Catastrophe, genocide and English
Here I present thoughts about the impacts of the genocide on the UK and the English. It concerns moral disintegration and decomposition. Self clarification was my aim but handling the enormity of the events we are witnessing, I have been hard put to remain coherent and logical. Authoritative I have not even tried to be. I am also aware as I write that an Israeli/US military attack on Iran is imminent . This war,I believe, is a ‘Clausewitzian’ war, that is, like a duel where one of the combatants being mortally struck will end the conflict. It will be of long duration and may well spread to a major conflict between the West and Russia and China. These event will be shocking and may well escalate all the processes that I am describing.
“Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti”
The Genocidal Field
As a genocide escalates and widens its focus and increases in intensity, ethnic identities are evoked in all the social spaces that surround the core action. These identities are stimulated, sharpened and affirmed. Since the genocide is the effacement of a people or ethnic group, all the groups that surround it are impacted as groups. Just as the genocidal crisis is existential for the victim group and, in a different way, for the perpetrator group, it is potentially so for all connected groups. In fact all groups that are connected to the perpetration of the genocide are forced by the ‘splitting’ process that lies at the heart of the genocide to be either perpetrators or aligned with the victim group and therefore to engage in resistance to the genocide. So the genocide illuminates and intensifies the cohesion of these social groups and the boundaries that, at the same time, connect them.
The space of the genocide is structured by what is happening at its centre, the processes of stigmatisation, isolation, harassment, displacement, concentration, confinement, segregation and extermination. In its ultimate stage it consists of the destruction of the physical life of the victim group, mass murder. However the genocidal process is a complex process of long duration. It’s origins lie in the need for reorganisation aimed at attaining coherence in the perpetrator group and enrichment of it through theft of resources. The perpetrator group consists of any number of social groups that may be formed by nation, class, religion, culture, history or locality.
The way human beings identify themselves in groups varies and is fluid according to circumstances. The genocide is active in a complex field that contains groups that are contiguous with it and are linked by mimetic processes. They copy and conform to one another by adopting behaviours, sharing values and building or adapting similar institutions. Sometimes these processes are not deliberate but are unconscious. It is characteristic of genocides that, as the process intensifies, those involved in carrying out the various actual practices constitute a special group operating at a distance from other groups. These other groups could be more powerful than this special group and be in command and control of it. They supply it. They can be more influential than the group which is actually carrying out the genocide. So there is a division of labour that operates. In a genocide such as that which is being carried out against the Palestinian people the perpetrator group contains systems of contiguity that are international. The Israeli state and its armed forces are indistinguishable and this group is materially and actually carrying out the genocide. It is at the centre of the perpetrator group on which it depends. This larger group consists of the ‘West’, defined by western imperialism. Denial plays a crucial role in articulating the ‘distancing’ of different perpetrator groups from the core group that is carrying out the genocide on its behalf.
So the sight, awareness and knowledge of the genocide is held in the conscious and unconscious life of all the social groups that are connected to its enactment. Any part of the population of any group that is contiguous with the group that is being effaced closes round itself, self-encloses, tightens its boundaries. Furthermore as the genocide enters its climactic stage of mass murder the idea of ‘group death’ permeates all these connected social bodies. People will revert to, or resume, primitive regressive forms of collective life. This also goes for all groups, whether perpetrator or defining themselves by affinity with the victim group. Social media in the current situation has made this connectivity extremely vivid. Because of the algorithmic ‘bubbling’ of connected groups, the impact of the genocide has been intensified, either in denial, acknowledgement or celebratory support.
We could call the field in which a regime is active the genocidal field. The regime, the assemblage of all the perpetrator groups, becomes more reliant on the genocidal process, more obsessively committed to its pursuit as if it is a matter of its own survival. Because of the ostentatious suffering of the victim group, it may escape our attention that the perpetrator group is compelled to continue the genocide and is unable to stop itself. This is not a question of diminished responsibility, it is to do with the fact that the genocide appears to be driven by the attributes of the victim group but in fact is driven by the need for coherence in the perpetrator group. Splitting within the perpetrator group produces the social energy of the genocide. In the instance of the genocide of the Palestinian people the whole perpetrator regime is formed by the contiguous regimes of the ‘West’. The most intense mass murder has happened and continues at a slower rate in Gaza but the genocidal movement continues (end of January 2026) against the whole of the Palestinian people so it intensifies on the West Bank.
The genocide is accompanied by a massive collective delusion of which denial is an integral component. Denial is a special form of lying since it depends on a sharp knowledge of the events of which it claims no knowledge. This special form of delusion spreads more or less rapidly through the political and social institutions of the genocidal regime. Its various impacts are corrosive of social trust in, and the honesty of, the ruling social institutions. It spreads like an infection, often at an unconscious level, employing what appear to be irresistible mimetic processes. It creates at various levels of the ‘perpetrator’ formation a kind of frenzy or alternatively a deep passivity, something that constitutes itself as a stupor/inertia/torpor/numbness/oblivion.
