Pro-Hamas Protests: Victims, Victimizers and Sanctimonious Psychopaths

by Jordan Peterson

We are now exposed to the truly appalling spectacle of widespread pro-Palestine demonstrates across the West (pro-Hamas, more truly)—particularly, although not only, in the London which is now the home of so many new immigrants. This has led to much predictable hand-wringing on the part of those who have been warning against the widespread remaking of the culture that is bound to accompany such widespread transformation of race, ethnicity and religion. Troublesome though too-rapid immigration and and oh-so-pristinely motivated policy that enables it may well be, it is by no means the main issue at hand.

There are many reasons why the Palestinian cause—and, therefore, the cause of Hamas—has attracted so much support. Some of it has to do with the careless naivete and sheer blind heedlessness of the West. We like to believe that differences in mere metaphysical and religious outlook can be easily overlooked, in favor of the shared humanity in which the promoters of the multi-culturalism doctrine do not even believe. In consequence, we fail to take seriously the very real differences between people (especially at their worst) that cause the eternal conflicts and predatory and parasitical criminal activity that keep much of the world poor, miserable and mean. We think we can wave the magic wand of goodwill, and all such variance in opinion and outlook will just vanish at the borders, leaving nothing behind but the much-vaunted “diversity” whose pursuit has become an absolute moral imperative—or else.

We also foolishly underestimate the persistence, strength and cunning of those who regard our virtues and freedoms as vices and historical accidents. Some reports have Hamas leaders or former leaders literally taking up residence in London—and certainly otherwise operating with little true constraint. Regardless of the truth of the specific claims, or the clear and present danger of those leaders, there can be little doubt that the serpentine authoritarian operatives of our enemies are now causing as much disruption as they possibly can everywhere in the major cities of the democratic world. The most germane current example is, obviously, that of the tyrants of Iran. Are we genuinely too stupid to note who, as well as what, is truly behind these massive demonstrations?

It is the Iranian pseudo-religious thugs who are taking full advantage of the current conflict in Israel, which they did everything possible to bring about and promote. It has long been to the advantage to the totalitarians who wish to cling pathetically to their power in the Middle East and elsewhere to use the Palestinians as cannon-fodder and goads in the side of the Jewish state upon whom everything bad in the area and throughout time can so conveniently be blamed, as well as the United States, which has been such a reliable Israel supporter.

We need to remember, although we won’t: the Iranian mullahs are on the ropes. Their own citizens hate them with a vengeance, and deservedly so. They are in addition thoroughly threatened by the Abraham Accords, which they are doing everything in their power to discredit and destroy. These historic agreements, long deemed impossible by an entrenched and intransigent State Department bureaucracy, brought peace and the possibility of cooperative prosperity to certain far-reaching Arab/Muslim countries (the UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, and Sudan). The much more powerful Saudis were supporting these initiatives, behind the scenes: we missed (that’s you, President Biden) a stellar and historically-unprecedented opportunity to bring them into the pro-Israel fold, mostly because of Democrat unwillingness to credit the Trump administration with any positive achievements whatsoever. C’est la vie—but here we are. All this laudaboe progress out of the 12th century risks fatally undermining the Muslims-against-everyone-most-particularly-the-Jews narrative that the bloody psychopaths inevitably depend upon to motivate the worst of themselves and their followers. Thus, it is in the clear interest of the Iran “leadership” to put the Jews in Israel on the offensive, so that use of their military and strategic prowess and ability in self-defense can be spun as—as what? That brings us precisely to the central problem.

Everyone who hasn’t lived under a rock for the last two decades understands that we are in a culture war of unprecedented depth and breadth. It has not yet broken out into full-fledged conflict, although it came close with the Black Lives Matters, with the January 6th protests, and, most recently and seriously, with the massive and aforementioned pro-Palestine protests wracking our major cities. Disturbing as that dark cloud may well be, it has the proverbial silver lining: the unquestionable revelation of the true nature of that culture war, which has come as a shock to many including the liberal Jews recently called out, albeit somewhat awkwardly, by Elon Musk. How could it possibly be that so much of Western Academia (as well as the progressives, more generally), could come out in support of the very movement that caused what was arguably the worst planned attack on Jewry since the Holocaust?

To understand that, we must come to understand the unholy alliance between post-modern philosophy and Marxism. We’ll concentrate most particularly on Michel Foucault, who is currently the world’s most-cited academic, and his joker Jacques Derrida. Foucault, the very embodiment of resentful bitterness (not least because of the alienation he suffered because of his sexual proclivities) spent his whole life bending his supreme intellect into knots reducing  all human motivation to that of power and its associated “repression.”

