Anthony McIntyre's Blog, page 1143
May 20, 2018
The Dreadful Hell Of The Sadistic Allah
Jeff Moore writing for Atheist Republic looks at an Islamic view of Hell.
“Then I saw the (Hell) Fire, and I have never before, seen such a horrible sight as that, and I saw that the majority of its dwellers were women.” –Muhammad
Stupidity, barbarism, and craziness are so prevalent in today’s major religions that a little bit of study of the religions with an open mind would help us to realize that they are manmade and an absolute sham. One of the crazy ideas that religions invented is the idea of heaven and Hell. While they seem like some of the best incentives to keep people moral, they actually are not even any proper incentive. Moreover, if we need the belief of heaven and Hell to be good to others then our morality should be questionable. However, one big question I want to answer before I start to describe the main topic is: Is the idea of Hell scientifically accurate? The simple answer is: the idea of Hell is as unscientific as much it is inhumane.
Hell is an unscientific idea
It is not possible for a human being to stay in Hell forever because fire cannot continue to burn a human body forever as the body will eventually become nothing. That is because our bodies only gives a finite amount of energy which makes it impossible to burn for eternity. But if a theist presents a counter-argument against that by saying, “In Hell, Allah or God will switch off the laws of nature and that makes describing Hellfire impossible”, that will be a very weak argument. The theist will also commit a red-herring fallacy because instead of answering the argument that was presented, the counter-argument will distract one from the reality or actual argument and demand that we imagine something that is not possible (we cannot imagine something where there is no law of nature).
Moreover, in the “holy” scriptures, where is it said that “the fire does not consume flesh in Hell” or “only soul exists in Hell”? Nowhere, in the books, it is said that the laws and theories of nature will not work in Hell. Rather we find from the scriptures like the Quran that God is talking about fire, not smokeless fire, God is talking about skin, shoulder, bones, flesh etc. and a mere soul does not have any of that. To me, Hell and its factors completely sound natural. Yet, if we had to take the fallacious arguments that the theists assert to make the idea of Hell immune from scientific scrutiny as the truth then also those arguments could be questioned scientifically.
For example, if the fire of Hell is smokeless and that only burns but does not consume anything then there will be no pain under that fire. We feel pain only when the pain receptors send a signal to our brain through nerve fibers to alert us to our cells being destroyed. So if the fire only burns and does not consume flesh that means no cells are destroyed and so there is no pain! Again, if there is no flesh in Hell and only the soul exists (by the way, what is the soul and who proved that scientifically?), there will be no body, no cells, no pain receptors, no spinal cord, no nerve fiber and hence, again, no pain. It is really foolish to believe something as an ultimate truth which is both scientifically inexplicable and inhumane.
Islamic Hell
Almost every major religion has the idea of Hell and among them, I found the idea of Islamic Hell as the most awkward, dangerous, and stupid one. I also think that it is not apropos at all to inculcate this idea of Islamic Hell into the mind of the little children. Once you finish reading this article with an open mind, you will also completely agree with me. The Hell that Allah has created for the non-Muslims is not any mere Hell with fire but so dangerous and horrifying that it would literally make anybody to cringe and doubt what kind of deity Allah is. In the Quran and Hadiths, Allah (in the Hadiths, Muhammad) over and over and over again threatened non-Muslims and even sometimes Muslims by gruesome Islamic Hell. It is not referred to as any spiritual punishment of Allah in the Quran and Hadiths. Rather the Quran and Hadiths explicitly describe Hell’s characteristics and constituents which makes it impossible to be only a spiritual punishment. In the Quran, Hell is described as having the ability to inhale and talk.
“When they are cast therein, they will hear the (terrible) drawing in of its breath even as it blazes forth,” (Quran 67:7)
One Day We will ask Hell, "Art thou filled to the full?" It will say, "Are there any more (to come)?" (Quran 50:30)
So, the Islamic Hell is made as a hungry fire-giant by Allah. According to a Hadith, Hell is so deep that if a stone were thrown, it would take 70 years for that stone to reach the bottom. In another Hadith, Muhammad said that the fire is blacker than tar. He also said that the fire of Hell is seventy times greater than the fire on earth! But why is it so? The fire on our planet is enough to torture someone forever with excruciating pain. Why then it had to be 70 times greater in intensity? Can somebody hate anybody that much? Actually, Hell is depicted in the most horrifying way possible that a 7th century Arab Bedouin could imagine. If, however, the Quran were sent in today’s time, it would promise other different types of painful punishment, e.g., punishing through severe electric shock. But, fortunately for the non-Muslims, “omniscient” Allah did not know anything about electricity 1400 years ago.
Allah created humans as a fuel of Hell
A challenge: after reading this section of this article whenever you see or hear: “Allah, the most Merciful and the most Beneficent,” you will laugh out loud. The idea of why Allah created men and jinns (a mythical creature in Islam) in the first place is going to make you see Allah completely differently. In the Quran Allah said:
Allah also said in the Quran that men are the fuel of Hell fire: “…guard yourselves against the Fire prepared for disbelievers, whose fuel is of men and stones.” (Quran 2:24)
We also read in the Quran: “And if your lord willed, all who are on the earth would have believed together.” (Quran 10:99)
Thus, from the above verses it can be inferred that Allah only created men as a fuel and to fill the fire-giant’s (Hell’s) belly. Also notice that in the last verse among the verses mentioned above, Allah said that if Allah had willed, we would have been saved from the Hellfire. But as Hell exists and we are going to be burning in Hellfire forever, that only means that Allah does not wish or want us to be saved. And also notice that Allah himself sends people astray and divide people because, again, he does not want us to be saved. Anyway, when I first read those verses I just wondered what sort of people would believe in such a deity so ardently.
Allah will punish non-Muslims in the most gruesome way possible
Now that we know that Allah has created humans as a fuel of Hell deliberately, we can now move forward to know how Allah will use the fuel in Hell.
First of all, the punishment of the sinners will be so excruciating that the “sinners” will yearn for their self-destruction and yet, Allah, “the merciful one”, will neither destroy them nor will he save them from Hell. Instead, he would keep tormenting them there forever.
Have you started to find Satan as the more compassionate one than Allah now? Quran surely sounds that way. The non-Muslim sinners will stay in Hell forever, as indicated above, and will never be exempt from the cruel punishment of Allah.
“Verily, Allah has cursed the disbelievers, and has prepared for them a flaming Fire (Hell) wherein they will abide forever: no protector will they find, nor helper”. (Quran 33:64-65)
This concept will sound more horrible and illogical to you when you will think in this way: if I don’t believe in a god or believe in many gods, because either Allah led me astray or Satan led me astray or I, as a fallible creature, made a mistake in comprehending the true nature of the universe (by the way, I am fallible because Allah made me fallible in the first place), it will not harm Allah or anyone. It is similar to, say, you are a Democrat and do not believe in a Republican government and your belief is no way harmful to anybody or anything. But you will be punished if somebody gets hurt for your ardent belief in the Democratic Party, e.g., if you killed a Republican just because she is a Republican. But would that be logical if a Republican president immured a Democrat and kept her in a prison forever just because she is a Democrat? No. Then why should it be logical in the case of God or Allah? Another analogy could be made by comparing Mr. Stephen Hawking’s life. Unfortunately, he died in the month of March and one day after his death, I saw a post on Facebook which said, “Not believed in God, now burn in Hell forever Hawking.” How despicable! A person who passed most of the time in his life by sitting in a wheelchair and teaching students about the nature of the universe, by committing no harm to anybody or anything will now burn in Hell forever just because of a mere belief! It will become more despicable to think of when you imagine a person like Mr. Hawking in an Islamic Hell. Thank goodness I am an atheist and do not have to think in this way about anybody.
Burning in Hellfire forever is not enough for Allah to torture a mere creature. In several places in the Quran, Allah vehemently announced what sort of foods and drinks the unbelievers will have in Hell and unsurprisingly those foods and drinks are the worst things possible. You would not even feed your worst enemy with those foods. Only a psychopath would feed someone with such dismaying foods and drinks which only would make one more hungry or make one choke or boil the intestines.
The foods and drinks which Allah will provide are the followings:
Filthy fluid of pus and blood:
Boiling water: "…Then will you fill your stomachs with it and drink boiling water on top of it, and you will drink boiling water on top of it, and you will drink like diseased camels…” (Quran 56:51-56)
A thorny plant: "No food will there be for them but a bitter Dhari' (a thorny plant) Which will neither nourish nor satisfy hunger.” (Quran 88:6-7)
A tree that "springs out of the bottom of Hell-fire” (Zaqqum): "Verily the tree of Zaqqum Will be the food of the Sinful,- Like molten brass; it will boil in their insides. Like the boiling of scalding water." (Quran 44:43-46)
Choking foods: “With Us are yokes (to bind them) and fire (to burn them) and food that chokes and a grievous punishment." (Quran 73:12-13)
Foods which come from the washing of wounds: "So he has no friend here this Day, nor does he have any food except what comes from the washing of wounds, which none will eat except the sinners." (Quran 69:35-37)
Now, it is pretty much understandable how horrible Allah’s mindset could be. But it seems like, according to the Quran and Hadiths, Allah’s thirst of punishing his own mere creatures cannot be quenched just by punishing in the ways mentioned above. There are several other gruesome techniques of Allah to punish his fallible creatures whom he made fallible intentionally in the first place. The other techniques of punishment are as follows:
1. Pouring boiled water over the head, providing garments of liquid pitch and fire, beating with maces made of Iron: "These two antagonists dispute with each other about their Lord: But those who deny (their Lord),- for them will be cut out a garment of Fire: over their heads will be poured out boiling water. With it will be scalded what is within their bodies, as well as (their) skins. In addition there will be maces of iron (to punish) them. Every time they wish to get away therefrom, from anguish, they will be forced back therein, and (it will be said), "Taste ye the Penalty of Burning!"" (Quran 22:19-22)
2. Restricting by chains and fetters: “When the Hellfire sees them from a distant place, they will hear its fury and roaring. And when they are thrown into a narrow place therein bound in chains, they will cry out thereupon for destruction.” (Quran 25:12-13)
"With Us are Fetters (to bind them), and a Fire (to burn them), And a Food that chokes, and a Penalty Grievous." (Quran 73:12-13)
Why would Allah bind the Hell dwellers with chains and fetters? Does Allah fear that they could come out of the Hell someday and destroy his throne?
3. Burning face and displacing lips: "The Fire will burn their faces, and they will therein grin, with their lips displaced." (Quran 23:104)
4. Changing skin to roast again and again and again and again…: "Those who reject our Signs, We shall soon cast into the Fire: as often as their skins are roasted through, We shall change them for fresh skins, that they may taste the penalty: for Allah is Exalted in Power, Wise.” (Quran 4:56)
Unbelievers will also be given thick skin in the Hell so that their skin burns for a longer period. That, as a result, would prolong the agony. (Sahih Muslim (40:6831)
5. Bringing out intestines: "Narrated Abu Wail: [...] He said, "I have heard him [Allah's Apostle] saying, "A man will be brought on the Day of Resurrection and thrown in the (Hell) Fire, so that his intestines will come out, and he will go around like a donkey goes around a millstone.”-Sahih Bukhari 4:54:489
6. Boiling brain by smoldering shoe: "The person who will have the least punishment from amongst the Hell Fire people on the Day of Resurrection, will be a man under whose arch of the feet a smoldering ember will be placed so that his brain will boil because of it."" -Sahih Bukhari 8:76:566
7. Hanging by the breasts: "In Hell I saw women hanging by their breasts. They had fathered bastards." - Ishaq:185
8. Moving burning stone from nipple to shoulder: "Narrated Al-Ahnaf bin Qais: While I was sitting with some people from Quraish, a man with very rough hair, clothes, and appearance came and stood in front of us, greeted us and said, "Inform those who hoard wealth, that a stone will be heated in the Hell-fire and will be put on the nipples of their breasts till it comes out from the bones of their shoulders and then put on the bones of their shoulders till it comes through the nipples of their breasts the stone will be moving and hitting." After saying that, the person retreated and sat by the side of the pillar, I followed him and sat beside him, and I did not know who he was. I said to him, "I think the people disliked what you had said." He said, "These people do not understand anything, although my friend told me." I asked, "Who is your friend?" He said, "The Prophet said (to me), ... " -Sahih Bukhari 2:24:489
Wow! How nice of the merciful God of the peaceful religion! Ask yourself now: if a person commits a harmless sin, say, for 100 years then how could it be equal to those grievous punishments of eternity? Where is the equality in the judgment of Allah? Will we punish a thief by cutting off his hands or putting him in a prison forever? Should a liar be punished through cutting off his tongue? We call punishing humans by torturing now barbaric and psychologists would rather suggest, depending on the crimes, psychological therapy or counseling or life incarceration for the criminals.