In fact the level of torpor or denial in one sub-group of the perpetrator group may produce an extremely heightened reaction in another part of the perpetrator group, that part that recognises the genocide and is empathetically connected to the victim group. The solidarity or resistant group insists on calling the genocide by its name. It vigorously attempts to dissociate itself from the groups within the perpetrator group that is conducting, or is in support, or is in denial, of the genocide. The exhaustion of energy in those who are overcome by the denial/stupor impacts on adjacent sub-groups in the perpetrator society and is matched by acknowledgement of the genocide, producing very highly energised reactive responses.
Since the process involved in genocide is an extreme and violent ‘othering’, fight/flight responses come strongly into play. People group together in the intense need to be ‘not other’ or to exclude the other. As the process effaces the out/other (victim) group, it organises the ‘in’ (perpetrator) group. In the latter it is motivated by the reorganisation of the perpetrator group aimed at coherence but this coherence is tenuous and volatile. At the climactic stages of the genocidal process the perpetrator group is held together solely by the intensification of mass murder and group death. Within the perpetrator group those nearest the violent destruction of human beings are thrown into a eschatological frenzy. They feel they can only survive by increasing the killing. This is propelled even further by unconscious guilt and extreme denial.
The current genocide of the Palestinian people is no different from other genocides in the way it articulates connections between interlocking and contiguous groups. As mentioned above, division of labour is characteristic of genocides. One corps or special unit of the perpetrator group is directly and materially involved in the mechanics of the processes of effacement. This division of labour enables the construction and operation of ‘deniability’. The perpetrator group consists of a number of interrelated groups, all of which are variously being reorganised by the slaughter. In the current genocide in Palestine the interrelated social groups, the societies of the West, are contiguous with the ‘front’ where the immediate perpetrators are the armed state of Israel, surrounded and backed by the Israeli population. The genocidal process is a centrally focused process and becomes more centred as it escalates into mass murder and as this, in turn, escalates. The intensity is more dispersed at the periphery. At the periphery denial is more possible and this denial fosters the intensity at the centre. The genocidal energies radiate out from the focal point in Palestine and thus they achieve their re-organisational impact. In January 2026, the so-called ceasefire has been proclaimed. This is an attempt to cover (and thus deny) the genocide in order to prolong it. This has refocused the genocidal action and there has been a fluctuation in the rate of killing but an increase in the scope and depth of it.
As the rate of killing increases there is a consequent but uneven internal disintegration. There is a loss of moral bearings, in the core of the interrelated perpetrator groups. The denial spreads to lying about other things. Delusion increases. It spreads throughout all the affected perpetrator groups. At a certain point in the escalating process suicidal abandonment becomes activated at a microcosmic level. This can give rise to further delusion and this delusion is itself furthered by denial as it becomes more necessary to deny what is happening. This is because what is happening is at once more and more unbearable; morally, in the perpetrator group, and physically, in the victim group.
These processes reach a level of generalised intensity and there is the danger of a sudden systemic collapse. This is downfall or catastrophe. This shattering disintegration of the human may happen more or less violently in any part of the perpetrator group (s). It may be triggered by the military defeat of the perpetrator state. The structure of genocide and that of war is similar and similar institutions are brought into operation, usually heavily based on ‘command and obey’, reflecting an intensification of the the division of labour mentioned above. The perpetration of the genocide can only be stopped by military defeat of the perpetrator group, in other words by its disintegration. In this respect the fake peace and ceasefire is a self-conservation strategy for the genocide.
You could take any group in the perpetrator group – the largest units of which are nation-states – and a different pattern of genocidal impact would be found in each. This is to do with the different structures of ethnicity held together within the various nation states. These fissures and splits that could equally well be called ethnic components are the defining characteristics of different nation states. The relationship between ethnicity and the structure of all nation-states within its range will be impacted by genocide. The myth of the nation-state is that there is an absolute conflation of the people (ethnos) and the state. This is germane to the nation-state’s originating process, the adaptation of kingship/monarchy in its subsumption of the people. The sovereignty of the people and the sovereign are made indistinguishable. So genocide is deeply linked to the nature of the nation-state as a social formation. In the case of the Palestinian genocide the focal nation-state entity, Israel, embodies the myth of ethnic purity as the keynote of its genealogy and constitution. This mythic dimension is derived from the roots of Zionism in the English ideology.
Throughout the whole field ‘irradiated’ by the genocide we can see all the signs of panic and fear, of almost unstoppable movements towards primitive and mythical identities, enactments of hatred of ‘the other’. Justice is abandoned and ferocious police and judicial action is unleashed. People of conscience are incarcerated in a draconian and frantic enactment of denial. The ruling elite’s only wish is for the silence of submission, the absolute imposition of ‘commend and obey’. This process is particularly intensive in the UK state because of its unique, initiating or originating role in the Palestinian genocide.