For Foucault and his idiot quasi-Nietzschean followers, there is no reality other than that of  compulsion and force: no responsibility, no rights, no truth, no heaven above nor hell below—nothing but the all-against-all of Thomas Hobbes. For Foucault and his ilk even those claiming to be motivated by, say, the intellectual tradition, the liberal ethos, or even the much-vaunted current Goddess of All-Encompassing Compassion Herself are in truth pursuing nothing but their own narrowly self-centred aims. Although the post-modernists famously evinced a radical skepticism regarding the validity of so-called meta-narratives or single uniting stories, they were not at all loathe to adopt this much broader version of the arrogant, resentful Marxist victim/victimizer narrative that was particularly attractive to so many major French intellectuals of the time.

History, for Marx, was best understood as the eternal battle between the corrupt haves and the innocent, virtuous and oppressed have-nots, the now-cliched bourgeoisie and proletariat. The world, for Marx, was in consequence pure conflict: his two classes of inevitable enemies faced off against each other for control of the purely economic spoils that made up all the true and real concern of true and genuine human beings (once all the religious and metaphysical “opiate of the masses” had been properly and progressively stripped away). This has morphed, under the pressure of the post-modern deconstructive ethos, into the meta-Marxism that likewise proclaims two classes of humanity, in even starker form: the victims (those that have anything and everything) and victimizers (those from whom the victimizers have stolen). This dichotomy is no longer merely economic: it characterizes every conceivable dimension of categorization, sexual, gendered (so-called), ethnic, racial, athletic, aesthetic and meritorious. Everywhere there is power dynamics, and subsequent inequality: everywhere there are evil victimizers and virtuous victims. This is the standard doctrine of the “elite” universities—faculty, students and administrators oppose it at their great peril. From those sources, it has spilled everywhere.

In this landscape of existential—and, eventually and inevitably, real and active terror—there are no sovereign citizens of ineffable essential worth, exchanging rational opinions in the attempt to bring clarity, productivity, generosity and truth to the fore, capable of civilized cooperation and competition. There are merely competitors in an irreducibly ideological landscape, clamoring for attention and fighting for power—with the worst of those developing and employing even the veritable language of freedom, rights, responsibility and human dignity for no other even hypothetically possible reason than their own narrow self-aggrandization. There is no property: only theft. There is no merit: only the definitions of merit that serve the powerful victimizers. There is no intrinsically-meaningful human struggle: there is only the brief dominance-motivated battles of mortal material beings, struggling in pointless quasi-Darwinian competition, getting ahead only by trampling on the arbitrarily less fortunate others. A more comprehensively destructive, nihilistic and inevitably sadistic doctrine has never been imagined; neither has a system of thought ever so clearly and unapologetically justified the use of naught but force and compulsion. If there is nothing except power, only a fool fails to use it.

In this nightmarish world (most truly that whose immediate precursors brought about the utter horrors of Mao and Stalin) there are only two social positions to occupy: you (and your group—there are no “individuals” in this conceptual scheme) are either victims or victimizers. This is a very simple theory. It is therefore something irresistibly attractive to the wilfully blind, stupid and ignorant, and also very convenient, to the bitter and resentful: if you are successful, in any guise, by any standards of comparison whatsoever, then you are a victimizer. If you are not, you are a victim. A rigid moral claim accompanies this act of starkly black-and-white categorization: there are only two forms of acceptable and laudable moral conduct or reputation. If you are a victim, or an “ally,” you are goodness incarnate—as is supposed to be self-evident, not least because of your loudly trumpeted compassion. If you are a victimizer, however, look the hell out: you are evil incarnate, a predatory parasite, and rightly subject to the most brutal of treatment (this becomes a veritable moral command).

Here’s a codicil, or consequence, of that demented and dangerous “theory.” This all means that victimizers can be identified by nothing more than their “success.” Remember: there is no merit, only competing claims to ability, in a competitive zero-sum landscape. There is no property or ownership—only the dominance over material goods exerted by the oppressors. Thus, those who have—those who have anything, mind you, that anyone else does not have—are therefore oppressors, at least along that dimension of evaluation. This is true of any form of success whatsoever, in any guise, by any all possible standards. Thus attractiveness, intelligence, youth, age, wealth, education, social standing and much more (race, ethnicity, religious belief) become dimensions of exploitation and nothing more. The fact that this makes literally who has any more than absolutely nothing an victimizer is always glossed over, until the mob shows up—as it has.

If you are a victimizer, remember, you have no moral standing whatsoever, and no punishment is either undeserved or too severe. This becomes true even if you are “only” a member of a victimizing group, and have done nothing wrong, other than that, as “individual” is a category that within the post-modern philosophy no longer truly exists. If you are a victim, by contrast, any and all moral outrage is justified, worthy and laudable—even morally required—even if you are merely a self-aggrandizing and vindictive “ally” of some marginalized group. The fact that such latitude in reactive or vengeful action fully opens the door for worst possible actions of the worst imaginable narcissists and psychopaths is also something rapidly glossed over or ignored by the vengeful ideologues of the postmodern left—most likely because it is an outcome most intensely desired in the blackest of all possible resentful fantasies.