There are so many examples of how a major thief realized his crime and came back in the society like a decent human being and helped to eradicate stealing from the society, many examples of how an addicted came back in the society and helped to build up a beautiful society. I am not in any way supporting any of those criminals and their activities, obviously, but just trying to say that cruel physical punishments of the religions and other ideologies have never worked to deter crime and criminals. In the UK, the rate of homicide continues to decrease despite abolishing capital punishment in 1973, which means capital punishment could not deter murder as much as socio-economic development did. Moreover, people commit a crime sometimes, because of various psychological predispositions (which are pretty hard to control), the intensity of an incident, unhealthy diet (e.g. excessive alcohol consumption), and environmental and social factors that affected their life in the past. In a study of Journal of Adolescent Health, Dr. Jonathan Groner, an associate professor of surgery at Ohio State University College of Medicine and Public Health who researches the deterrent effect of capital punishment, said regarding most of the criminals and crimes:
He also said this regarding capital punishment:
"It is very clear that deterrents are not effective in the area of capital punishment,"
So, what could reduce crimes like murder and stealing? Mr. Groner describes:
The murder rate is most closely associated with the socio-economic health of the country. The murder rate in the U.S. was highest during the Depression. Also, the majority of people on death row are from the most blighted parts of the U.S. They are very poor and very impoverished. A very high percentage have mental health problems. Good access to health care and improving the socioeconomic health of our country's cities would reduce the murder rate more effectively than executions.
So, according to the today’s intellectuals, physical punishment has always been futile to deter crime. Instead, they think the development of the socio-economic condition is the key.
To make this relationship between crime and punishment more clear, I want to give another analogy: imagine a prison in a civilized country where criminals are immured. There they have got clean foods and clothes, library, recreational activities, chances of talking to their families etc. But why a modern and civilized society is providing those privileges to the criminals? Because a modern society learns from history, learns through experience, reasoning, and scientific analysis and by that, it evolves. Cruel and barbaric punishments had been practiced on our planet and every time that practice just worsened the situation instead of ameliorating it and modern societies learned lessons from that. They also learned that criminals deserve a chance to realize their crime and punishing them horribly physically is not the solution to that. Consequently, they stripped barbarism away. Actually, that is how we, as civilized people, have learned to think through the evolution of our ways of thinking. We have become civilized only because we can identify and admit the problems in our thinking and stop them, unlike Allah or God. To make our morality better we have never needed any religious book but needed our own endeavor to think, to criticize others thinking, and to engage in a civilized debate. So, it is now obvious that Allah has got various problems in his judgment and could easily be tagged as a barbaric deity in our modern and civilized society.
Verses describing Hell are inappropriate for children
Now, the verses mentioned above raise another major question: how one could teach her children those verses? Like this way: “Honey, please do not question Allah’s barbarism or his existence or Muhammad’s pedophilia, otherwise you will be burned in Hell forever and there you will be fed with pus, blood, and thorny tree. There, also, your skin and brain will be burned and boiled, respectively, over and over again”? If it were right, then I guess, I could threaten a kid to do his homework by saying: “Dear kid, please do your homework properly and if you don’t, I will burn your finger and feed you mosquitos and pus.” Moreover, in the Islamic world, many children are taught those brutal verses and other ludicrous verses of the Quran and Hadiths in Madrasas (Islamic schools, where children are often molested and a perfect place for terrorists). If in this way a kid is brainwashed with such egregious verses, very easily he could be filled with hatred and blow away himself in the midst of a crowd with the opposite beliefs. After all, if you ardently revere a deity with so much hatred, then you will, generally, inherit some of the hateful attributes of that deity for yourself.
The dwellers of Hell don’t deserve constant painful punishment
There are actually seven gates of Hell for seven types of “sinners” who committed sins because Allah led them astray because Allah does not wish them to be saved from the Hellfire.
“And verily, Hell is the promised abode for them all! To it are seven gates: for each of those gates is a (special) class (of sinners) assigned." (Quran 15:43-44)
Now, how many of the earth’s people will reside in the Islamic insane Hell? Well, in a short answer, 99% of humans.
Yes, you read that right, and I know that you are not surprised now as you already have got the idea of how cruel Allah can be. It is also noteworthy that one of the most common beliefs of the Muslims is that no Muslim will live in Hell forever no matter what is the crime of that Muslim. Unlike the non-Muslims, sooner or later every Muslim will go to the paradise (Islamic paradise is nothing but a brothel). Who are those 99% people that are going to reside in Hell forever? Read the following:
Wives who are not obedient and grateful to their husbands:
Artists: "The people who will receive the severest punishment from Allah will be the picture makers". -Shahi Bukhari 72:834
Overbearing and proud people:
Hypocrites (people who act like Muslim because if caught otherwise, could be executed, since according to Islam, apostasy is punishable by death): "The Hypocrites will be in the lowest depths of the Fire: no helper wilt thou find for them;-" (Qur'an 4:145)
Polytheists: "Verily ye, (unbelievers), and the (false) gods that ye worship besides Allah, are (but) fuel for Hell! to it will ye (surely) come! If these had been gods, they would not have got there! but each one will abide therein." (Quran 21:98-99)
Satanic Jinns: "Amongst us (jinns) are some that submit their wills (to Allah), and some that swerve from justice. Now those who submit their wills - they have sought out (the path) of right conduct: But those who swerve,- they are (but) fuel for Hell-fire" (Quran 72:14-15)
People who commit suicide: "Narrated Thabit bin Ad-Dahhak: The Prophet (p.b.u.h) said, "Whoever intentionally swears falsely by a religion other than Islam, then he is what he has said, (e.g. if he says, 'If such thing is not true then I am a Jew,' he is really a Jew). '"And whoever commits suicide with piece of iron will be punished with the same piece of iron in the Hell Fire."'
Narrated Jundab "the Prophet said, "A man was inflicted with wounds and he committed suicide, and so Allah said: My slave has caused death on himself hurriedly, so I forbid Paradise for him."" - Sahih Bukhari 2:23:445
People who are unjust: "At length will be said to the wrong-doers: 'Taste ye the enduring punishment! ye get but the recompense of what ye earned!" (Quran 10:52)
People who actively lead their worldly lives: "These are the people who buy the life of this world at the price of the Hereafter: their penalty shall not be lightened nor shall they be helped." (Qur'an 2:86)
Murderers of Muslims: "If a man kills a believer intentionally, his recompense is Hell, to abide therein (Forever): And the wrath and the curse of Allah are upon him, and a dreadful penalty is prepared for him." (Quran 4:93)
Particular Jews and Christians: "The Jews call 'Uzair a son of Allah, and the Christians call Christ the son of Allah. That is a saying from their mouth; (in this) they but imitate what the unbelievers of old used to say. Allah's curse be on them: how they are deluded away from the Truth!" (Quran 9:30),
"Abu Musa' reported that Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) said: When it will be the Day of Resurrection Allah would deliver to every Muslim a Jew or a Christian and say: That is your rescue from Hell-Fire." - Sahih Muslim 37:6665
Do any of the people mentioned above deserve the inhumane and barbaric punishments of Allah in Hell? You could argue murderers were mentioned, they should be punished severely as their crime is unforgivable. Yes, murder is the vilest crime and I would say a life incarceration without any parole is way better than execution. I have already described above how execution is not the best choice. However, punishments like the execution of a perpetrator of a murder or a mass-murder or genocide or multiple rapes can be justified but yet that punishment would not sound in any way like the punishments of Allah. After all, executing a mass-murderer is not equal to torturing a mass-murderer forever in the most inhumane way possible and getting pleasure from his pain and suffering. But what kind of person gets pleasure by inflicting pain and suffering on others? A sadist. Not only Allah will get pleasure from the sufferings of Hell dwellers forever, Allah is also responsible for all the pains, sufferings, problems, and misunderstandings among the human beings. Because Allah is an omniscient and omnipotent god, he knew well ahead of everything that people will suffer so much on the earth and 99% of the people will burn in Hell forever and despite that, he let that happen. It is like you know that if your girlfriend goes out of her house today, she will be hit by a bus and will die on the spot and yet, you let her go out of her house instead of stopping her. In a conversation between Allah and the angels during the creation of Adam, the angels asked Allah why he was going to create humans, knowing that they would suffer most of the time. The reply of Allah to that question is he knew what angels did not know.
“Behold, thy Lord said to the angels: ‘I will create a vicegerent on earth." They said: "Wilt Thou place therein one who will make mischief therein and shed blood? whilst we do celebrate Thy praises and glorify Thy holy (name)?" He said: "I know what ye know not.’” (Quran 2:30)
Now that is like nothing but an inane and equivocal reply to any intellectual. But the question of the angels made complete sense. You will not do something which will make billions of people suffer for eternity if you become an omniscient person, will you?
So, after all this discussion, we can easily assert that Allah intentionally let people to suffer to get pleasure from that and that makes him nothing but a sadistic deity.
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“Then I saw the (Hell) Fire, and I have never before, seen such a horrible sight as that, and I saw that the majority of its dwellers were women.” –MuhammadStupidity, barbarism, and craziness are so prevalent in today’s major religions that a little bit of study of the religions with an open mind would help us to realize that they are manmade and an absolute sham. One of the crazy ideas that religions invented is the idea of heaven and Hell. While they seem like some of the best incentives to keep people moral, they actually are not even any proper incentive. Moreover, if we need the belief of heaven and Hell to be good to others then our morality should be questionable. However, one big question I want to answer before I start to describe the main topic is: Is the idea of Hell scientifically accurate? The simple answer is: the idea of Hell is as unscientific as much it is inhumane.
Hell is an unscientific idea
It is not possible for a human being to stay in Hell forever because fire cannot continue to burn a human body forever as the body will eventually become nothing. That is because our bodies only gives a finite amount of energy which makes it impossible to burn for eternity. But if a theist presents a counter-argument against that by saying, “In Hell, Allah or God will switch off the laws of nature and that makes describing Hellfire impossible”, that will be a very weak argument. The theist will also commit a red-herring fallacy because instead of answering the argument that was presented, the counter-argument will distract one from the reality or actual argument and demand that we imagine something that is not possible (we cannot imagine something where there is no law of nature).
Moreover, in the “holy” scriptures, where is it said that “the fire does not consume flesh in Hell” or “only soul exists in Hell”? Nowhere, in the books, it is said that the laws and theories of nature will not work in Hell. Rather we find from the scriptures like the Quran that God is talking about fire, not smokeless fire, God is talking about skin, shoulder, bones, flesh etc. and a mere soul does not have any of that. To me, Hell and its factors completely sound natural. Yet, if we had to take the fallacious arguments that the theists assert to make the idea of Hell immune from scientific scrutiny as the truth then also those arguments could be questioned scientifically.
For example, if the fire of Hell is smokeless and that only burns but does not consume anything then there will be no pain under that fire. We feel pain only when the pain receptors send a signal to our brain through nerve fibers to alert us to our cells being destroyed. So if the fire only burns and does not consume flesh that means no cells are destroyed and so there is no pain! Again, if there is no flesh in Hell and only the soul exists (by the way, what is the soul and who proved that scientifically?), there will be no body, no cells, no pain receptors, no spinal cord, no nerve fiber and hence, again, no pain. It is really foolish to believe something as an ultimate truth which is both scientifically inexplicable and inhumane.
Islamic Hell
Almost every major religion has the idea of Hell and among them, I found the idea of Islamic Hell as the most awkward, dangerous, and stupid one. I also think that it is not apropos at all to inculcate this idea of Islamic Hell into the mind of the little children. Once you finish reading this article with an open mind, you will also completely agree with me. The Hell that Allah has created for the non-Muslims is not any mere Hell with fire but so dangerous and horrifying that it would literally make anybody to cringe and doubt what kind of deity Allah is. In the Quran and Hadiths, Allah (in the Hadiths, Muhammad) over and over and over again threatened non-Muslims and even sometimes Muslims by gruesome Islamic Hell. It is not referred to as any spiritual punishment of Allah in the Quran and Hadiths. Rather the Quran and Hadiths explicitly describe Hell’s characteristics and constituents which makes it impossible to be only a spiritual punishment. In the Quran, Hell is described as having the ability to inhale and talk.
“When they are cast therein, they will hear the (terrible) drawing in of its breath even as it blazes forth,” (Quran 67:7)
One Day We will ask Hell, "Art thou filled to the full?" It will say, "Are there any more (to come)?" (Quran 50:30)
So, the Islamic Hell is made as a hungry fire-giant by Allah. According to a Hadith, Hell is so deep that if a stone were thrown, it would take 70 years for that stone to reach the bottom. In another Hadith, Muhammad said that the fire is blacker than tar. He also said that the fire of Hell is seventy times greater than the fire on earth! But why is it so? The fire on our planet is enough to torture someone forever with excruciating pain. Why then it had to be 70 times greater in intensity? Can somebody hate anybody that much? Actually, Hell is depicted in the most horrifying way possible that a 7th century Arab Bedouin could imagine. If, however, the Quran were sent in today’s time, it would promise other different types of painful punishment, e.g., punishing through severe electric shock. But, fortunately for the non-Muslims, “omniscient” Allah did not know anything about electricity 1400 years ago.