The contiguities between the different ‘interlocking’ groups are observable patterns of real behaviour, utterances, procedures and rituals. From one group to another the communication is made through mimesis, real human beings in their individual and institutional behaviours copying each other either consciously or unconsciously. This is because of the hierarchical character of the systems. They are influenced by envy, denunciations, blame-attribution, displacements, reorderings, discrediting, exposing, commending, appointing, dismissing, shame and guilt.
The assumption of state power by the Israeli entity was facilitated by a training and incubation period during the British Mandate in Palestine. The Israeli state even adopted the regulations and laws of the Mandate but the sharing was deeper and more pervasive. British society governed by the UK state, is a key group in the interrelating contiguous perpetrator groups of the Palestinian genocidal process. Because of the deep historical responsibilities of this ruling group, the United Kingdom is in greater danger than perhaps any other except Israel of downfall as a consequence of its political investment in the genocide. The roots of its complicity and its historic responsibility are entangled in the deep history of the UK state.
It was the British entity that politically, organisationally, administratively and militarily shoe-horned the Zionist project into its place as the UK state gave up the mandate it had been granted by the League of Nations in 1920. The British mid-wifed the birth of the Jewish state. There was an ethical transfusion from the UK state to the Israeli state and this strong mimetic link is active and may explain how specifically the role of the UK state as a contiguous perpetrator group places itself in the genocidal ‘field’. The behaviour of the UK state in its police and judicial attacks on the internal opposition to the genocide find their roots here. The link with the long policy assumption adopted by the governing class in the UK with the Balfour Declaration was not even the start of this strategic movement.
English
But what are the specific consequences of these processes for the political spaces of the perpetrator groups. But particularly, what is happening to British society and specifically English society as a consequence of its perpetration of the Palestinian genocide?
First, it is notable that the responses to the genocide are different in the different ‘nations’ that make up the UK/British entity: the English, Scots, Welsh and those groups in the partitioned North of Ireland that avow allegiance to the British Crown. The impacts reveal faultlines that are historic. The UK state encompasses a number of contiguous groups. One consequence of the perpetration of the genocide will be a further fissuring of the relationship between the ‘nations’ of Great Britain. Nowhere has the distancing between government and people been more emphatic than in the UK. Just as cracks will appear in the relationship between the ‘nations’ so also between the English elites and its populations. The development of the British state entailed the colonial oppression of the Welsh and the Scots and their incorporation into the imperial project of the English. This propelled the formation of the fake/artificial identity of ‘British’ which was accomplished during the period after the Act of Union (with Scotland) in 1707. Furthermore, an integral part of the British Empire project has been the need to secure the submission of the imperial metropolitan ‘homeland’ peoples and make them complicit in Empire. The genocidal wars fought by the UK against the indigenous people of the world were accompanied and motivated, as in many genocides, by theft of resources. The super-exploitation (both labour and resources) of the indigenous peoples of the world was a way of shoring up support for the empire amongst the ‘home’ populations. Thus providing the perpetrator group with the coherence which is described above as the energising force in genocidal projects.
Like other contiguous perpetrator groups the English are experiencing an increasingly sharper definition of itself as a distinct national group. To some extent this is noticeable because of the rise of racism and the ratcheting up of anti-immigrant feelings amongst privileged and marginalised social groups. There has been increasing manipulation of these sentiments by the ruling group. Alongside this I believe there are signs of fractures and fissures of a different kind between substantial sections of the English population and the ruling group.
The ruling group like elsewhere consists of a core of families, dynastic connections and institutions like the Church, the armed forces, the civil service and the intelligence services that circulate around the ‘court’ and the core monarchic institutions and their state administrative factotums. These latter are the loyal servants and administrators who conduct affairs as if they were core members of the elites. They control the police and judicial systems. The coherence of this arrangement of groups and sectors is tied to a shared history of constitutional processes, loyalty to certain key institutions and principles, a way of life, a feeling about a way of doing things. This ruling group is more isolated and embattled than ever.
Alongside this destabilisation which has been ongoing for decades, there is a looming constitutional crisis. The ruling elites no longer have the ritual certainty of a two-party legislative chamber. The failures of the Tory Party and the Labour Party in quick succession has created an unprecedented destabilisation. A future election of a parliament that cannot present a coherent majority party to form a government may create moves by the ‘deep state’ (the core monarchic institutions) to overthrow the Parliament and exert direct control. A similar situation occurred in 1974 when the February election of that year produced no clear majority party to form a government. Anybody familiar with the events of the English Civil War will know about the relationship between the armed forces and Parliament and the struggle between these different state institutions. It is not just a question of the extreme unpopularity of the current Labour government. The problem is a systemic decline of popular consent and belief.
The overall impoverishment of public services in the West as a consequence of the 2008-9 crash, consequent ‘nation-state’ indebtedness, austerity is also sending substantial sectors of the population towards redistributive strategies and engaging in issues of social justice rather than moving towards racism and nationalism. The response to the initial call by YOUR PARTY of 800,000 supporters gives an indication of this.