What does this mean for Israel, re Hamas, Gaza and Palestine? Well, the Jews are successful. This is the source of their continual downfall. Good, properly-behaving minorities languish, performing poorly in silence. The Jews, with their social hyper-valuing of intellectual accomplishment and success, continually and irrepressibly outperform. Does this make them admirable? Not to the eternally resentful, to whom any sign of success is precisely the sign of the victimizer. Not to those who would rather assume that such success must be a consequence of the behind-the-scenes conspiracy that the Jews are always accused of fomenting, rather than a result of genuine ability and effort. Those don’t exist, remember?—not in the postmodern Meta-Marxist world.

And don’t we remember that the Jews were pilloried precisely as parasites by the National Socialists, planning to annihilate them, precisely because their success, economically and even in integrating, was nothing but proof of their theft and canniness? Doesn’t that hypothesis fit in all-too-perfectly with the radical leftist idea that success, per se, is nothing but than the consequence of the unjust compulsion and force that also characterizes “capitalism”? Isn’t it just ever so stunningly convenient—and dangerous—that such a proposition dovetails with the story of resentful, entitled narcissistic failures everywhere, looking to justify their own pathetic and often self-imposed misery, seeking desperately for a target for their consequent spite and hatred? And just how wonderful is it that the victim/victimizer narrative morally justifies the destruction of those whose success rankles so bitterly? Can you imagine anything worse than providing the worst with moral justification for their most bitter and vicious acts of hatred? And even the Jewish intellectuals who so foolishly waved the progressive banner, claiming undying kinship with the resentful and “victimized” now are beginning to see the deadly error of their ways.

The Jews are successful—in the Middle East, and elsewhere. There is no true merit for the progressives, however, to say it again—only claims to merit. There is no true innovation; no  sacrificial productivity and generosity—only theft from the victimized. Thus, according to the dictates of the post-modern Meta-Marxist, the successful Jews must be disproportionately avaricious, exploitative, and criminal, as that is the only allowable explanation. This turns out to be a very convenient theory for the Iranian leader-thugs, hoping to turn the attention away from their own failings, as it has been forever for such faux-leaders and true exploiters. It has always been useful to treat the Jews with disgust and contempt when it is time to find someone else to blame—and that is a strategy that forever appeals to the worst in everyone, and in every society.

And you might remember this: once the psychopaths can turn their sights on the Jews, with no resistance or consequence, anyone who has anything is next. An

The danger of the victim/victimizer narrative cannot possibly be overstated. It was its promulgation that gave rise to Lenin, Stalin and Mao. It was its promulgation that gave rise to Nazi Germany, and to the absolute catastrophe of Rwanda. It is a tale as old as time: Cain himself was the first victim, and his good brother, Abel, the victimizer, deserving of death. The spirit of Cain, whose second-rate sacrifices are eternally found lacking, all-too-easily becomes  Luciferian in its presumption, judging man and God alike for its failure, finding existence itself to be wanting, insisting that nothing but power truly rules. We fall continually for the blandishments of that spirit, which appeal to what is truly most appalling inside the darkest reaches of our psyches—and it is often the most “intelligent” among us (and therefore those most prey to the pride of the intellect) that are most dreadfully attracted. We invite it in to possess us at our extreme peril, nonetheless.

There are hundreds of thousands marching for the demonization of the Jews, manipulated, behind the scenes, by the principalities of evil ideology and the actions of the world’s worst Machievellian autocrats. This has happened time and time again. The descendants of the ancient Israelites are the universal canaries in the coal mine. If we allow to rule or even to move unimpeded among us those driven to vengeful madness by their envy, we are truly laying our necks on the line. We will pay, inevitably, as societies and the individuals who compose them have always paid for committing this most egregious, covetous, arrogant, prideful and sadistic of sins.

Enough stupidity and blindness, Western cowards; Western good-thinkers. The barbarians are no longer at the gate: they are inside, and they are beginning to torture the Jews. They are not simply “the immigrants,” of whatever stripe, although those still adhering for their own miserable reasons to the most authoritarian of fundamentalist doctrines are certainly contributing. They would have little purchase, however, if the ground for their protestations had not already been prepared by the miserable, prideful “intellectual” ideologues purporting, not least, to educate our children, who are instead fulminating hatred in the name of compassion, and contaminating everything everywhere of any worth whatsoever with the dread accusation of exploitation and oppression. Their bloody doctrine, disguised as compassion, must be identified, understood and rejected, before nothing remains but the blood.

First published at jordanpeterson.com.