Allah created humans as a fuel of Hell
A challenge: after reading this section of this article whenever you see or hear: “Allah, the most Merciful and the most Beneficent,” you will laugh out loud. The idea of why Allah created men and jinns (a mythical creature in Islam) in the first place is going to make you see Allah completely differently. In the Quran Allah said:
Whomsoever Allah guides, he is the guided one, and whomsoever He sends astray, those! They are the losers. And surely, We have created many of the jinns and mankind for Hell. (Quran 7:178-179)
If thy Lord had so willed, He could have made mankind one people: but they will not cease to dispute. Except those on whom thy Lord hath bestowed His Mercy: and for this did He create them: and the Word of thy Lord shall be fulfilled: "I will fill Hell with jinns and men all together. (Quran 1:118-119)
Allah also said in the Quran that men are the fuel of Hell fire: “…guard yourselves against the Fire prepared for disbelievers, whose fuel is of men and stones.” (Quran 2:24)
We also read in the Quran: “And if your lord willed, all who are on the earth would have believed together.” (Quran 10:99)
Thus, from the above verses it can be inferred that Allah only created men as a fuel and to fill the fire-giant’s (Hell’s) belly. Also notice that in the last verse among the verses mentioned above, Allah said that if Allah had willed, we would have been saved from the Hellfire. But as Hell exists and we are going to be burning in Hellfire forever, that only means that Allah does not wish or want us to be saved. And also notice that Allah himself sends people astray and divide people because, again, he does not want us to be saved. Anyway, when I first read those verses I just wondered what sort of people would believe in such a deity so ardently.
Allah will punish non-Muslims in the most gruesome way possible
Now that we know that Allah has created humans as a fuel of Hell deliberately, we can now move forward to know how Allah will use the fuel in Hell.
First of all, the punishment of the sinners will be so excruciating that the “sinners” will yearn for their self-destruction and yet, Allah, “the merciful one”, will neither destroy them nor will he save them from Hell. Instead, he would keep tormenting them there forever.
The sinners will be in the Punishment of Hell, to dwell therein (for aye): Nowise will the (Punishment) be lightened for them, and in despair will they be there overwhelmed. Nowise shall We be unjust to them: but it is they who have been unjust themselves. They will cry: "O Malik! (chief gatekeeper of Hell), would that thy Lord put an end to us!" He will say, "Nay, but ye shall abide!" (Quran 43:74-77)
Have you started to find Satan as the more compassionate one than Allah now? Quran surely sounds that way. The non-Muslim sinners will stay in Hell forever, as indicated above, and will never be exempt from the cruel punishment of Allah.
“Verily, Allah has cursed the disbelievers, and has prepared for them a flaming Fire (Hell) wherein they will abide forever: no protector will they find, nor helper”. (Quran 33:64-65)
This concept will sound more horrible and illogical to you when you will think in this way: if I don’t believe in a god or believe in many gods, because either Allah led me astray or Satan led me astray or I, as a fallible creature, made a mistake in comprehending the true nature of the universe (by the way, I am fallible because Allah made me fallible in the first place), it will not harm Allah or anyone. It is similar to, say, you are a Democrat and do not believe in a Republican government and your belief is no way harmful to anybody or anything. But you will be punished if somebody gets hurt for your ardent belief in the Democratic Party, e.g., if you killed a Republican just because she is a Republican. But would that be logical if a Republican president immured a Democrat and kept her in a prison forever just because she is a Democrat? No. Then why should it be logical in the case of God or Allah? Another analogy could be made by comparing Mr. Stephen Hawking’s life. Unfortunately, he died in the month of March and one day after his death, I saw a post on Facebook which said, “Not believed in God, now burn in Hell forever Hawking.” How despicable! A person who passed most of the time in his life by sitting in a wheelchair and teaching students about the nature of the universe, by committing no harm to anybody or anything will now burn in Hell forever just because of a mere belief! It will become more despicable to think of when you imagine a person like Mr. Hawking in an Islamic Hell. Thank goodness I am an atheist and do not have to think in this way about anybody.
Burning in Hellfire forever is not enough for Allah to torture a mere creature. In several places in the Quran, Allah vehemently announced what sort of foods and drinks the unbelievers will have in Hell and unsurprisingly those foods and drinks are the worst things possible. You would not even feed your worst enemy with those foods. Only a psychopath would feed someone with such dismaying foods and drinks which only would make one more hungry or make one choke or boil the intestines.
The foods and drinks which Allah will provide are the followings:
Filthy fluid of pus and blood:
Thus, All this. But indeed for the oppressors will be an evil place of final return. It is Hellfire - they will burn therein, and how evil is that bed, Thus, then will they taste it - a boiling fluid and a filthy fluid of pus and blood and other penalties of a similar kind to match them. (Quran 38:55-58)
Boiling water: "…Then will you fill your stomachs with it and drink boiling water on top of it, and you will drink boiling water on top of it, and you will drink like diseased camels…” (Quran 56:51-56)
A thorny plant: "No food will there be for them but a bitter Dhari' (a thorny plant) Which will neither nourish nor satisfy hunger.” (Quran 88:6-7)
A tree that "springs out of the bottom of Hell-fire” (Zaqqum): "Verily the tree of Zaqqum Will be the food of the Sinful,- Like molten brass; it will boil in their insides. Like the boiling of scalding water." (Quran 44:43-46)
Choking foods: “With Us are yokes (to bind them) and fire (to burn them) and food that chokes and a grievous punishment." (Quran 73:12-13)
Foods which come from the washing of wounds: "So he has no friend here this Day, nor does he have any food except what comes from the washing of wounds, which none will eat except the sinners." (Quran 69:35-37)
Now, it is pretty much understandable how horrible Allah’s mindset could be. But it seems like, according to the Quran and Hadiths, Allah’s thirst of punishing his own mere creatures cannot be quenched just by punishing in the ways mentioned above. There are several other gruesome techniques of Allah to punish his fallible creatures whom he made fallible intentionally in the first place. The other techniques of punishment are as follows:
1. Pouring boiled water over the head, providing garments of liquid pitch and fire, beating with maces made of Iron: "These two antagonists dispute with each other about their Lord: But those who deny (their Lord),- for them will be cut out a garment of Fire: over their heads will be poured out boiling water. With it will be scalded what is within their bodies, as well as (their) skins. In addition there will be maces of iron (to punish) them. Every time they wish to get away therefrom, from anguish, they will be forced back therein, and (it will be said), "Taste ye the Penalty of Burning!"" (Quran 22:19-22)
2. Restricting by chains and fetters: “When the Hellfire sees them from a distant place, they will hear its fury and roaring. And when they are thrown into a narrow place therein bound in chains, they will cry out thereupon for destruction.” (Quran 25:12-13)
"With Us are Fetters (to bind them), and a Fire (to burn them), And a Food that chokes, and a Penalty Grievous." (Quran 73:12-13)
Why would Allah bind the Hell dwellers with chains and fetters? Does Allah fear that they could come out of the Hell someday and destroy his throne?
3. Burning face and displacing lips: "The Fire will burn their faces, and they will therein grin, with their lips displaced." (Quran 23:104)
4. Changing skin to roast again and again and again and again…: "Those who reject our Signs, We shall soon cast into the Fire: as often as their skins are roasted through, We shall change them for fresh skins, that they may taste the penalty: for Allah is Exalted in Power, Wise.” (Quran 4:56)
Unbelievers will also be given thick skin in the Hell so that their skin burns for a longer period. That, as a result, would prolong the agony. (Sahih Muslim (40:6831)
5. Bringing out intestines: "Narrated Abu Wail: [...] He said, "I have heard him [Allah's Apostle] saying, "A man will be brought on the Day of Resurrection and thrown in the (Hell) Fire, so that his intestines will come out, and he will go around like a donkey goes around a millstone.”-Sahih Bukhari 4:54:489
6. Boiling brain by smoldering shoe: "The person who will have the least punishment from amongst the Hell Fire people on the Day of Resurrection, will be a man under whose arch of the feet a smoldering ember will be placed so that his brain will boil because of it."" -Sahih Bukhari 8:76:566
7. Hanging by the breasts: "In Hell I saw women hanging by their breasts. They had fathered bastards." - Ishaq:185
8. Moving burning stone from nipple to shoulder: "Narrated Al-Ahnaf bin Qais: While I was sitting with some people from Quraish, a man with very rough hair, clothes, and appearance came and stood in front of us, greeted us and said, "Inform those who hoard wealth, that a stone will be heated in the Hell-fire and will be put on the nipples of their breasts till it comes out from the bones of their shoulders and then put on the bones of their shoulders till it comes through the nipples of their breasts the stone will be moving and hitting." After saying that, the person retreated and sat by the side of the pillar, I followed him and sat beside him, and I did not know who he was. I said to him, "I think the people disliked what you had said." He said, "These people do not understand anything, although my friend told me." I asked, "Who is your friend?" He said, "The Prophet said (to me), ... " -Sahih Bukhari 2:24:489
Wow! How nice of the merciful God of the peaceful religion! Ask yourself now: if a person commits a harmless sin, say, for 100 years then how could it be equal to those grievous punishments of eternity? Where is the equality in the judgment of Allah? Will we punish a thief by cutting off his hands or putting him in a prison forever? Should a liar be punished through cutting off his tongue? We call punishing humans by torturing now barbaric and psychologists would rather suggest, depending on the crimes, psychological therapy or counseling or life incarceration for the criminals.
There are so many examples of how a major thief realized his crime and came back in the society like a decent human being and helped to eradicate stealing from the society, many examples of how an addicted came back in the society and helped to build up a beautiful society. I am not in any way supporting any of those criminals and their activities, obviously, but just trying to say that cruel physical punishments of the religions and other ideologies have never worked to deter crime and criminals. In the UK, the rate of homicide continues to decrease despite abolishing capital punishment in 1973, which means capital punishment could not deter murder as much as socio-economic development did. Moreover, people commit a crime sometimes, because of various psychological predispositions (which are pretty hard to control), the intensity of an incident, unhealthy diet (e.g. excessive alcohol consumption), and environmental and social factors that affected their life in the past. In a study of Journal of Adolescent Health, Dr. Jonathan Groner, an associate professor of surgery at Ohio State University College of Medicine and Public Health who researches the deterrent effect of capital punishment, said regarding most of the criminals and crimes:
The psychological mindset of the criminal is such that they are not able to consider consequences at the time of the crime. Most crimes are crimes of passion that are done in situations involving intense excitement or concern. People who commit these crimes are not in a normal state of mind -- they do not consider the consequences in a logical way.
He also said this regarding capital punishment:
"It is very clear that deterrents are not effective in the area of capital punishment,"
So, what could reduce crimes like murder and stealing? Mr. Groner describes:
The murder rate is most closely associated with the socio-economic health of the country. The murder rate in the U.S. was highest during the Depression. Also, the majority of people on death row are from the most blighted parts of the U.S. They are very poor and very impoverished. A very high percentage have mental health problems. Good access to health care and improving the socioeconomic health of our country's cities would reduce the murder rate more effectively than executions.
So, according to the today’s intellectuals, physical punishment has always been futile to deter crime. Instead, they think the development of the socio-economic condition is the key.
To make this relationship between crime and punishment more clear, I want to give another analogy: imagine a prison in a civilized country where criminals are immured. There they have got clean foods and clothes, library, recreational activities, chances of talking to their families etc. But why a modern and civilized society is providing those privileges to the criminals? Because a modern society learns from history, learns through experience, reasoning, and scientific analysis and by that, it evolves. Cruel and barbaric punishments had been practiced on our planet and every time that practice just worsened the situation instead of ameliorating it and modern societies learned lessons from that. They also learned that criminals deserve a chance to realize their crime and punishing them horribly physically is not the solution to that. Consequently, they stripped barbarism away. Actually, that is how we, as civilized people, have learned to think through the evolution of our ways of thinking. We have become civilized only because we can identify and admit the problems in our thinking and stop them, unlike Allah or God. To make our morality better we have never needed any religious book but needed our own endeavor to think, to criticize others thinking, and to engage in a civilized debate. So, it is now obvious that Allah has got various problems in his judgment and could easily be tagged as a barbaric deity in our modern and civilized society.
Verses describing Hell are inappropriate for children
Now, the verses mentioned above raise another major question: how one could teach her children those verses? Like this way: “Honey, please do not question Allah’s barbarism or his existence or Muhammad’s pedophilia, otherwise you will be burned in Hell forever and there you will be fed with pus, blood, and thorny tree. There, also, your skin and brain will be burned and boiled, respectively, over and over again”? If it were right, then I guess, I could threaten a kid to do his homework by saying: “Dear kid, please do your homework properly and if you don’t, I will burn your finger and feed you mosquitos and pus.” Moreover, in the Islamic world, many children are taught those brutal verses and other ludicrous verses of the Quran and Hadiths in Madrasas (Islamic schools, where children are often molested and a perfect place for terrorists). If in this way a kid is brainwashed with such egregious verses, very easily he could be filled with hatred and blow away himself in the midst of a crowd with the opposite beliefs. After all, if you ardently revere a deity with so much hatred, then you will, generally, inherit some of the hateful attributes of that deity for yourself.
The dwellers of Hell don’t deserve constant painful punishment
There are actually seven gates of Hell for seven types of “sinners” who committed sins because Allah led them astray because Allah does not wish them to be saved from the Hellfire.
“And verily, Hell is the promised abode for them all! To it are seven gates: for each of those gates is a (special) class (of sinners) assigned." (Quran 15:43-44)
Now, how many of the earth’s people will reside in the Islamic insane Hell? Well, in a short answer, 99% of humans.