The ruling elites have suffered other blows to their credibility. The involvement of Andrew Windsor in the Epstein circle of pedophilia and sex trafficking is an example of the moral danger they are in. Their association with the zionist entity and its culture of sexual abuse, the collective assertion within Israeli society of the right to rape Palestinians can be connected to the involvement of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack in the Epstein circle and Epstein’s close relationship to Mossad. The discrediting of the ruling elites and the potential collapse of their moral authority and thus their ability to govern is a danger for them.
The events of the Palestinian genocide are happening alongside other massive tectonic movements in geo-politics and are changing the position of the UK state. The ‘West’ has lost the war in Ukraine. The ruling elites in Europe are still pursuing the strategy of victory for Ukraine against Russia. The alliance with the US looks as if it is fracturing. The European states have committed themselves to increased military spending. This move is also based on pressure from the financial sector to boost growth and to maintain the confidence of the bond markets and inflate the European economies through government spending favourable to big business. This is an attempt to disguise an underlying economic weakness in Europe. The splits that have occurred in the European-Atlantic alliance and the reorientation of US foreign policy accepting a coexistence with Russia have isolated Europe.
However the USA is also facing decline. The increasing burden of debt carried by the US is making the US more vulnerable as China and the BRICS nations free themselves of the use of the dollar as the key international exchange currency. China is gradually divesting itself of US government bonds. The habitual imperialist pattern of behaviour by the United States persists. The attempt to solve fiscal indebtedness by protectionist tariffs, military confrontation and resource ‘grabs’ show little sign of working because the tariffs effectively tax the population thus decreasing demand and tax revenues. Military spending increases the debt further. For example, the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro designed to intimidate and gain submission from Venezuela, is a flawed strategy. It is an attempt to assert hegemony in the Western hemisphere but, because it relates to a global geopolitical alignment of forces, the issues at play may be decided elsewhere. This is to do with the declining global dominance of the US. Decisive in this may be the struggle over the development of AI between US and China. This is moving decisively in China’s favour. The social ‘open source’ model of the development in China appears to be increasing productivity. In the West with the over-reliance on the financial sector it is producing a dangerous bubble (ie overestimation of value). The new technology has caused unemployment in China but in the West the rise in financial market valuation is starkly set against the downturn in employment.
The decline of the US presents a particular problem for the UK since its economy and recent history are so deeply connected to its former colony. In all this the UK state is in a particularly vulnerable position because of its isolation from Europe and its more deeply institutionalised vassal status in relation to the USA. The people of the British Isles and particularly the English, are caught between the illusions of empire and an unimaginable future. Illusions of the imperial past are only sustained by its client relationship with the US that displaced it as the world imperial centre.
The solidarity movement in the UK has been massive and has expressed itself through demonstrations and multiple smaller, linked projects. The generation that has grown up in the new century, particularly those that were active in the Fridays for Future movement that started in 2018, have been a decisive part of the pro-Palestinian movement. The connection between the climate change movement and the pro-Palestinian movement has been galvanic and sustained. The strategy of civil disobedience and direct action has leapt across from one movement to the other. The UK state now finds itself confronting a hunger strike by (at the current time) two remaining strikers. Nowhere in the West has the resistance and protest been stronger and nowhere has the the state’s response been so violent, utilising extreme forms of legislation to suppress activists. On the cultural front, for example, at Glastonbury in 2024 the state was once again confronted by dissent. The police and judicial response is so extreme that it indicates how worried the political elites are that things ‘may get out of hand’.
The multiform struggle to gain dominance and submission by the ruling elite looks desperate. They appear to look at social organisation and governance as if they were running a slave plantation They pick off the leaders of any resistance and display punitive violence against them. This is the case with the current hunger strike by young protestors who have been incarcerated awaiting trial for over a year, held in custody and not granted bail. Their direct action against the UK state’s supply of armament to the genocidal state of Israel was aimed at the Israeli arms firm, Elbit and at a Royal Air Force airfield. Thousands of people have been arrested under the Terror legislation in support of Palestine Action.
The current UK government have been programmatic in denial of the genocide. They have continued their co-operation with the Israeli state through the supply of reconnaissance data from spy planes based at the RAF base in Cyprus; they have supplied refuelling services to Israeli aircraft in their attack on Qatar and possibly elsewhere, they have supplied arms, particularly parts for F35 fighter bombers. They have pronounced their denial of genocide and have made moves to prevent the events in Palestine being described as such. These have taken the form of government statements and semi-official utterances by senior ministers. Alongside these actions, they have failed to be clear about their disapproval of islamophobia and have been selective in their police action against hate speech. This is linked to culturally exclusive statements and policies on immigration. These statements have now been backed up by new measures targeting sectors of the population who are recent immigrants. A succession of UK governments have operated a policy of creating a ‘hostile environment’ for certain categories of immigrant communities. They have used a ‘counter-terrorism’ programme called ‘Prevent’ whose main procedural activity is described as ‘safeguarding’ but which is brought into action through a multiagency co-ordinated response to signs of what is described as ‘radicalisation’. This may take the form of the expression of views deemed to be connected to radical islam. It has been aimed mainly at the Muslim community.
