that they become antagonists to the American presumption to define global ‘rules of the road’ for all to adhere to. They stand jointly, steadfast, and warn against trespass beyond their explicit ‘red lines’. This, they have done. 

But will the US practitioners of meme-politics absorb and comprehend that this stance by Russia-China - in riposte - is not some same-ilk counter-mobilization and that ‘red lines’ may be ‘red lines’… literally?

Where does this leave the Palestinians? When this political ‘New Normal’ was unveiled, millions of people were already living a reality in which facts no longer mattered at all; where things that never happened officially, happened. And other things that obviously happened never happened: not officially, that is. Or, were “far-right extremist conspiracy theories,” “fake news,” or “disinformation,” or whatever, despite the fact that people knew that they weren’t.

Palestinians then, brandishing the daily facts of their occupation, face a reality in which European and US élites are heading in the opposite direction to epistemological purity – and well-founded argument. That is, the new normal is about generating a lot of contradictory realities, not just contradictory ideologies, but actual mutually-exclusive realities, which could not possibly simultaneously exist … which are intended to bemuse people out. 

This then becomes the mental ‘blank page’ on which the deliberately fluid realities of cosmopolitan gender, and self-defining identities, might be written. The Oligarchic Elect now seek to ‘unvalue’ all remaining national values, untether national cohesion -- for their logical objective is not to author a new ideology (it doesn’t need that), but rather to impose a single global, mercantilist order through first, the monetization of every possible ‘thing’, and then its ‘capitalization’ into fresh financial ‘assets’.

Of course, every Re-set needs its ‘narrative’. But the point here, of narrative - any Establishment narrative - is to draw a Maginot line, a defensive ideological boundary, between ‘the truth’ as defined by the ruling classes, and with that of any other ‘truth’ that contradicts their narrative. 

The credentialed ‘managerial classes’ (such as the one run by Brussels), know that their success is in large part made possible by their enthusiasm for official narratives. And their collective hope is that the correct ‘narrative’ provides them with an enduring safe space. On one side of the Maginot Line then, is ‘normal’ society, gainful employment, career advancement, and all the other considerable benefits of cooperating with the ruling classes. Beyond the Maginot Line are disadvantage, anxiety, social and professional stigmatization, and various other forms of suffering. 

“Which side of the wall do you want to be on? Every day, in countless ways, each of us is asked and has to answer this question. Conform, and there’s a place for you inside. Refuse, and … well, good luck out there.” 

Nevertheless, a globalist world, for the few who aspire to grow immensely wealthy in it, is still understood to be a veritable cornucopia of uncountable material satisfactions -- a magic carpet they would be loath to abandon.

Many contemporary European liberals clearly are well-intentioned in their desire to see social justice for Palestinians. But ultimately, it is of the nature of cultural-meme war that ultimately the content to cultural struggle becomes little more than a rhetorical shell, lacking sincerity at its core, and which serves only as a decoration to a ‘higher order’ project -- the preservation by the élites of global ‘rules of the road’, framed around US interests.  

"Israel" is projecting the narrative of a nation-state of ‘start-ups’, actively pursuing Davos’ Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and Re-Set. The Palestinian Authority’s narrative is as a victim, which to the Oligarchic Elect sounds a lot like losers, with a capital ‘L’. Sad and unjust. 

The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
  • US President Donald Trump
  • Palestine
  • Russia
  • Israel
  • US
  • US President Joe Biden
  • President Joe Biden
  • Trump
  • China
  • Biden
  • The Biden Administration
  • Biden's administration
  • Joe Biden
  • Donald Trump
  • Iran
Alastair Crooke

Alastair Crooke

Director of Conflicts Forum; Former Senior British Diplomat; Author.

Most Read

All
Throughout Operation Prosperity Guardian, current and former US military and intelligence officials expressed disquiet at the enormous “cost offset” involved in battling Ansar Allah. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Zeinab El-Hajj)

Ansar Allah triumphant: US facing Red Sea defeat again

  • Opinion
  • 3 May 2025
While Salams is intended to be for Muslims seeking marriage, the other companies owned by Match Group are seen as encouraging casual relationships like OK Cupid and Tinder. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Zeinab el-Hajj)

Selling Muslim marriage app Salams to the Zionist pornography complex

  • Opinion
  • 27 Apr 2025
"Israel" appears to be the only place in the world where there are actual demonstrations defending rapists as national heroes precisely because of their crimes. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Batoul Chamas)

'Israeli pride' - Celebrating rape in the Zionist entity

  • Opinion
  • 4 May 2025
Why the Israelis cannot win in Gaza or Yemen

Why the Israelis cannot win in Gaza or Yemen

  • Opinion
  • 7 May 2025

Coverage

All
The Ummah's Martyrs

More from this writer

All
The Nakedness of EU ‘Geo-political’ Ambitions Will Be Revealed - As the Ukraine War Melts Away

The Nakedness of EU ‘Geo-political’ Ambitions Will Be Revealed - As the Ukraine War Melts Away

The Slow-Motion Advance to the Edge of the Abyss

The Slow-Motion Advance to the Edge of the Abyss

Already, "Israel" has the White House committed to support an Israeli military operation against Hezbollah. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Zeinab El-Hajj)

Does 'Israel' want war?

The European Mutiny: The Consequences are Just Beginning

The European Mutiny: The Consequences are Just Beginning

Al Mayadeen English

Al Mayadeen is an Arab Independent Media Satellite Channel.

All Rights Reserved

  • x
  • Privacy Policy
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Authors
Android
iOS