"Narrated Abu Huraira: The Prophet said, "The first man to be called on the Day of Resurrection will be Adam who will be shown his offspring, and it will be said to them, 'This is your father, Adam.' Adam will say (responding to the call), 'Labbaik and Sa'daik' Then Allah will say (to Adam), 'Take out of your offspring, the people of Hell.' Adam will say, 'O Lord, how many should I take out?' Allah will say, 'Take out ninety-nine out of every hundred." They (the Prophet's companions) said, "O Allah's Apostle! If ninety-nine out of every one hundred of us are taken away, what will remain out of us?" He said, "My followers in comparison to the other nations are like a white hair on a black ox."" - Sahih Bukhari 8:76:536
Yes, you read that right, and I know that you are not surprised now as you already have got the idea of how cruel Allah can be. It is also noteworthy that one of the most common beliefs of the Muslims is that no Muslim will live in Hell forever no matter what is the crime of that Muslim. Unlike the non-Muslims, sooner or later every Muslim will go to the paradise (Islamic paradise is nothing but a brothel). Who are those 99% people that are going to reside in Hell forever? Read the following:
Wives who are not obedient and grateful to their husbands:
Narrated 'Abdullah bin Abbas: [...] Then I saw the (Hell) Fire, and I have never before, seen such a horrible sight as that, and I saw that the majority of its dwellers were women.’ The people asked, ‘O Allah's Apostle! What is the reason for that?’ He replied, ‘Because of their ungratefulness.’ It was said. ‘Do they disbelieve in Allah (are they ungrateful to Allah)?’ He replied, ‘They are not thankful to their husbands and are ungrateful for the favors done to them. Even if you do good to one of them all your life, when she seems some harshness from you, she will say, ‘I have never seen any good from you.’’” -Sahih Bukhari 7:62:125
Artists: "The people who will receive the severest punishment from Allah will be the picture makers". -Shahi Bukhari 72:834
Overbearing and proud people:
"Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: There was a dispute between the Hell and the Paradise and it (the Hell) said: The haughty and the proud would find abode in me. And the Paradise said: The meek and the humble would find their abode in me. Thereupon Allah, the Exalted and Glorious, (addressing the Hell) said: You are (the means) of My punishment by which I punish those of My servants whom I wish. (And addressing the Paradise) He said: You are only My Mercy by means of which I shall show mercy to those whom I wish, but each one of you would be full." - Sahih Muslim 40:6818
Hypocrites (people who act like Muslim because if caught otherwise, could be executed, since according to Islam, apostasy is punishable by death): "The Hypocrites will be in the lowest depths of the Fire: no helper wilt thou find for them;-" (Qur'an 4:145)
Polytheists: "Verily ye, (unbelievers), and the (false) gods that ye worship besides Allah, are (but) fuel for Hell! to it will ye (surely) come! If these had been gods, they would not have got there! but each one will abide therein." (Quran 21:98-99)
Satanic Jinns: "Amongst us (jinns) are some that submit their wills (to Allah), and some that swerve from justice. Now those who submit their wills - they have sought out (the path) of right conduct: But those who swerve,- they are (but) fuel for Hell-fire" (Quran 72:14-15)
People who commit suicide: "Narrated Thabit bin Ad-Dahhak: The Prophet (p.b.u.h) said, "Whoever intentionally swears falsely by a religion other than Islam, then he is what he has said, (e.g. if he says, 'If such thing is not true then I am a Jew,' he is really a Jew). '"And whoever commits suicide with piece of iron will be punished with the same piece of iron in the Hell Fire."'
Narrated Jundab "the Prophet said, "A man was inflicted with wounds and he committed suicide, and so Allah said: My slave has caused death on himself hurriedly, so I forbid Paradise for him."" - Sahih Bukhari 2:23:445
People who are unjust: "At length will be said to the wrong-doers: 'Taste ye the enduring punishment! ye get but the recompense of what ye earned!" (Quran 10:52)
People who actively lead their worldly lives: "These are the people who buy the life of this world at the price of the Hereafter: their penalty shall not be lightened nor shall they be helped." (Qur'an 2:86)
Murderers of Muslims: "If a man kills a believer intentionally, his recompense is Hell, to abide therein (Forever): And the wrath and the curse of Allah are upon him, and a dreadful penalty is prepared for him." (Quran 4:93)
Particular Jews and Christians: "The Jews call 'Uzair a son of Allah, and the Christians call Christ the son of Allah. That is a saying from their mouth; (in this) they but imitate what the unbelievers of old used to say. Allah's curse be on them: how they are deluded away from the Truth!" (Quran 9:30),
"Abu Musa' reported that Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) said: When it will be the Day of Resurrection Allah would deliver to every Muslim a Jew or a Christian and say: That is your rescue from Hell-Fire." - Sahih Muslim 37:6665
Do any of the people mentioned above deserve the inhumane and barbaric punishments of Allah in Hell? You could argue murderers were mentioned, they should be punished severely as their crime is unforgivable. Yes, murder is the vilest crime and I would say a life incarceration without any parole is way better than execution. I have already described above how execution is not the best choice. However, punishments like the execution of a perpetrator of a murder or a mass-murder or genocide or multiple rapes can be justified but yet that punishment would not sound in any way like the punishments of Allah. After all, executing a mass-murderer is not equal to torturing a mass-murderer forever in the most inhumane way possible and getting pleasure from his pain and suffering. But what kind of person gets pleasure by inflicting pain and suffering on others? A sadist. Not only Allah will get pleasure from the sufferings of Hell dwellers forever, Allah is also responsible for all the pains, sufferings, problems, and misunderstandings among the human beings. Because Allah is an omniscient and omnipotent god, he knew well ahead of everything that people will suffer so much on the earth and 99% of the people will burn in Hell forever and despite that, he let that happen. It is like you know that if your girlfriend goes out of her house today, she will be hit by a bus and will die on the spot and yet, you let her go out of her house instead of stopping her. In a conversation between Allah and the angels during the creation of Adam, the angels asked Allah why he was going to create humans, knowing that they would suffer most of the time. The reply of Allah to that question is he knew what angels did not know.
“Behold, thy Lord said to the angels: ‘I will create a vicegerent on earth." They said: "Wilt Thou place therein one who will make mischief therein and shed blood? whilst we do celebrate Thy praises and glorify Thy holy (name)?" He said: "I know what ye know not.’” (Quran 2:30)
Now that is like nothing but an inane and equivocal reply to any intellectual. But the question of the angels made complete sense. You will not do something which will make billions of people suffer for eternity if you become an omniscient person, will you?
So, after all this discussion, we can easily assert that Allah intentionally let people to suffer to get pleasure from that and that makes him nothing but a sadistic deity.
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May 19, 2018
No Border — Irish Unity Now
From Sean Bresnahan @ An Claidheamh Solus the text of a letter published in the Irish News, 19th April, underscoring the imperative that Irish Unity proceed upon Britain’s withdrawal from the EU.
Post-the recent ‘Brexit’ vote in the UK and with Britain currently negotiating her exit from the European Union, Ireland — both north and south — faces certain upheaval over the months and years to come.
Brexit is now the dominant conversation in Irish politics, with much of that discussion centering on its likely impact on the border — a border which still separates the north of our country from its natural hinterland, the rest of Ireland.
Much of the focus is on whether a ‘renewed’ border, despite it having never gone away, should be a ‘hard border’ or a ‘soft border’ — depending on what arrangements are decided on by Britain (which claims sovereignty over the North) and the rest of Europe when Brexit has been finalised.
But the damage that Brexit is certain to do Ireland, in particular the North — which faces acute isolation removed from Europe and on the margins of the UK — demands neither a hard border or a soft border but an END to the border, with full Irish Unity to proceed in its stead.
Brexit, then, establishes a renewed imperative for Irish Unity — that Ireland at last be reunited. With the difficulties faced by our divided country set only to deepen, in a manner not seen in many decades, this is now a national priority and indeed THE national priority.
On that basis, we propose that the Irish people be afforded their long-denied right to determine their own future — this through a national referendum that brings forward an independent all-Ireland republic.
Such a republic is best-placed to resolve the complex challenges presented by Brexit. It would afford the Irish people a better future, for each of their number, in a modern democratic arrangement that affords the stability demanded by these uncertain times.
Sean Bresnahan, Chair, Thomas Ashe Society Omagh blogs at An Claidheamh Soluis
Follow Sean Bresnahan on Twitter @bres79
Post-the recent ‘Brexit’ vote in the UK and with Britain currently negotiating her exit from the European Union, Ireland — both north and south — faces certain upheaval over the months and years to come.
Brexit is now the dominant conversation in Irish politics, with much of that discussion centering on its likely impact on the border — a border which still separates the north of our country from its natural hinterland, the rest of Ireland.
Much of the focus is on whether a ‘renewed’ border, despite it having never gone away, should be a ‘hard border’ or a ‘soft border’ — depending on what arrangements are decided on by Britain (which claims sovereignty over the North) and the rest of Europe when Brexit has been finalised.
But the damage that Brexit is certain to do Ireland, in particular the North — which faces acute isolation removed from Europe and on the margins of the UK — demands neither a hard border or a soft border but an END to the border, with full Irish Unity to proceed in its stead.
Brexit, then, establishes a renewed imperative for Irish Unity — that Ireland at last be reunited. With the difficulties faced by our divided country set only to deepen, in a manner not seen in many decades, this is now a national priority and indeed THE national priority.
On that basis, we propose that the Irish people be afforded their long-denied right to determine their own future — this through a national referendum that brings forward an independent all-Ireland republic.
Such a republic is best-placed to resolve the complex challenges presented by Brexit. It would afford the Irish people a better future, for each of their number, in a modern democratic arrangement that affords the stability demanded by these uncertain times.
Sean Bresnahan, Chair, Thomas Ashe Society Omagh blogs at An Claidheamh Soluis
Follow Sean Bresnahan on Twitter @bres79
Vasily Grossman’s Life And Fate - Staring History In The Face
Gabriel Levy features in People And Nature with his take on a play based on a novel by Vasily Grossman.
The play, being shown this month (in Russian, with English captions) at the Theatre Royal in London, portrays the darkest days of 20th century European history. What conveys hope is how determinedly its director, Lev Dodin, and its cast stare Soviet history in the face.
The impact was especially forceful last week, when Russian officialdom was as usual celebrating the “great patriotic war” with vast, aggressive displays of military hardware (on 9 May, the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany).
Russian and Ukrainian friends have been sharing on social media, with horror, photos and video clips of kindergarten children, encouraged by teachers and parents to parade with models of tanks, armoured cars and heavy weapons. (See for example videos here from Piatagorsk, or here from Krasnodar.) All while real Russian bombs are killing kindergarten children in Syria. …
But that’s only one Russia. The Maly Drama Theatre reminds us of another, where past wars are not justified or reproduced, but thought about, along with the repression and prison camps that accompanied them. Such thought is a precondition for making a future without any of these things.
The Theatre has put on its adaptation of Grossman’s masterpiece every year since 2007. It was developed out of a theatre school course taught by Lev Dodin, the theatre’s director. (He talked in an interview at the time about how that happened. See below.)
Life and Fate was written in the 1950s, suppressed in Soviet times, and published in Switzerland in 1980 and Moscow only in 1988. It is set in 1943, when the battle of Stalingrad turned the tide of the second world war against Germany. The central characters are Viktor Shtrum, a physicist, and his wife Liudmila. Grossman’s novel includes in its panoramic sweep scenes at the battle of Stalingrad; along the Volga river, following a voyage by Liudmila’s sister Zhenya; in the ghetto at Berdichev, Ukraine, where the Jewish population was killed under Nazi occupation; and in Russian and German prison camps.
Grossman, a journalist of Jewish heritage, won fame with his realistic war reporting, including the first report of the liberation of prisoners from a Nazi concentration camp. His first novel about the war, For a Just Cause, was published to acclaim in 1952, but the honesty of Life and Fate and other subsequent writing was too much for the Soviet censors.
Lev Dodin’s stage adaptation puts front and centre two types of anti-semitism. The genocidal anti-semitism of the Holocaust is portrayed in the last letter of Anna Shtrum (played by Tatiana Shestakova) to her son Viktor, describing life and death in the Berdichev ghetto. The play starts, and is punctuated throughout, with readings from the letter.
The counterpoint to this is the pernicious, petty anti-semitism of the Soviet elite, wrapped up with an unpleasant Russian nationalism, to which Viktor Shtrum (Sergei Kuryshev) falls victim in an early scene. To a foul tirade from the bosses of his Institute he responds: “This is how power works. The individual and the state.”
Stalinist repression is a central theme. The stage version well conveys Grossman’s sensitivity to the way that the system of arrests and shootings was glued together by fear, guilt and the destruction of people’s morale.
Those who survive their relatives are tortured by guilt; those who escape arrest are tortured by fear of it. Liudmila Shtrum’s sister Zhenya (Elizaveta Boiarskaia) is haunted by the thought that she may inadvertently have betrayed her first husband, the veteran communist Krymov (Alexy Zubarev), by saying too much to her lover Novikov (Sergey Vlasov) – and by the thought that Novikov might have betrayed her. But Novikov, the commander of a tank division, is himself eaten up by the repressive machine, for the “crime” of waiting eight minutes before executing an order to advance, in the hope of minimising fatalities among his troops.
Grossman’s novel reflects on the crushing of the hopes raised by the 1917 revolution, and the relationship of those hopes, and the socialist ideals that accompanied them, to Stalinism. Here I felt that the stage version lost some of the complexities. On the other hand the novel’s exceptional and forthright comparison between Stalinism and Nazism is powerfully rendered, especially in conversations between the Gestapo officer Liss (Oleg Dmitriev) and the veteran communist Mostovskoy (Igor Ivanov), one of his prisoners.
