Illustration by H Biberstein
Reject the Sadean Moral Calculus of Enforced Reconciliation
by Richard Steinhardt
This is the Sadean moral calculus: the enforced intimacy of the wife forgiving the wife-beater and crying for him— of understanding the genocider and feeling sympathy for him: “What they did to your great-grandparents was awful, Mr. Levy. I forgive you for killing my children and stealing my land and bombing my house and for torturing and imprisoning me. I bow to your racial and religious superiority.” That is what forgiveness of the Israelis for a Palestinian means. There can be no forgiveness, only justice! And this is what disgusted Nietzsche about Christian morality; it can be the morality of cowardice and capitulation to power.
Forgive the Israelis, forgive the US ruling corporate class for the millions they have killed all over the world since the last war. For the poverty they have imposed on more than half the world through their system of wealth extraction, for keeping countries in chaos and overthrowing sovereign governments that might have had the interests of their own people at heart rather than those of the West.
And so, when I went to a church service yesterday, and a Palestinian grassroots activist was there—somebody who rebuilt houses and re-dug wells, and fixed the pipes that had been broken by Israeli colonists, and tried to undo so much of the damage, whose organisation protected children from being sniped and attacked by providing school transport—when he gave his talk there, he was welcomed by the a congregation. But to me it seemed that the minister, in addition to welcoming him, preached a kind of peace that contained within it the implication of a crude moral equivalence that put the coloniser at the same level as the colonised; in the service there was a call for the victim and the perpetrator, Palestinians and Israelis, to reconcile. There is no moral equivalence, as the Christian Palestinian Pastor Muncher Isaac explains.
Be a good little uncle Tom. Be a good person; be a Christian and forgive the perpetrator or else. Or else you will get labelled by the ruling class of the West as an intolerant dangerous revolutionary who will upset the applecart. In fact, if you do not forgive the people who have killed your children, who have tortured you, who have stolen almost everything from you, who have tormented you for decades—if you do not forgive them—then the billionaire owned press in the West and the Western states controlled by their oligarchic establishments and the big corporations will make sure you are labelled a terrorist and they will declare open season on you.
My mother was a feminist, and in 1970 wrote an article for Transition magazine called ‘Women are the Slaves of Slaves’. How should the slave in a hierarchical society express his freedom, power and agency? By bullying and enslaving in turn? Freedom framed in Sadean psychosexual terms as the power to abuse!
And so, for example, if we remember the literature of the angry working class of John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe, whose characters beat their women and mistreated them in order to express their feelings of anguish and frustration. They were only asking to be understood—usually while wearing a string vest. In On The Waterfront with Marlon Brando, it was expected that we would empathise with the femicide played by Marlon Brando, and to suspect (in some dark corner of the minds) that Blanche Dubois had it coming.
Feel sorry for the slaves of slaves because they are exploited and abused and this is why they too exploit and abuse in turn. In the books of Dostoevsky, and in life, the drunken worker comes home and beats up his family. The chain of victimhood is lengthy; the stronger and older children bully and beat and abuse the weaker and younger children, and so on and so on.
Production of Look Back in Anger at Tübingen. December 1958. Photograph Dietrich Göhner, Wikimedia Commons
For many years, the Marquis de Sade has been presented as some kind of respectable existentialist philosopher. Time it seems, made him less reprehensible. This is what I gathered without ever being inspired to read him from cover to cover. But I read extracts to try and understand in what way he could possibly be considered to be an original thinker, or a philosopher. He is revered, it seems, by many. I was viewing him, and condemning him, from my mother’s feminist viewpoint. Was I really being too being narrow-minded?
What is this Sadean philosophy? Was the Marquis de Sade really the herald of sexual freedom? Perhaps the Marquis de Sade opened up ideas about the unconscious and the id, perhaps he revealed that there are many kinds of sexuality, and that the possibilities of sex are much broader than those previously considered possible or acceptable in what was once polite society. Was he a herald of sexual freedom despite the bondage gear?
Essentially, Sadean philosophy is the enforcement of intimacy. It is the bully forcing his victim to understand his pain and motivations, with a faint possibility that the bully will reciprocate and repent. “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” To me, Sadean philosophy means this: the perpetrator demands forgiveness from the victim who in turn acknowledges him as superior and more deserving. Is that a bowdlerisation of a deeply sophisticated Sadean philosophy. Should I try to understand Marquis’ motivations better, to please him?
And so the white collaborators with the white apartheid regime, and the whites in South Africa demanded forgiveness from the people they colonised, tortured, killed, enslaved, and separated from their families. In South Africa, not only did white Apartheid supporting South Africans demand forgiveness (and they got it in the form of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) but, with support of western backers, they also demanded that they be allowed to keep everything they had stolen (and were allowed to do so). They refused to pay any kind of indemnisation or reparation. Now, this is the Sadean philosophy manifested in politics.
It is the perpetrator, the Apartheid state, the Israeli state in a sort of inverted moral calculus, demanding forgiveness and understanding and redemption without truly recompensing the victim.
Jeffrey Benzien, apartheid-era policeman. Screenshot credit, TRC broadcast
The thief goes up to someone in the street and stabs them to death and then, in court his lawyer explains: “Well, he’s had such a hard life, and really needed the money, and he had a drug habit, and I didn’t know what he was doing. Forgive him.” In this context, forgiveness of Zionism and Israelis is simply a form of moral cowardice in the face of aggressive power—forgiveness is a kind of tactical retreat.
Once, my mother’s senses slightly numbed by the morphine she was taking for her cancer, my hippie uncle, in response to one of her statements, started lecturing her on forgiveness, on how hatred only hurts the person who hates and how forgiveness releases you, and how he had felt that he was mistreated by his stepmother and so he went and forgave her and was liberated from his feelings of anger towards her. At this point, my mother, who would normally not have responded the way she did, said, “Listen, Mike—because Mike was always like a younger brother (when she first met him, he was only 14 and she was 20)”.
‘Listen Mike, sometimes it’s healthy to hate. I hate the people who put me in prison, I hate the people who killed my grandmother in a concentration camp. I hate them, and sometimes it’s healthy to hate.”
The people at the centre in the church preaching to the Palestinians and telling them to forgive the Israelis—what right do you, the liberal heirs to the British Empire, have to lecture and demand that Palestinians forgive Israelis?
And so, in this service, the liberals of the church offered sympathy and called for justice—the refrains went: “You’re a god of justice.’ ‘Resist evil, don’t despair, act humbly, bear witness to uncomfortable truths, have the courage to speak”. In a song that we were required to sing a response to a call to peace in both Arabic and in Hebrew. We were asked in verse to help reconcile Palestinian and Israeli.
Think of the implications of that. The word Israeli is offensive, just as the word Rhodesia is offensive. The Israelis are not settlers, they are colonialists. Let’s get that straight. To ask for a reconciliation between Palestine and Israel is like asking for Zimbabwe and Rhodesia to reconcile. Such a scheme, a two state solution, is immoral. To suggest Israelis and Palestinians reconcile is tactical retreat; perverse and Sadean. Jews, Christians and Muslims will only ever be reconciled in equality in a single state of Palestine, and the Israeli perpetrators and their western backers must be brought to justice.
The answer to colonisation is decolonisation, not rapprochement..
Richard Steinhardt is a committed socialist and a radical humanist and has published in the Morning Star and a variety of other communist and socialist publications. He believes that human conscience and understanding should always precede dogma and deterministic formulas posturing as ‘social science’.
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