The size of the movement of protest plus the impact of considerable sections of the population turning away from mainstream media and receiving information and sharing their responses through social media has deeply troubled the elites. In the USA there have been major division with the base of support amongst young people for Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. Throughout the world, populations have turned more vigorously against the West and particularly against Israel. This is why the US administration, followed by its allies has had to accede to the call for a ceasefire in Gaza. The ‘peace deal’ which was manufactured and made into a spectacle by Trump and the US administration is a strategy to disguise the genocide and allow it to continue in another form. It presents itself as another denial strategy. It also contravenes, in a basic and principled way, international law and though ‘The Board of Peace’ gained a positive vote in the UK Security Council by doing so it negated the authority of the United Nations by recklessly countermanding and contradicting other policy positions, especially those affirming the rights of Palestinians to their land and self-determination.
At the moment (January 2026) this gambit is barely containing the emerging conflicts between the USA and Israel. This ‘peace’ plan demonstrates so clearly the delusional character of the strategies of the perpetrator groups. It resurrects the colonial past in such a blatant and shamefaced way with its proposal to put a former UK Prime Minister in place as a kind of colonial governor. ‘The Board of Peace’ has privatised the regulatory and governance functions in the Gaza Strip and made it the personal domain of the Trump dynasty and the stockholders who they have appointed. This is a regressive form of capitalist imperialist developed and resembles the setting up of the East India Company and the Royal African Company.
In the UK, the police and judicial actions that have been undertaken to break or prevent the expression of support for the Palestinian liberation struggle derive from the ‘war on terror’. In October/November 2023 There was an attempt to set the pro-Palestinian protest marches against remembrance services for the armed services in the November after the onset of the genocide. The implicit call was that to be pro-Palestinian was unpatriotic. These suppressive strategies did not work coherently. This meant that the more draconian strategy of the use of the Prevention of Terrorism law was activated. Public order laws were used against the demonstrators in an orchestrated and targeted way. In one incident the leaders of both Stop the War and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign along with a couple of MPs were tricked into a confrontation that enabled the police to arrest them under these laws. However the two main legislative instruments have been the use of the Prevention of Terrorism legislation and the legislation around incitement to racial hatred. The former has been used to suppress freedom of expression through the powers it gives to the government to proscribe organisations and thus to make support for them a crime. The use of these two legislations have been increased during the Palestinian genocide.
The strategies of the UK state in relation to the genocide is not effectively creating the social cohesion that it has tried to impose. This has been attempted by the means indicated above and against the background of geo-political crisis that I have described. The cultural institutions, the universities, the Church, the Arts and the Media have, by and large, been compliant but this has sunk these institutions deeper into the stupor of denial. This is a negative energy and is connected to a profound demoralisation. However this does not mean that the state itself is in danger of imminent collapse. This could only take place if a number of converging circumstances arise to expose or undermine the power of the ruling group. These are likely to be a mixture of endogenous and exogenous elements. The failure of the ruling elite’s war strategy in Ukraine coupled with increasing unemployment and up-turn in the cost of living could destabilise the ruling group. A substantial undermining of the Israeli state and the exacerbation of splits within it could be decisive. However a lot of energy and resources are being invested in Israel particularly because of its special position for the USA.
No social change will happen without the energy of a new collective popular movement promising an alternative. Since the crash of 2008-9 there has been a substantial social movement mainly focused on anti-austerity. It was this movement which brought Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party. The leaders of this movement were created by the protests against student fees during the first months of the Coalition government that came to power in 2010. These energies though they may not have an organisational focus are still active.
For substantial sections of the population the genocide has swept away the liberal humanist pretensions that have wrapped the governing strategies of the elites in the veneer of moral reasonableness and moderation. This has created a moral vacuum and has posed new problems for the opposition to, and resistance against, the ‘governing’ class. A need to build a new morality, a new ethics has emerged. What are the visible lines of development of this project for the future? Where do we go to generate shared values and beliefs? What are the keynotes of this new voice? This is especially important since the new voice has to graft itself on to already existing values and develop itself within already existing institutions.
I said that the genocide has impacts of a profound sort on all ethnic groups that are connected to, or contiguous with, it. I pointed out that there had been a revival of what could be described as English nationalism, chauvinism and racism. All participants in this ethnic group, as with all other ethnic groups, will either more or less feel this intensification of identity, a consciousness of belonging to a particular group. Of course this may be experienced in a number of ways, as responsibility, guilt, shame, grief, exaltation, resentment and so on.