Liss mocks Mostovskoy’s internationalist principles and forecasts that Stalinism, as it scraped the bottom of the anti-semitic barrel, would resemble Nazism more closely than Mostovskoy can bring himself to admit.
Dodin has achieved a feat by compressing into a three-hour-plus performance so many of the complexities of Grossman’s novel. One set, bifurcated by a net and with the Shtrum’s furniture front of stage, is used for every scene, allowing the action to shift rapidly from the Shtrums’ Moscow apartment, to Soviet and then German prison camps, and in one scene to Stalingrad.
In 1961, when Vasily Grossman sought permission to publish Life and Fate in the Soviet Union, a senior Communist party official, Mikhail Suslov, told him it would not see the light of day “for at least 200 years”. Grossman died in 1965, not knowing whether his novel would ever be read. A half century later, one of Russia’s leading theatre companies is conveying, developing, and expanding on, the novel’s themes. I think that’s progress: reflection on the past takes time. GL, 14 May 2018.
“So that the future can be less horrible, we need to dig up the past”
Parts of an interview with Lev Dodin, director of the Maly Drama Theatre, published in Ogonyok on 19 March 2007
Q/ Do you think the comparison [of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate ] with War and Peace [by Lev Tolstoy] are justified?
LD/ It’s the closest analogy. No accident that the European press called Life and Fate “the War and Peace of the 20th century”. Tolstoy’s novel really isn’t only about Napoleon and Russia: it’s a novel about humanity – yes, using material in Russia, because Tolstoy lived here. And Life and Fate is based on material from the Soviet Union, because in those most tragic years Vasily Grossman lived and worked here. Everything is brought together in the novel: his war experiences; his mother perishing in the ghetto; and the fact that Grossman was one of the first in Europe to witness the hell of the fascist concentration camps. He accompanied the [Soviet] army to [the Nazi death camp at] Treblinka [in Poland]. Grossman’s novel has so much to say about Russian, and European, history.
Q/ You worked on this play for nearly three years. Was that because of the scale of the subject matter?
LD/ To be accurate, I have lived with that novel in my heart since 1985, when I read it for the first time. But the work on it was related to my new course [at the St Petersburg Academy of Theatrical Arts]: I wanted to immerse my students in artistic and human material that would open up new horizons for them, make them into artists. When we started work, we agreed that there would be no performance at the end, that it was impossible to do this only with those future artists. It was course work, a sort of investigation. And for that reason we travelled to sites of former prison camps: to Norilsk [in Russia, north of the Arctic circle], to Auschwitz. We studied materials from the archives, and we re-read [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn, [Varlam] Shalamov, [Evgeniya] Ginzburg, [George] Orwell. [The play was put together subsequently.] […]
Q/ Are you sure that all this [history] is topical today?
LD/ Great literature never loses its topicality. The problem of choices, for example: every one of us makes choices, every second. Even if we refuse to make moral choices, that is already making a choice, an irrevocable choice. What could be more topical than to remind people now about morality? And our history? Anyone who fears dealing with the terrible past is preparing a terrible future for himself. And the issue is not direct repetition: the relationship is much more complicated, nuanced. It needs to be grappled with. As long as we don’t feel that each one of us is responsible for what happens, nothing will change. As long as there is a Gulag [prison camp system], as long as there is injustice – I am imprisoned in the Gulag, and I am a victim of injustice. Even if that injustice has not yet hit me directly. What could be more topical?
Q/ And did the Gulag directly hit your family?
LD/ My family – no, but, as they say, the shells fell all around us. My father was a prominent scientist, a geologist. I very well remember how in 1949, when I was five years old, my mother, sister, brother and I were living at our dacha [country house] in the summer, and we would often go to the local station to meet the last train [from Moscow]. My dad would always take the last train. And sometimes he wouldn’t be on it. My mother would literally turn white, because at that time, at the Institute where my dad worked, there were [political] meetings. They would arrest faculty members – and not only Jews – and they often did so after these meetings. We had to live through that fear of our father not returning. I still remember the name of his teacher, Eidelman, a very celebrated scientist, one of the founders of the Geological Committee of the USSR. He was 84 years old. They imprisoned him, and he disappeared.
Another very clear memory is from 1956, when people started returning from the camps. Many former prisoners, my dad’s colleagues, came to see us. I very clearly remember Vologdin [a member of the Academy of Sciences]. He returned from the prison camp to Moscow, and came to visit us. My mother cooked a goose, using a special recipe. But when it was brought to the table, Vologdin couldn’t eat. All his teeth had been knocked out when he was being questioned [after his arrest]. I will never forget the scene. No-one at the table touched the goose. It was quickly removed, and my mum never cooked that dish again. My brother, who is also a geologist, was taught by Urvantsev, a very well-known academic. Urvantsev served an eighteen-year sentence in Norilsk. After he came back, we met quite often at family events. I have known many people who went through the Stalinist prison camp system. […]
Q/ You have said that during rehearsals some of your students’ parents reacted indignantly to your proposal to base a performance on Grossman’s novel.
LD/ Yes, at the beginning we had that problem. Some of the parents were admirers of Stalin, either covert, or very overt. And for some others, maybe, the theme we were working on simply wasn’t important. The mother of one of our women students was very indignant at the start. But after the dress rehearsal, she spent the whole night talking with her daughter. I think they began better to understand each other as a result. Another of our women students learned just recently that her grandad, a peasant, had suffered repression [under Stalin], and been shot. Her parents just hadn’t said anything to her about this before.
Q/ Even before the premiere in St Petersburg, you showed the play in Norilsk [formerly the site of an extensive group of prison camps]. How was it received?
LD/At the dress rehearsal, and at the two performances we did in Norilsk, the theatre was full to overflowing. The first time the actors went to bow to the audience, the whole crowd stood up to applaud, as if on command. In Petersburg I never saw such a thing. Although the reaction in Norilsk was not uniform. I saw eyes downcast, sad faces. It wasn’t only a festival atmosphere. Many people cried, and some, I think, were angry with us. Many came backstage with expressions that seemed to be turned inside out: young people; elderly former prisoners, who had been young when they were sent here. For example, people who had been sent to Norilsk from western Ukraine as teenagers, after the war. We met a woman from there who told us her story, showed us her documents. […]
Q/ It’s quite common to hear people say, these days: “Why dig us the past? Everything’s there in school history textbooks, after all.” Somebody I know always tell me that the only people who want to think about these things are those whose families suffered repression.
LD/ What an awful, enslaved mentality! The past is there exactly to be dug up. The past: that’s all the experience we have to go on. There is horror in the future, that we don’t yet know, and, so that the future can be less horrible, we need to dig up the past. And study it. In Russia there are always people who don’t want to know their history, or get it all confused because they are so scared of finding something bad. In Germany, for example, not a year goes by without serious research being published on the Hitler period. Films and plays on that subject appear one after the other. Although that period was shorter, and our [Soviet] system existed for nearly a century. Maybe it’s because of that we don’t want to deal with it? Because we are all children of that system? In my opinion that’s that system’s most awful influence – a sign of the fact that it is still alive. As long as we don’t understand that the responsibility for that system was borne not only by Stalin, not only by the party, but by all who allowed that system to exist, we will continue to live in the past.
Q/ That sounds pessimistic. And if you are a pessimist, why did you put on this play?
LD/ For one thing, for myself. For another, because you can not stay silent in the face of that, that you consider to be false – for your own sake, and for the sake of those who are able to listen. And pessimism is not such a negative quality. It is a way to avoid disillusionment – although it doesn’t avoid responsibility. This was one of Grossman’s points: pessimism requires courage. It requires you to do things that optimism will never do.
■ All the photos are from the Maly Drama Theatre’s web site
More on Russian history on People & Nature
■ The Death of Stalin is a riot (November 2017)
■ “The street has already spoken, gentlemen.” The Russian revolution replayed in real time (March 2017)
■ From the Russian revolution to socialism on Mars (April 2016)
■ Russia and Ukraine called up on national service (July 2015)
The play, being shown this month (in Russian, with English captions) at the Theatre Royal in London, portrays the darkest days of 20th century European history. What conveys hope is how determinedly its director, Lev Dodin, and its cast stare Soviet history in the face.
The impact was especially forceful last week, when Russian officialdom was as usual celebrating the “great patriotic war” with vast, aggressive displays of military hardware (on 9 May, the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany).
Russian and Ukrainian friends have been sharing on social media, with horror, photos and video clips of kindergarten children, encouraged by teachers and parents to parade with models of tanks, armoured cars and heavy weapons. (See for example videos here from Piatagorsk, or here from Krasnodar.) All while real Russian bombs are killing kindergarten children in Syria. …
But that’s only one Russia. The Maly Drama Theatre reminds us of another, where past wars are not justified or reproduced, but thought about, along with the repression and prison camps that accompanied them. Such thought is a precondition for making a future without any of these things.
The Theatre has put on its adaptation of Grossman’s masterpiece every year since 2007. It was developed out of a theatre school course taught by Lev Dodin, the theatre’s director. (He talked in an interview at the time about how that happened. See below.)
Life and Fate was written in the 1950s, suppressed in Soviet times, and published in Switzerland in 1980 and Moscow only in 1988. It is set in 1943, when the battle of Stalingrad turned the tide of the second world war against Germany. The central characters are Viktor Shtrum, a physicist, and his wife Liudmila. Grossman’s novel includes in its panoramic sweep scenes at the battle of Stalingrad; along the Volga river, following a voyage by Liudmila’s sister Zhenya; in the ghetto at Berdichev, Ukraine, where the Jewish population was killed under Nazi occupation; and in Russian and German prison camps.
Grossman, a journalist of Jewish heritage, won fame with his realistic war reporting, including the first report of the liberation of prisoners from a Nazi concentration camp. His first novel about the war, For a Just Cause, was published to acclaim in 1952, but the honesty of Life and Fate and other subsequent writing was too much for the Soviet censors.
Lev Dodin’s stage adaptation puts front and centre two types of anti-semitism. The genocidal anti-semitism of the Holocaust is portrayed in the last letter of Anna Shtrum (played by Tatiana Shestakova) to her son Viktor, describing life and death in the Berdichev ghetto. The play starts, and is punctuated throughout, with readings from the letter.
The counterpoint to this is the pernicious, petty anti-semitism of the Soviet elite, wrapped up with an unpleasant Russian nationalism, to which Viktor Shtrum (Sergei Kuryshev) falls victim in an early scene. To a foul tirade from the bosses of his Institute he responds: “This is how power works. The individual and the state.”
Stalinist repression is a central theme. The stage version well conveys Grossman’s sensitivity to the way that the system of arrests and shootings was glued together by fear, guilt and the destruction of people’s morale.
Those who survive their relatives are tortured by guilt; those who escape arrest are tortured by fear of it. Liudmila Shtrum’s sister Zhenya (Elizaveta Boiarskaia) is haunted by the thought that she may inadvertently have betrayed her first husband, the veteran communist Krymov (Alexy Zubarev), by saying too much to her lover Novikov (Sergey Vlasov) – and by the thought that Novikov might have betrayed her. But Novikov, the commander of a tank division, is himself eaten up by the repressive machine, for the “crime” of waiting eight minutes before executing an order to advance, in the hope of minimising fatalities among his troops. Grossman’s novel reflects on the crushing of the hopes raised by the 1917 revolution, and the relationship of those hopes, and the socialist ideals that accompanied them, to Stalinism. Here I felt that the stage version lost some of the complexities. On the other hand the novel’s exceptional and forthright comparison between Stalinism and Nazism is powerfully rendered, especially in conversations between the Gestapo officer Liss (Oleg Dmitriev) and the veteran communist Mostovskoy (Igor Ivanov), one of his prisoners.
Liss mocks Mostovskoy’s internationalist principles and forecasts that Stalinism, as it scraped the bottom of the anti-semitic barrel, would resemble Nazism more closely than Mostovskoy can bring himself to admit.
Dodin has achieved a feat by compressing into a three-hour-plus performance so many of the complexities of Grossman’s novel. One set, bifurcated by a net and with the Shtrum’s furniture front of stage, is used for every scene, allowing the action to shift rapidly from the Shtrums’ Moscow apartment, to Soviet and then German prison camps, and in one scene to Stalingrad.
In 1961, when Vasily Grossman sought permission to publish Life and Fate in the Soviet Union, a senior Communist party official, Mikhail Suslov, told him it would not see the light of day “for at least 200 years”. Grossman died in 1965, not knowing whether his novel would ever be read. A half century later, one of Russia’s leading theatre companies is conveying, developing, and expanding on, the novel’s themes. I think that’s progress: reflection on the past takes time. GL, 14 May 2018.
“So that the future can be less horrible, we need to dig up the past”
Parts of an interview with Lev Dodin, director of the Maly Drama Theatre, published in Ogonyok on 19 March 2007
Q/ Do you think the comparison [of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate ] with War and Peace [by Lev Tolstoy] are justified?
LD/ It’s the closest analogy. No accident that the European press called Life and Fate “the War and Peace of the 20th century”. Tolstoy’s novel really isn’t only about Napoleon and Russia: it’s a novel about humanity – yes, using material in Russia, because Tolstoy lived here. And Life and Fate is based on material from the Soviet Union, because in those most tragic years Vasily Grossman lived and worked here. Everything is brought together in the novel: his war experiences; his mother perishing in the ghetto; and the fact that Grossman was one of the first in Europe to witness the hell of the fascist concentration camps. He accompanied the [Soviet] army to [the Nazi death camp at] Treblinka [in Poland]. Grossman’s novel has so much to say about Russian, and European, history.
Q/ You worked on this play for nearly three years. Was that because of the scale of the subject matter?
LD/ To be accurate, I have lived with that novel in my heart since 1985, when I read it for the first time. But the work on it was related to my new course [at the St Petersburg Academy of Theatrical Arts]: I wanted to immerse my students in artistic and human material that would open up new horizons for them, make them into artists. When we started work, we agreed that there would be no performance at the end, that it was impossible to do this only with those future artists. It was course work, a sort of investigation. And for that reason we travelled to sites of former prison camps: to Norilsk [in Russia, north of the Arctic circle], to Auschwitz. We studied materials from the archives, and we re-read [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn, [Varlam] Shalamov, [Evgeniya] Ginzburg, [George] Orwell. [The play was put together subsequently.] […]
Q/ Are you sure that all this [history] is topical today?
LD/ Great literature never loses its topicality. The problem of choices, for example: every one of us makes choices, every second. Even if we refuse to make moral choices, that is already making a choice, an irrevocable choice. What could be more topical than to remind people now about morality? And our history? Anyone who fears dealing with the terrible past is preparing a terrible future for himself. And the issue is not direct repetition: the relationship is much more complicated, nuanced. It needs to be grappled with. As long as we don’t feel that each one of us is responsible for what happens, nothing will change. As long as there is a Gulag [prison camp system], as long as there is injustice – I am imprisoned in the Gulag, and I am a victim of injustice. Even if that injustice has not yet hit me directly. What could be more topical?
Q/ And did the Gulag directly hit your family?
LD/ My family – no, but, as they say, the shells fell all around us. My father was a prominent scientist, a geologist. I very well remember how in 1949, when I was five years old, my mother, sister, brother and I were living at our dacha [country house] in the summer, and we would often go to the local station to meet the last train [from Moscow]. My dad would always take the last train. And sometimes he wouldn’t be on it. My mother would literally turn white, because at that time, at the Institute where my dad worked, there were [political] meetings. They would arrest faculty members – and not only Jews – and they often did so after these meetings. We had to live through that fear of our father not returning. I still remember the name of his teacher, Eidelman, a very celebrated scientist, one of the founders of the Geological Committee of the USSR. He was 84 years old. They imprisoned him, and he disappeared. Another very clear memory is from 1956, when people started returning from the camps. Many former prisoners, my dad’s colleagues, came to see us. I very clearly remember Vologdin [a member of the Academy of Sciences]. He returned from the prison camp to Moscow, and came to visit us. My mother cooked a goose, using a special recipe. But when it was brought to the table, Vologdin couldn’t eat. All his teeth had been knocked out when he was being questioned [after his arrest]. I will never forget the scene. No-one at the table touched the goose. It was quickly removed, and my mum never cooked that dish again. My brother, who is also a geologist, was taught by Urvantsev, a very well-known academic. Urvantsev served an eighteen-year sentence in Norilsk. After he came back, we met quite often at family events. I have known many people who went through the Stalinist prison camp system. […]
Q/ You have said that during rehearsals some of your students’ parents reacted indignantly to your proposal to base a performance on Grossman’s novel.
LD/ Yes, at the beginning we had that problem. Some of the parents were admirers of Stalin, either covert, or very overt. And for some others, maybe, the theme we were working on simply wasn’t important. The mother of one of our women students was very indignant at the start. But after the dress rehearsal, she spent the whole night talking with her daughter. I think they began better to understand each other as a result. Another of our women students learned just recently that her grandad, a peasant, had suffered repression [under Stalin], and been shot. Her parents just hadn’t said anything to her about this before.
Q/ Even before the premiere in St Petersburg, you showed the play in Norilsk [formerly the site of an extensive group of prison camps]. How was it received?
LD/At the dress rehearsal, and at the two performances we did in Norilsk, the theatre was full to overflowing. The first time the actors went to bow to the audience, the whole crowd stood up to applaud, as if on command. In Petersburg I never saw such a thing. Although the reaction in Norilsk was not uniform. I saw eyes downcast, sad faces. It wasn’t only a festival atmosphere. Many people cried, and some, I think, were angry with us. Many came backstage with expressions that seemed to be turned inside out: young people; elderly former prisoners, who had been young when they were sent here. For example, people who had been sent to Norilsk from western Ukraine as teenagers, after the war. We met a woman from there who told us her story, showed us her documents. […] Q/ It’s quite common to hear people say, these days: “Why dig us the past? Everything’s there in school history textbooks, after all.” Somebody I know always tell me that the only people who want to think about these things are those whose families suffered repression.
LD/ What an awful, enslaved mentality! The past is there exactly to be dug up. The past: that’s all the experience we have to go on. There is horror in the future, that we don’t yet know, and, so that the future can be less horrible, we need to dig up the past. And study it. In Russia there are always people who don’t want to know their history, or get it all confused because they are so scared of finding something bad. In Germany, for example, not a year goes by without serious research being published on the Hitler period. Films and plays on that subject appear one after the other. Although that period was shorter, and our [Soviet] system existed for nearly a century. Maybe it’s because of that we don’t want to deal with it? Because we are all children of that system? In my opinion that’s that system’s most awful influence – a sign of the fact that it is still alive. As long as we don’t understand that the responsibility for that system was borne not only by Stalin, not only by the party, but by all who allowed that system to exist, we will continue to live in the past.
Q/ That sounds pessimistic. And if you are a pessimist, why did you put on this play?
LD/ For one thing, for myself. For another, because you can not stay silent in the face of that, that you consider to be false – for your own sake, and for the sake of those who are able to listen. And pessimism is not such a negative quality. It is a way to avoid disillusionment – although it doesn’t avoid responsibility. This was one of Grossman’s points: pessimism requires courage. It requires you to do things that optimism will never do.
■ All the photos are from the Maly Drama Theatre’s web site
More on Russian history on People & Nature
■ The Death of Stalin is a riot (November 2017)
■ “The street has already spoken, gentlemen.” The Russian revolution replayed in real time (March 2017)
■ From the Russian revolution to socialism on Mars (April 2016)
■ Russia and Ukraine called up on national service (July 2015)
May 18, 2018
All Too Common
From Solidarity Times - Free the Media, Be the Media a piece claiming attack on the Yes camps posters ahead of next week's referendum.
As well as being an organised assault on democracy, showing the contempt the No campaign have for the people of Ireland, the shortage of resources often means each of these stories is heart breaking. We heard from the couple who had driven to Dublin to pick up the these posters which they had paid for themselves with donations they had collected.
She told us:
Anthony McIntyre
Like
As well as being an organised assault on democracy, showing the contempt the No campaign have for the people of Ireland, the shortage of resources often means each of these stories is heart breaking. We heard from the couple who had driven to Dublin to pick up the these posters which they had paid for themselves with donations they had collected.
She told us:
This morning no fewer than 8 messages came in to our Facebook page telling us our posters had been cut down and destroyed all over the county.
We paid for those posters ourselves with donations. G. drove to Dublin to collect them, a 6 hour trip. Himself and a lovely bunch of volunteers spent all Sunday putting them up right across the county. And the No side organised an attack on them right across the county.
Why, they have at least a million posters across the country. We put up about 500 at the weekend.
Can you please think long and hard what will happen if these people win and get more power. Do you want Mattie McGrath and Ronan Mullen, the Healy Raes, the Sherlocks running the country? Catholic fundamentalism, is that what we want to go back to? Say goodbye to contraception, sex education, divorce, marriage equality so.
You might not care about this issue, you might not like abortion but this is not about liking abortion, it's about trusting women to make the best decision for them and being compassionate and not judgemental.
Don't let this be another Trump or Brexit. Please, please get involved in the final days of the campaign, vote yes, abstain if you can't but please do not hand any power to these people.
Anthony McIntyreLike
Crash
Christopher Owens has been involved in a crash.
Human sexuality and technology.
A trope that has become all too commonplace in the 21st century.
From phone sex, through to Tinder and robotic sex dolls, we now seem to crave the act without the human interaction. Whether that is the power of modern technology, or the human species is at a dead end (genetically speaking) is up for debate.
What's often left out of the debate is that we were warned about this by one of the greatest writers to have walked this earth.
First published in 1973 (after being rejected by various publishers, including one where a reader wrote "This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish"), Crash remains a work that is utterly engulfing, utterly unforgettable and utterly magnificent.
The plot itself is fairly simple: James Ballard has a car accident in which he kills a man and hospitalises himself. However, the crash itself is an epiphany for him:
Quickly, he realises that his sexual inclinations have moved towards car crashes and the meshing of the most base human act with the most damaged piece of machinery that most of us rely on from day to day is one that is utterly uplifting and life affirming for him:
Meeting Vaughan, whose ultimate goal is to die in a car crash with Elizabeth Taylor, sees events move far quicker and introduces James to other people who live their lives through car accidents and sexual acts.
Originally billed as "a brutal, erotic novel," Ballard takes pornography and substitutes the bodies with machinery. What we are left with is a novel that fetishises the unfetishable, and the distinction between the clean, clinical world of the machinery (which works on the basis of A and B working to produce C) and the messy, individualistic needs of humans (who work on irrationality).
This (pardon the pun) collision of two different worlds throws up interesting ideas about us humans: are we truly controlled by our desires, or are we being controlled by technology? If it is the latter, then is fucking the technology an act of rebellion, or is it a new human need? In Crash, it seems to be both.
Vaughan's obsession with Elizabeth Taylor and his desire to die with her can be seen as an early allegory for our obsession with the seeming purity and unabashed freedom that celebrities offer. By inducting Taylor into the car crash sect, there is no difference between the average person and a celebrity. Both are piled together by humanity's re-rendering of technology for their own end.
Ballard once claimed that his objective with Crash was "... to rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror." He certainly achieved this, but there's so much more to the novel than a forewarning.
It looks at how human sexuality is purely functional and fluid (James ends up having sex with Vaughan and notes afterwards that in "... our wounds we celebrated the re-birth of the traffic-slain dead, the deaths and injuries of those we had seen dying by the roadside and the imaginary wounds and postures of the millions yet to die"), our willingness to hand our freedom over for convenience (the car crash sect are almost zombie like in their devotion to crashes) and mob mentality (Vaughan's desire to crash into Elizabeth Taylor is considered perfectly normal by the sect).
Considered unfilmable for many years, 1996 saw an adaptation hit the screens by way of the legendary David Cronenberg (who had adapted another unfilmable novel, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, in 1990). Still controversial, Portadown born Alexander Walker (film critic for the Evening Standard, and personal friend of Stanley Kubrick) described the film as containing:
Walker had form for such behaviour: he heckled a Cannes screening of Ken Loach's Hidden Agenda as he believed the film was IRA propaganda, described Fight Club as fascistic as well as anti God and, according to The Telegraph, "When Jane Fonda appeared at the National Film Theatre in 1974 with a film on Vietnam, he asked if she was going to attack the Soviet regime's 'pogroms' when she went to Moscow; he then incurred the wrath of some present by being unsatisfied by her reply that she was not going to point the finger at anyone 'until the blood of Indo-China is off the hands of the American government.' "
Although Walker never called for the film to be banned, his review started off a chain of events that would lead to the Daily Mail to openly call for the banning of the film. All for a film that had its origins in a book from 1973 by a critically acclaimed author? That's the power of literature.
Certainly not an easy read but, when approached with an open mind, will leave you thinking of nothing else but it for a few weeks.
JG Ballard Crash 1973 HarperCollins Publishers ISBN-13: 978-0099334910
Christopher Owens reviews for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland.Follow Christopher Owens on Twitter @MrOwens212
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Human sexuality and technology. A trope that has become all too commonplace in the 21st century.
From phone sex, through to Tinder and robotic sex dolls, we now seem to crave the act without the human interaction. Whether that is the power of modern technology, or the human species is at a dead end (genetically speaking) is up for debate.
What's often left out of the debate is that we were warned about this by one of the greatest writers to have walked this earth.
First published in 1973 (after being rejected by various publishers, including one where a reader wrote "This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish"), Crash remains a work that is utterly engulfing, utterly unforgettable and utterly magnificent.
The plot itself is fairly simple: James Ballard has a car accident in which he kills a man and hospitalises himself. However, the crash itself is an epiphany for him:
After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident. After the commonplaces of everyday life, with their muffled dramas, all my organic expertise for dealing with physical injury had long been blunted or forgotten. The crash was the only real experience I had been through for years.
Quickly, he realises that his sexual inclinations have moved towards car crashes and the meshing of the most base human act with the most damaged piece of machinery that most of us rely on from day to day is one that is utterly uplifting and life affirming for him:
Once together in my car, with the crowded traffic lanes through which we had moved forming an unseen and unseeing audience, we were able to arouse each other. Each time she revealed a growing tenderness towards myself and my body, even trying to allay my concern for her. In each sexual act together we recapitulated her husband's death, re-seeding the image of his body in her vagina in terms of the hundred perspectives of our mouths and thighs, nipples and tongues within the metal and vinyl compartment of the car.
Meeting Vaughan, whose ultimate goal is to die in a car crash with Elizabeth Taylor, sees events move far quicker and introduces James to other people who live their lives through car accidents and sexual acts.