Being English
I am English and the way I relate to the genocide will be shaped and expressed through the specific cultural processes I have been brought up through and which I have grown old knowing. My mother came from a working class Midlands family and my father from a lower middle class family from Lancashire. Neither of them received higher education. My mother worked as a hairdresser and left school when she was 14. My father matriculated from a grammar school and went to work for his father’s business, wholesale groceries. The second world war led to my father becoming a pilot and flying instructor in the Royal Air Force and my mother becoming a driver in the Motorised Transport Corps. I went to a grammar school that became a comprehensive school and went on to study English at Cambridge University. I became a theatre director and writer and lived mostly in London. My experience of being English is as fragmented as this short summary might suggest. The geographical dimensions of the story are as fragmented as the educational circumstances. The first work I had on leaving University was in Paris working at a film school running an acting course. This exposure to yet another culture presented me with a choice as to where I belonged. I made a decision to return to England. At the time I believed that I would be more be more effective. I actually thought because the year was 1970 and the world appeared to be convulsed by political and social change that I would be more effective in participating in the revolutionary changes I envisaged in my own land where my understanding was based on experience and my language was based on familiarity. I believed that change would come from the working class. I had already developed a deep distrust and dislike for the English/British political elites.
My subsequent involvement as a member of a film-making collective in the struggle for justice and liberation in Northern Ireland shattered and transformed my sense of being English and increased my deep dissociation from the English/British ruling elites. A significant event in this aversion to the English ruling elites was my experience on the anti-internment protest march in Derry in January 1972 when the British Army murdered 14 demonstrators.
Has the sense of my own English identity been impacted by the genocide? I have absolutely no sense of kinship with the English racism of the followers of Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage. What then is the nature is my ‘englishness’? Are we (am I) capable of undoing the link we have to these bonds of national identity. In the case of some Israelis that I know, they have had to struggle to retain their sense of being Jewish while rejecting their Israeli identity. Am I able to retain my English identity while rejecting my British identity? How far does my own struggle link to the crisis that I perceive in the UK nation-state or social body? Is this social body held together in any way by values and beliefs that relate to that which I feel familiar and have a sense of knowing. How far does the resistance to the UK state’s perpetration of genocide involve a selective redefinition of my national identity?
I am completely sure that I am not part of the English that have abused the rule of law in their use of terror legislation to suppress protest and in their immoral incarceration of protestors who are now on hunger strike? I can look back at the history of the struggle for liberation here in England and feel the roots of my identity with the Levellers, the Diggers and the radical movement that happened in the English Civil War. I can feel an affinity with the Chartists, the slave trade abolitionists, the poets and musicians of rebellion and liberation. I believe it is important not to have English identity hijacked either by racists whether they are working people nor the elite. Rebuilding a morality for the future must involve the struggle for national identity alongside internationalist and species consciousness.
My ongoing struggle to distance myself from the UK imperial state and maintain my English identity involves a kind of continuous rupture and I wonder how this interior process relates to the larger story of the UK state. My attention is caught by the catastrophe that the failure of the UK state is facing at the same time as the processes of renewal that I would call cathartic, which are necessary to complete this perilous journey between the old order and the new.
Downfall
I have already used the word catastrophe to describe a late stage in the genocide process. Here I am not talking specifically about what is borne by the victim group which of course is disastrous and dreadful in terms of the intensity and quantity of human suffering. I am referring to the collapse of the perpetrator group. The sequence of events is similar to the structure of the dramatic movement of tragedy. ‘Strophe’ means something like ‘turn’ or ‘reversal’. It has a specific origin in the physical turn and change of direction in the movement of the chorus in the enactment of Greek tragedy in the classical period. Alongside the meaning of ‘Cata’ which means ‘down’ together they specifically refer to the downfall of the tragic figure in the tragedy. This downfall is sequential, and causally linked, to the overreaching height of the illusion of the power of the tragic figure. Catharsis refers to a process of purgation. In drama – this idea is found in Aristotle’s Poetics – the process of purgation is brought about by the audience’s recognition of, and identity with and repulsion at, the fate of the tragic figure. Aristotle observes that this recognition/identity is structured through fear (fear that we are like the tragic figure) and pity (pity because we are unlike the tragic figure). The energy of this purgation process is produced by the oscillation of attraction and repulsion animated by these emotions. By the engagement in these ‘to and fro’ movements the audience/spectator undergoes the purification of these emotions as a crisis of identity and is returned to a kind of integrity. This process reaches a climax at the moment of catastrophe. The high point and suddenly experienced low point is the disintegration of the tragic figure.
Is this metaphor taken from dramatic poetry useful? I want to emphasise my belief that the structure of dramatic poetry is a mimetically related to the way real events happen, their sequence and what their internal human affective logic is.
If there are identificatory processes that we relate to through fear and pity, through the tension between feelings of similitude and feelings of dissimilitude, then is it possible to specify what elements are subject to catharsis? In all instances in the real world as well as in the drama that which has to be purged is scarcely capable of being brought into the light of day. It must be connected to underlying forces that are liminal and only partly conscious.
The overextended height of delusion that precedes the tragic downfall in the drama is enacted in a collective denial. This society-wide denial is a combination of group intuitive repulsion and a manufactured artificial structuring of state policy. Oedipus is the king of Thebes. This is the poetic meaning, for example, of Oedipus’ blinding. It is the poetic ritual registration of his denial. But is it possible to assert the resemblance of a social body such as the UK nation-state entity to a tragic hero? At first this seems absurd.