Originally billed as "a brutal, erotic novel," Ballard takes pornography and substitutes the bodies with machinery. What we are left with is a novel that fetishises the unfetishable, and the distinction between the clean, clinical world of the machinery (which works on the basis of A and B working to produce C) and the messy, individualistic needs of humans (who work on irrationality).
This (pardon the pun) collision of two different worlds throws up interesting ideas about us humans: are we truly controlled by our desires, or are we being controlled by technology? If it is the latter, then is fucking the technology an act of rebellion, or is it a new human need? In Crash, it seems to be both.
Vaughan's obsession with Elizabeth Taylor and his desire to die with her can be seen as an early allegory for our obsession with the seeming purity and unabashed freedom that celebrities offer. By inducting Taylor into the car crash sect, there is no difference between the average person and a celebrity. Both are piled together by humanity's re-rendering of technology for their own end.
Ballard once claimed that his objective with Crash was "... to rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror." He certainly achieved this, but there's so much more to the novel than a forewarning.
It looks at how human sexuality is purely functional and fluid (James ends up having sex with Vaughan and notes afterwards that in "... our wounds we celebrated the re-birth of the traffic-slain dead, the deaths and injuries of those we had seen dying by the roadside and the imaginary wounds and postures of the millions yet to die"), our willingness to hand our freedom over for convenience (the car crash sect are almost zombie like in their devotion to crashes) and mob mentality (Vaughan's desire to crash into Elizabeth Taylor is considered perfectly normal by the sect).
Considered unfilmable for many years, 1996 saw an adaptation hit the screens by way of the legendary David Cronenberg (who had adapted another unfilmable novel, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, in 1990). Still controversial, Portadown born Alexander Walker (film critic for the Evening Standard, and personal friend of Stanley Kubrick) described the film as containing:
some of the most perverse acts and theories of sexual deviance I have seen propagated in mainstream cinema - Crash, without exaggeration, will tax public tolerance and film censorship to the limits and maybe beyond.
Walker had form for such behaviour: he heckled a Cannes screening of Ken Loach's Hidden Agenda as he believed the film was IRA propaganda, described Fight Club as fascistic as well as anti God and, according to The Telegraph, "When Jane Fonda appeared at the National Film Theatre in 1974 with a film on Vietnam, he asked if she was going to attack the Soviet regime's 'pogroms' when she went to Moscow; he then incurred the wrath of some present by being unsatisfied by her reply that she was not going to point the finger at anyone 'until the blood of Indo-China is off the hands of the American government.' "
Although Walker never called for the film to be banned, his review started off a chain of events that would lead to the Daily Mail to openly call for the banning of the film. All for a film that had its origins in a book from 1973 by a critically acclaimed author? That's the power of literature.
Certainly not an easy read but, when approached with an open mind, will leave you thinking of nothing else but it for a few weeks.
JG Ballard Crash 1973 HarperCollins Publishers ISBN-13: 978-0099334910
Christopher Owens reviews for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland.Follow Christopher Owens on Twitter @MrOwens212
May 17, 2018
Zionism Has Become An Existential Threat — To Jews
From Tikkun Magazine Mark LeVine writes on the latest onslaught by Israel against unarmed Palestinians.
With each new death in Gaza the Israeli government is not only sealing the judgement of history as to the irredeemably racist and violent core of Zionist nationalism, it is also flashing a giant red light at Jews everywhere, warning us that the movement started ostensibly to protect and normalize Jewish existence has become an existential threat—to Jews.
What else can one reasonably conclude when a new American embassy is opened to great fanfare in Jerusalem, its inauguration “blessed” by two pastors who openly call for the eternal damnation of the Jews as Israeli and Diaspora Jewish leaders beam with pride and sip champagne, while sixty miles away young Jews, in the name of their religion, massacre dozen of unarmed Palestinian women, men, children, elderly and young with utter inhumanity and impunity.
The increasingly fascistic Jewish nationalism of the State of Israel and its supporters in the organized Jewish communities of the Diaspora is widening a split within world Jewry, one that won’t be reconciled through dialog and understanding precisely because the choice is so stark and ground for compromise non-existent. Globally there is a Jewish population of some 15 million souls. Well over half of them (about a third of American Jews, most Israeli Jews and the large majority of other Diaspora Jews) more or less enthusiastically support an unending and brutal colonial Occupation and Apartheid regime, an illegal and unconscionable dispossession of the colonized population of its lands and resources, the unremitting if spasmodic ethnic cleansing of the land, the increasingly genocidal rhetoric of the political leadership, and the insidious transformation of Jewish history, culture and faith these policies both demand and inevitably produce.
Those opposed to these policies, comprising a small percentage of Israeli Jews, a somewhat larger percentage of the global Diaspora, and the (sadly still too silent) majority of American Jews, have little power and even less room for manoeuvre, as they are squeezed between a rising tide of nationalism and anti-Semitism in their home countries and a Judaism in practice that is completely alien to the humanistic values of justice, mercy and equality which they always assumed represented the core of their identity.
We are quickly facing a moment of rupture potentially as great as that which split Islam after the death of the Prophet Muhammad or Christianity after Luther’s challenge to the Church. But with well over 1 billion adherents each, Christianity and Islam are simply too big to fail, even if they have literally split over core issues of theology and power. With comparative so few adherents Judaism is in a much more precarious position and cannot easily survive the kind of split that fundamentally divided the other Abrahamic faiths into competing and often warring factions. Quite simply, when the Prime Minister of Israel and the Jewish children of the President of the United States openly cavort with Christians preaching eternal hellfire for Jews and Muslim monarchs who’ve spent untold billions to spread the most viciously anti-Semitic ideology since Nazism then the Jewish people are in mortal danger indeed.
To be sure, many might celebrate the performance at the Embassy as the ultimate act of realpolitik, with each side winking to its own faithful as they clang their champagne glasses in celebration of their mutual power and interests. But as the crematoria remind us, hell fire doesn’t need the End of Days to descend upon us. (In fact, American evangelicals are literally giddy with the prospect that the violence in Gaza heralds the Apocalypse.)
Undaunted by the hatred of their most ardent Christian supporters, the fascist axis that has hijacked Judaism see little reason to compromise or reconcile with their fellow Jews, never mind Palestinians. They are too drunk with power even to acknowledge the opposition, other than to attempt to crush it. Netanyahu, Kushner, Adelson & Co. firmly believe that they are the tail wagging the American dog, as American professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt famously claimed, who can bend America to Israel’s will and ensure US support for even the most atrocious policies and wars.
But these claims have always betrayed a confusion of cause and effect. Make no mistake, Israel is the tail wagging to the American war dog’s rhythm, for whom the Jewish state’s worth and function have ultimately been as a conduit for untold billions in profit from arms deals, wars, high oil prices, a hyper militarized global order and the “shared values” that protect and expand them all. In fact, Israel is more like a salamander’s tail than a dog’s; it can be sloughed off the moment it stops being useful, has fulfilled its purpose, or gets the US caught in a particularly unpleasant or dangerous situation. When that happens the Jew-hatred will return unfettered, and those with whom the Netanyahus and Kushners supped while Gaza bled and burned will turn their knives towards us.
In retrospect, it is still shocking how liberal and progressive Jews have for so long enabled such intense racism, oppression and violence in their name with so little resistance. How easily and tenaciously they’ve clung to the notion that underneath all the harm wrought by Zionism something remained that could be redeemed; that the idea of a democratic and Jewish state was still possible if only Palestinians could make the hard compromises necessary to allow the Occupation to end. So strongly has this lie been been accepted by generations of Israeli and Diaspora Jews that despite massive human rights violations, war crimes, and crimes against humanity committed by Israel, by Jews against Palestinians, Lebanese, and the citizens of dozens of dictatorships and war-torn countries across Latin America, Africa and Asia whose murderous rulers have routinely counted on Israeli aid and counsel, Jews have held fast to the Jewish state as if its purity and innocence remained untouched, all that blood simply running off, disappearing and forgotten, into the earth.
Of course, this belief was never anything but a willfully ignorant fantasy, as could be easily seen by anyone, Jew as well as gentile, who cared to look. The internal logic and goals of Zionism, as an openly, self-described settler colonial movement, were and remain based on the conquest of territory and the removal of as many of the indigenous population as possible in order to ensure permanent Jewish sovereignty over it. Everything else has been little more window-dressing at best, smoke and mirrors at worst.
Yes, Zionism has been and could always be many other things as well—hi-tech start-ups, medical miracles, avant-garde dance troupes, biblical scenery, Oriental heavy metal, to name just a few—just as the United States, Australia or any of the other European settler colonial states that emerged in the last two centuries could be and have been many other things besides ruthless colonial enterprises. But they couldn’t be those things without ethnic cleansing and genocide, the sine qua non for their creation, expansion and continued existence. America’s own “manifest destiny” and “exceptionalism” tell us as much, without apology. The ongoing Nakba is Israel’s manifest destiny.
It is also true that there has always been a surface tension within Zionism about the two faces of Jewish nationalism. The historically dominant Socialist Zionist movement did everything possible to mask the urge to conquest within a civilizing mission that successfully portrayed the inevitable conflict as the result of the ignorance and intransigence of the natives and the perfidy and hatred of their leaders for a people who only wanted to make the desert bloom and bring modernity to a benighted land. Revisionist leaders, starting with the movements’ founder, Ze’v Jabotinisky, at least had the decency to be honest, declaring in 1937 that “apart from those who have been virtually ‘blind’ since childhood, all the other moderate Zionists have long since understood that there is not even the slightest hope of ever obtaining the agreement of the Arabs of the Land of Israel to ‘Palestine’ becoming a country with a Jewish majority… The inhabitants (no matter whether they are civilized or savages) have always put up a stubborn fight.”
And so when Golda Meir infamously claimed there was no such thing as a Palestinian people, she wasn’t just denying their peoplehood, she was denying their humanity, making any sort of violence necessary to secure Zionist goals legitimate. Indeed, from the pre-1948 era and particularly after Zionist leaders understood that the surest path to victory was to dehumanize Palestinians through violence to the point where the only response they could produce was a far more feeble, but in fact quite useful, attempt at dehumanization in return, with whatever violence they could deploy merely serving to justify even more violence (and more to the point, more settlements) by Israel.
Similarly, when Ehud Barak declared that if he were Palestinian he would join Hamas, he was not admitting to a sin but rather letting us in on a strategy. He understood as well as anyone that the way to continue to hold the world’s grudging sympathy or at least indulgence was to push Palestinians past the point of any possibility of peaceful resistance so that they turn to the exact kind of dehumanizing violence that would trigger Israel’s (self-righteous) “purity of arms” in response. So well has this discourse worked that even as Palestinians have always, and today continue, to engage in innumerable and creative acts of non-violent resistance, the continue to be jailed, tortured and murdered on an almost daily basis without comment or concern by the majority of Israeli and Diaspora Jews, never mind Israel’s “allies” and defenders around the world.
What the present moment reminds us is that true liberal or progressive values simply can’t coexist with racially, religiously and/or ethnically grounded nationalisms. They are two very different epistemological and even ontological systems; when they interact, it is the latter which almost always triumphs, as Trump’s path of destruction of whatever remains of the liberal American state attests. Similarly, Zionism’s myriad sins are not accidental; nor are they mistakes or excesses of a basically (or at least originally) moral enterprise. Rather, they are original to the movement, coded into its baseline programming from the start—the same “conquest of land” and “conquest of labor” that guided Zionist policies in 1909 produced the Nakba in 1948, the Occupation in 1967, and the rise of Greater, fascist Israel in the last generation.
Other than quite literally selling all their land and embracing Zionism as a savior—as Herzl imagined would happen in his novel 1902 novel Altneuland (Tel Aviv)–there was nothing Palestinian could do, a century ago or today, to prevent this history from unfolding. Indeed, if Americans, with our vast territory, wealth and security still cannot own up to the costs and continuing toll of African slavery and native American genocide, how can we ever imagine a small country like Israel, still engaged in an all-out struggle to secure and control the territory it claims for itself, will ever be able to do so?
The situation today presents a very troubling question: What are Progressive Jews, those who still put the core Prophetic ideals of our religious and cultural heritage, and our shared humanity with Palestinians and the broader non-Jewish world, ahead of the idolatrous worship of territory and brute power represented by Zionism and Israel, supposed to do? Who can we look to for support if our leaders and institutions have largely sold their souls? As attested by the near miraculous expansion of anti-Zionist Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now and other movements who have built upon the moral witness and foundation of the Prophetic voices such as Tikkun and other Jewish Renewal groups, the Jewish community itself seems finally to be choosing sides—or rather, progressive Jews are in increasing numbers choosing to make a decisive break with Zionism as it presently exists and could conceivably exist in the foreseeable future.
Whether in Occupied Palestine or the US, Jews, especially the younger generation, are standing in radical solidarity with Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, African Americans, and other oppressed communities, as it becomes clear that Zionism and Israeli policies are not just untenable on their own terms, but are inseparable from a much broader set of pathologies at the heart of the world system—whether its Saudi Arabia’s murderous rampage in Yemen, Assad’s genocide against his own people, Trump’s white nationalist renaissance, or dozens of other violent, autocratic, racist and hyper exploitative regimes across the globe.
The power of this solidarity has the potential to offer an unprecedented challenge to the Zionist hegemony within the American and perhaps even Diaspora Jewish communities. That’s precisely why, from the fields of the West Bank to American college campuses, the Israeli state and organized Jewish community leadership have declared an all-out war against any kind of solidarity activism, from BDS to joint actions against land expropriations, illegal detention, and once again, mass slaughter. It’s also why Israel’s greatest admirers today can be found among the likes of white nationalists and Arab wahhabis.
The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, facing odds at least as overwhelming as those faced by anti-Zionist Jews as he struggled against a still young Italy’s movement towards fascism, railed against what he termed the indifference that allows chauvinistic ideologies to take root and spread. “Odio gli indifferenti”–“I hate the indifferent”–he declared, explaining that “I believe to live means to be a partisan” for one side or another. He would ultimately pay for his choice with his life; his martyrdom, like those of Palestinians at the Gaza border fence, remind us that ultimately, we are all making a choice, whether its indifference or complicity, oppression or resistance.
The cries of Gaza’s Palestinians remind liberal and progressive Jews that for too long the choice has been made for them by a leadership in Israel and the Diaspora that has long acted in a manner that is the antithesis of the Prophetic Jewish values that have long been at the forefront of struggles for liberation, humanity and dignity. Zionism has now entered a terminal phase, and it is threatening to take us all down with it if we don’t take a stand. As Rabbi Hillel asked two millennia ago, “If not now, when?”
➤Mark LeVine, Tikkun’s longest serving Editorial Board member, teaches history at UC Irvine and is a research fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University and, most recently, at the University of Bologna’s Institute for Advanced Studies. He’s currently working on a collaboratively written history of the Occupation with several dozen leading Palestinian, Israeli and international scholars.
With each new death in Gaza the Israeli government is not only sealing the judgement of history as to the irredeemably racist and violent core of Zionist nationalism, it is also flashing a giant red light at Jews everywhere, warning us that the movement started ostensibly to protect and normalize Jewish existence has become an existential threat—to Jews.
What else can one reasonably conclude when a new American embassy is opened to great fanfare in Jerusalem, its inauguration “blessed” by two pastors who openly call for the eternal damnation of the Jews as Israeli and Diaspora Jewish leaders beam with pride and sip champagne, while sixty miles away young Jews, in the name of their religion, massacre dozen of unarmed Palestinian women, men, children, elderly and young with utter inhumanity and impunity.
The increasingly fascistic Jewish nationalism of the State of Israel and its supporters in the organized Jewish communities of the Diaspora is widening a split within world Jewry, one that won’t be reconciled through dialog and understanding precisely because the choice is so stark and ground for compromise non-existent. Globally there is a Jewish population of some 15 million souls. Well over half of them (about a third of American Jews, most Israeli Jews and the large majority of other Diaspora Jews) more or less enthusiastically support an unending and brutal colonial Occupation and Apartheid regime, an illegal and unconscionable dispossession of the colonized population of its lands and resources, the unremitting if spasmodic ethnic cleansing of the land, the increasingly genocidal rhetoric of the political leadership, and the insidious transformation of Jewish history, culture and faith these policies both demand and inevitably produce.
Those opposed to these policies, comprising a small percentage of Israeli Jews, a somewhat larger percentage of the global Diaspora, and the (sadly still too silent) majority of American Jews, have little power and even less room for manoeuvre, as they are squeezed between a rising tide of nationalism and anti-Semitism in their home countries and a Judaism in practice that is completely alien to the humanistic values of justice, mercy and equality which they always assumed represented the core of their identity.
We are quickly facing a moment of rupture potentially as great as that which split Islam after the death of the Prophet Muhammad or Christianity after Luther’s challenge to the Church. But with well over 1 billion adherents each, Christianity and Islam are simply too big to fail, even if they have literally split over core issues of theology and power. With comparative so few adherents Judaism is in a much more precarious position and cannot easily survive the kind of split that fundamentally divided the other Abrahamic faiths into competing and often warring factions. Quite simply, when the Prime Minister of Israel and the Jewish children of the President of the United States openly cavort with Christians preaching eternal hellfire for Jews and Muslim monarchs who’ve spent untold billions to spread the most viciously anti-Semitic ideology since Nazism then the Jewish people are in mortal danger indeed.
To be sure, many might celebrate the performance at the Embassy as the ultimate act of realpolitik, with each side winking to its own faithful as they clang their champagne glasses in celebration of their mutual power and interests. But as the crematoria remind us, hell fire doesn’t need the End of Days to descend upon us. (In fact, American evangelicals are literally giddy with the prospect that the violence in Gaza heralds the Apocalypse.)
Undaunted by the hatred of their most ardent Christian supporters, the fascist axis that has hijacked Judaism see little reason to compromise or reconcile with their fellow Jews, never mind Palestinians. They are too drunk with power even to acknowledge the opposition, other than to attempt to crush it. Netanyahu, Kushner, Adelson & Co. firmly believe that they are the tail wagging the American dog, as American professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt famously claimed, who can bend America to Israel’s will and ensure US support for even the most atrocious policies and wars.
But these claims have always betrayed a confusion of cause and effect. Make no mistake, Israel is the tail wagging to the American war dog’s rhythm, for whom the Jewish state’s worth and function have ultimately been as a conduit for untold billions in profit from arms deals, wars, high oil prices, a hyper militarized global order and the “shared values” that protect and expand them all. In fact, Israel is more like a salamander’s tail than a dog’s; it can be sloughed off the moment it stops being useful, has fulfilled its purpose, or gets the US caught in a particularly unpleasant or dangerous situation. When that happens the Jew-hatred will return unfettered, and those with whom the Netanyahus and Kushners supped while Gaza bled and burned will turn their knives towards us.
In retrospect, it is still shocking how liberal and progressive Jews have for so long enabled such intense racism, oppression and violence in their name with so little resistance. How easily and tenaciously they’ve clung to the notion that underneath all the harm wrought by Zionism something remained that could be redeemed; that the idea of a democratic and Jewish state was still possible if only Palestinians could make the hard compromises necessary to allow the Occupation to end. So strongly has this lie been been accepted by generations of Israeli and Diaspora Jews that despite massive human rights violations, war crimes, and crimes against humanity committed by Israel, by Jews against Palestinians, Lebanese, and the citizens of dozens of dictatorships and war-torn countries across Latin America, Africa and Asia whose murderous rulers have routinely counted on Israeli aid and counsel, Jews have held fast to the Jewish state as if its purity and innocence remained untouched, all that blood simply running off, disappearing and forgotten, into the earth.
Of course, this belief was never anything but a willfully ignorant fantasy, as could be easily seen by anyone, Jew as well as gentile, who cared to look. The internal logic and goals of Zionism, as an openly, self-described settler colonial movement, were and remain based on the conquest of territory and the removal of as many of the indigenous population as possible in order to ensure permanent Jewish sovereignty over it. Everything else has been little more window-dressing at best, smoke and mirrors at worst.
Yes, Zionism has been and could always be many other things as well—hi-tech start-ups, medical miracles, avant-garde dance troupes, biblical scenery, Oriental heavy metal, to name just a few—just as the United States, Australia or any of the other European settler colonial states that emerged in the last two centuries could be and have been many other things besides ruthless colonial enterprises. But they couldn’t be those things without ethnic cleansing and genocide, the sine qua non for their creation, expansion and continued existence. America’s own “manifest destiny” and “exceptionalism” tell us as much, without apology. The ongoing Nakba is Israel’s manifest destiny.
It is also true that there has always been a surface tension within Zionism about the two faces of Jewish nationalism. The historically dominant Socialist Zionist movement did everything possible to mask the urge to conquest within a civilizing mission that successfully portrayed the inevitable conflict as the result of the ignorance and intransigence of the natives and the perfidy and hatred of their leaders for a people who only wanted to make the desert bloom and bring modernity to a benighted land. Revisionist leaders, starting with the movements’ founder, Ze’v Jabotinisky, at least had the decency to be honest, declaring in 1937 that “apart from those who have been virtually ‘blind’ since childhood, all the other moderate Zionists have long since understood that there is not even the slightest hope of ever obtaining the agreement of the Arabs of the Land of Israel to ‘Palestine’ becoming a country with a Jewish majority… The inhabitants (no matter whether they are civilized or savages) have always put up a stubborn fight.”
And so when Golda Meir infamously claimed there was no such thing as a Palestinian people, she wasn’t just denying their peoplehood, she was denying their humanity, making any sort of violence necessary to secure Zionist goals legitimate. Indeed, from the pre-1948 era and particularly after Zionist leaders understood that the surest path to victory was to dehumanize Palestinians through violence to the point where the only response they could produce was a far more feeble, but in fact quite useful, attempt at dehumanization in return, with whatever violence they could deploy merely serving to justify even more violence (and more to the point, more settlements) by Israel.
Similarly, when Ehud Barak declared that if he were Palestinian he would join Hamas, he was not admitting to a sin but rather letting us in on a strategy. He understood as well as anyone that the way to continue to hold the world’s grudging sympathy or at least indulgence was to push Palestinians past the point of any possibility of peaceful resistance so that they turn to the exact kind of dehumanizing violence that would trigger Israel’s (self-righteous) “purity of arms” in response. So well has this discourse worked that even as Palestinians have always, and today continue, to engage in innumerable and creative acts of non-violent resistance, the continue to be jailed, tortured and murdered on an almost daily basis without comment or concern by the majority of Israeli and Diaspora Jews, never mind Israel’s “allies” and defenders around the world.
What the present moment reminds us is that true liberal or progressive values simply can’t coexist with racially, religiously and/or ethnically grounded nationalisms. They are two very different epistemological and even ontological systems; when they interact, it is the latter which almost always triumphs, as Trump’s path of destruction of whatever remains of the liberal American state attests. Similarly, Zionism’s myriad sins are not accidental; nor are they mistakes or excesses of a basically (or at least originally) moral enterprise. Rather, they are original to the movement, coded into its baseline programming from the start—the same “conquest of land” and “conquest of labor” that guided Zionist policies in 1909 produced the Nakba in 1948, the Occupation in 1967, and the rise of Greater, fascist Israel in the last generation.
Other than quite literally selling all their land and embracing Zionism as a savior—as Herzl imagined would happen in his novel 1902 novel Altneuland (Tel Aviv)–there was nothing Palestinian could do, a century ago or today, to prevent this history from unfolding. Indeed, if Americans, with our vast territory, wealth and security still cannot own up to the costs and continuing toll of African slavery and native American genocide, how can we ever imagine a small country like Israel, still engaged in an all-out struggle to secure and control the territory it claims for itself, will ever be able to do so?
The situation today presents a very troubling question: What are Progressive Jews, those who still put the core Prophetic ideals of our religious and cultural heritage, and our shared humanity with Palestinians and the broader non-Jewish world, ahead of the idolatrous worship of territory and brute power represented by Zionism and Israel, supposed to do? Who can we look to for support if our leaders and institutions have largely sold their souls? As attested by the near miraculous expansion of anti-Zionist Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now and other movements who have built upon the moral witness and foundation of the Prophetic voices such as Tikkun and other Jewish Renewal groups, the Jewish community itself seems finally to be choosing sides—or rather, progressive Jews are in increasing numbers choosing to make a decisive break with Zionism as it presently exists and could conceivably exist in the foreseeable future.
Whether in Occupied Palestine or the US, Jews, especially the younger generation, are standing in radical solidarity with Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, African Americans, and other oppressed communities, as it becomes clear that Zionism and Israeli policies are not just untenable on their own terms, but are inseparable from a much broader set of pathologies at the heart of the world system—whether its Saudi Arabia’s murderous rampage in Yemen, Assad’s genocide against his own people, Trump’s white nationalist renaissance, or dozens of other violent, autocratic, racist and hyper exploitative regimes across the globe.
The power of this solidarity has the potential to offer an unprecedented challenge to the Zionist hegemony within the American and perhaps even Diaspora Jewish communities. That’s precisely why, from the fields of the West Bank to American college campuses, the Israeli state and organized Jewish community leadership have declared an all-out war against any kind of solidarity activism, from BDS to joint actions against land expropriations, illegal detention, and once again, mass slaughter. It’s also why Israel’s greatest admirers today can be found among the likes of white nationalists and Arab wahhabis.
The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, facing odds at least as overwhelming as those faced by anti-Zionist Jews as he struggled against a still young Italy’s movement towards fascism, railed against what he termed the indifference that allows chauvinistic ideologies to take root and spread. “Odio gli indifferenti”–“I hate the indifferent”–he declared, explaining that “I believe to live means to be a partisan” for one side or another. He would ultimately pay for his choice with his life; his martyrdom, like those of Palestinians at the Gaza border fence, remind us that ultimately, we are all making a choice, whether its indifference or complicity, oppression or resistance.
The cries of Gaza’s Palestinians remind liberal and progressive Jews that for too long the choice has been made for them by a leadership in Israel and the Diaspora that has long acted in a manner that is the antithesis of the Prophetic Jewish values that have long been at the forefront of struggles for liberation, humanity and dignity. Zionism has now entered a terminal phase, and it is threatening to take us all down with it if we don’t take a stand. As Rabbi Hillel asked two millennia ago, “If not now, when?”
➤Mark LeVine, Tikkun’s longest serving Editorial Board member, teaches history at UC Irvine and is a research fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University and, most recently, at the University of Bologna’s Institute for Advanced Studies. He’s currently working on a collaboratively written history of the Occupation with several dozen leading Palestinian, Israeli and international scholars.
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