The structure of the drama enacts the movement of human interrelationships. The figure at the centre of the drama is the scapegoat who, by gathering up within him or her the impacts of the fatal wound of ignorance or denial enacted as overbearing pride or mortal defiance, is eventually cast out and symbolically excluded. The word tragedy means ‘goat-song’. The making of the human group is in the sacrifice, the unmaking, of the ritual victim. As I have pointed out the public who attend the drama are both attracted and repelled by this figure of suffering humanity. The social function of the drama is to purge the unwanted resistance to fate. This is tantamount to the society breathing out the old breath and breathing in the new. The drama reminds us that human action is irreversible.
Downfall is accompanied by the assumption or resumption of integrity in the drama through the process of catharsis or purgation. The movement of a failure of consensus in relation to the UK state will take the form of an emotional movement in millions of people. This movement will consist of pity and fear, disgust and rage. These are not static positions. They are emotional. They will ultimately be reflective of the system’s values and how, in enacting these values, they come to be in massive discord with people’s sense of justice and what they believe about themselves and those that they love, of what they need in their lives and how they relate to the people around them. The state will be shattered by this movement. It will disintegrate.
The state is not a machine but is a relational systemic entity which consists of spaces in which human beings make decisions, where ‘performative’ utterances are made, where changes of status are enacted, where certain people are elevated and promoted, where others are ousted, condemned and incarcerated. The state is like a sub-group which has immense and powerful contiguity with other sub-groups that make up the social group or social body of the nation. It is made up of walls, corridors, securitisation, procedures, affirmations, accusations, judgements, pronouncements, orders, commands, oaths, vows, emblems and signs. It exerts its power through parades and spectacles. It is representational. It has to be seen to be believed and it has to be believed to be powerful. It works through mimesis. Crucially it can exact physical constraint and justify it. It has power over private and public spaces and can kill human beings. This is also extended into the power to nurture or to deplete life. People feel they want to copy it. This constitutes their submission to its power. The political elite as a group exact forms of obedience and submission through their command of attention. This group in the UK are currently ‘in denial’, about the imperialist past and present, about the emergence of Russia and China, about climate change and crucially (because it involves ‘group death’) about the Palestinian genocide.
These displays and procedures, the old order, will lose their charismatic power and be seen only to be the justification for extreme police brutality, cruelty, judicial bias, and hypocrisy. At this point the crucial relationship between sanctification of state violence and its execution will break. The moral decay of the current period will be seen to be the harbinger of this collapse.
However, accompanying this process of collapse is a process of renewal. Political thinkers have distinguished the objective and subjective circumstances or factors of social and political change. Movements of political consciousness act at a collective and individual level. People move from a state of anxiety about individual survival to a collective sense of human liberation.
The new will be generated within the old. Society can be made from the bottom up. Society-making involves play, role-playing and experimental spaces. Narratives and underlying forces are changed through imagining and enacting different and alternative scenarios.
What are the elements out of which we must rebuild our human society? Is our social being, our society, governed and determined by forces that are beyond our control? Are we shaped by forces that only anthropologists can struggle to understand? If our society can be renewed it will not happen in isolation from other movements by other human beings in other parts of the earth. This means that international solidarity plays a core role in this struggle for identity at a national level. This is the significance of the movement of solidarity for the Palestinian people.
Society-making
Is it possible or likely that a movement of renewal can happen in a space characterised by decline? The decline of the infrastructure and institutions of UK society and economy started at the peak of British Imperial power in the 1870s. Already by that time the productivity of British labour processes were overtaken by those in the USA and in Germany. Since the Spanish-American War in the late 1890s the USA started to assume its hegemonic role of the Western alliance, of Western Industrial capitalist domination. The two World Wars of the twentieth century completed the transfer of imperial dominance from Britain to the USA. UK/Britain successfully collaborated in the shedding of its direct imperial hold (though of course it continues its economic/financial grip) on significant parts of its colonies while keeping a special place in the Western alliance for its ‘intelligence’ and banking institutions, including tax havens. It created a subaltern role for itself holding onto some of the glamour of empire through what it has called its ‘special relationship’ with the USA. The imperial privileges and display were retained while it became a client state in the US-dominated system. This means any movement forward as a national entity is extremely problematic. Not only does the movement of renewal have to disempower the ‘domestic’ political elites, it also has to break its ties and dependencies on its imperial ‘master’. Significant sections of the population will hang on to the illusions and, often real, benefits of accumulated power and social capital, that support a backward-looking exceptionalism.
In the twentieth century the development of this imperialist transition and adjusted role was shaped and significantly impacted by the development of socialism, particularly in Russia and China. The international socialist movement had to fight Western militarism but it also had to take on the process of industrialisation. Meanwhile in the West the movement towards socialism was halted by liberal political strategies that involved economic and social policies that succeeded in diverting socialist energies by weakening the working class and dividing it from the growing middle class who were persuaded to identify with the elites. This initial post-World War Two period was succeeded after the US defeat in Vietnam and Nixon shock (de-linking the dollar from the value of gold) by a successful attempt to defeat soviet socialism and a decrease in the social role of the state in the ‘West’. This ‘Neo-liberal’ project itself began to collapse in 2008/9, leaving a weakened state system indebted to the financial institutions. The political structures of the West became more and more open to nationalist populism. The universal suffrage system had never before existed in a period of general economic decline and new unexpected features emerged in the political structures.
The roots of socialism lie in the process of ‘society-making’. I am emphasising this activity rather than the characterisation of socialism as an economic system. The determinism that underlies this latter conception leads to the assumption that socialism will replace capitalism as an economic system. Capitalism – commodity production for exchange rather use – is a system of rule that developed from patriarchy and is a continuation of it. This means that I look for society-making in reproductive processes, in the crucial ‘intersubjectivity’ that characterises the primary relationships we enter into as human beings. Society-making lies not in producing things but in generating humanity, making people, making each other. It is a reciprocal activity based on play and on experiential processes where roles are not fixed. This involves an alternative way of understanding social energy and collaboration. It confronts and displaces hierarchical structures.
The genocide in Palestine has destroyed the illusion of Western humanism. Humanist hypocrisy has been revealed to be instrumental in genocide denial. The resistance and opposition now has the responsibility of regenerating the moral and cultural basis of the renewal. We do not know where this new conception of human social organisation will come from. There are thinkers that have proposed that the new thinking will come from the metropolises. They have compared cities to factories in terms of creating the conditions where a new coalescence of social forces, people acting collectively, may come together. Where can inspired social thinking and action come from? Does this process require a kind of critical mass, a kind of generative soup of different cultures and experiences, different levels of thinking? It is on the large cities that the use of social networking can ‘realise’ itself , facilitating real face to face meetings and common actions. Clustering, proximity and quick living exchange is important.
After the downfall will there be a purgation, a catharsis, that will get rid of the detritus of the old system? How far can catharsis be a social and collective process? In Gramsci’s prophetic use of this term. He describes a movement from ‘economic’ consciousness to a renewal of species consciousness, a reconstruction of the human. I believe that young people, the generation that produced Fridays for Future, are working with this dimension and consciousness.
It is likely that the UK because of its history as the first global imperial power has experienced decline in a particularly intensive way. The initial process of the imperialism which reached its peak at the end of the nineteenth century was the colonisation, by the English, of Wales in the 12th and 13th century. This was a classic settler colonial project with the implanting of English farmers on stolen (conquered) Welsh land and the building of a network of castles (in some ways resembling the Zionist settlements in Palestine) to oversee the rule of the English. The invasion of the English part of Great Britain by the Normans in 1066 was in itself a settler colonial project – it faced its fiercest opposition in the North of England – and this led to the imposition of a ruling aristocratic elite who formed the basis of the current ruling class. The fissures between this elite and the population were given sharp expression during the English Civil War of 1642-1651. The downfall of this UK imperialist regime will take the form of disintegration, of splitting and divisions. One element in this disintegration, n the moral collapse of the UK ruling group, is its inability to deal with the implications of the pro-Palestinian movement. This movement has powerful precedents in the climate change movement and has already had a shattering effect on the political structures in the UK. This will be reflected in the genocidal field. If there is splitting in one of the interlocked/interrelated/contiguous groups there could be similar splittings in others. How similar is the ‘Reform’/Tommy Robinson-style fascist-nationalist-racist group in the UK to the Rassemblement National led by Marine Le Pen in France to the Banderist neo-fascist group in Ukraine to the AFD in Germany to the settler-led Kahanist-Otzma-Yehudit/Religious Zionist Party coalition in Israel?
Disintegration is accompanied by decomposition.not only are institutions voided of belief and effectiveness, there is a moral vacancy and deep uncertainty. It is the horror of what has happened in the genocide that will germinate the need for people to find a new sense of what is right and what is wrong. The ruling elites appear to be morally shattered. New movements of regeneration will take place from the bottom up though at first they may appear weak and to be surrounded by institutional fragility. In the current situation there will also be mutant and regressive forms like ‘The Board of Peace’ other forms of privatisation like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and movements in the corporate world to go beyond the nation-state structures and also international bodies like the United Nations. In certain ways the disintegration is being hastened by these morbid elements, old brutalities posing as entrepreneurial esprit. These forms will be riven by contradictions, exemplified most glaringly in the Make America Great Again movement in the USA. The decomposing fragments of the old order coexist with the emergence of the new and they interact. New forms of organisation and new institutions will arise. This process will happen, of course, between people, reconnecting various levels and aspects of their experience.
My thoughts about this direct my attention towards ethics. Human beings live in the here and now but morally they live in eternity. They need meaning and this meaning is not capable of being simply affirmed by reciprocal engagement with others but has a necessary dimension which is timeless.
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