A couplet of Bedil

This is a couplet of Bedil-

Zi khūd bih yād-i nigāhī ki mīravī, Bīdil

Ki az ghubār-i tū būy-i Firang mī-āyad

From yourself, to the memory of that glance, O Heartless!

Departing pay thanks

Such that from your grave dust arises, artless,

the fragrance of the Franks.

The Sufi gives thanks to God or the Spiritual preceptor at the time of death. Musk, associated with desire, is the scent associated with the Franks (Europe).

Edward Said on Netanyahu & Terrorism.

Terrorism works if those it is directed at surrender, run away, or retaliate so asymmetrically as to prevent sensible deals being done thus making 'pay-for-slay' a lucrative profession. It goes without saying that moral inversion ensures that virtue signallers will end up celebrating the homicidal maniacs. This in turn ensures that the silent majority will side with those in the counter-terrorism 'mowing the lawn' business. 

A separate subject is random violence to signal preference intensity- e.g. shooting up the local kindergarten to protest J.K Rowling. 

Professional terrorism quickly morphs into organized crime starting with extortion & moving into drug trafficking, arms smuggling & most atrociously of all, pirating videos of Jennifer Aniston romcoms. 

In 1986 Edward Said reviewed Netanyahu's book titled 'Terrorism- How the West can Win' for the Arab Studies Quarterly. At the time Netanyahu was Israel's Ambassador to the UN

As a word and concept, "terrorism" has acquired an extraordinary status

in American public discourse.

It had even higher status for the Palestinians & their Arab allies. The PLO assassinated a senior Palestinian official in Cairo. The gunman stopped to lick the blood of the slain man. Clearly, there was some atavistic belief in the magical powers of doing evil shit.  

It has displaced Communism as public enemy number one,

Not yet. Art Malik was the Afghan ally of James Bond in 1987. He was the villainous terrorist in Tru e Lies in 1994. 

although there are frequent efforts to tie the two together. It has spawned uses of language, rhetoric and argument that are frightening

terrorism is frightening because it kills people. Said shits himself because of 'rhetoric'.  

in their capacity for mobilizing opinion, gaining legitimacy and provoking various sorts of murderous action.

Like killing killers.  

And it has imported and canonized an ideology with origins in a distant conflict,

the Crusades?  

which serves the purpose here of institutionalizing the denial and avoidance of history.

Universities have Departments of History. But the Government has an Institute for telling History to fuck the fuck off.  

In short, the elevation of terrorism to the status of a national security threat

e.g. 9/11. Sadly, no Palestinians were involved. They had gone soft.  

(though more Americans drown in their bathtubs, are struck by lightning or die in traffic accidents)

Death should be abolished.  

has deflected careful scrutiny of the government's domestic and foreign policies.

Smart people were paid to do that. Professors of worthless shite weren't.  

Whether the deflection will be longstanding or temporary remains to be seen,

Longstanding. Muslims be kray-kray.  

but given the almost unconditional assent of the media, intellectuals and policy-makers to the terrorist vogue, the prospects for a return to a semblance of sanity are not encouraging.

Coz Muslims be kray-kray.  

I hasten to add two things, however, that are. The noisy consensus on our

Libyan adventures is, or seems to be, paper thin.

Bombing Qadaffi brought the fellow to his senses. Sadly, bringing him down created a worse situation. 

The few dissenting voices are a good deal more effective in stimulating discussion and reflection (which on their own, alas, cannot prevent the destruction we are capable of unleashing) than one might have thought. A small instance of what I mean occurred recently during a Phil Donahue show whose subject was the April 14 raid on Libya.

Donahue began the show by asking the audience for their opinion; he received

an almost total, even enthusiastic, endorsement of "our" righteous strike. Two

of his guests were Sanford Ungar and Christopher Hitchens, who, once they

got going, managed quite rapidly to extend the discussion beyond the audience's

unexamined assumptions and patriotic bombast. By the end of the hour, the

kicking of Libyan ass in revenge for terrorism seemed to be a less agreeable,

more troubling exercise than when the program began.

Said gets terrorized by rhetoric. Watching Donahue isn't supposed to cause you to shit your pants. As Said says, this is a disagreeable and troubling outcome.  

The second source of encouragement is related to the first. The obvious case

to be made against the ugly violence and disruptions caused by desperate and

often misguided people has little sustainable power once it is extended to in-

clude gigantic terror networks, conspiracies of terrorist states or terrorism as

a metaphysical evil.

It is a nuisance. It can be curbed. Torture & kill the families of terrorists. Be like China- 're-educate' entire populations in Concentration Camps. Genocide works too.  

For not only will common sense rise up at the paucity

of evidence for these preposterous theories,

Said lacked common sense. That's why he was teaching nonsense to imbeciles.  

but at some point (which is not

yet near enough) the machinery for pushing the terrorist scare will stand ex-

posed for the political and intellectual scandal that it is.

Terrorism is self-defeating. That is why the Israelis gave it up. Those who didn't became plagued by their own Frankenstein's monster.  

The fact is that most, if not all, states use dirty tricks, from assassinations and bombs to blackmail.

But the US & Israel have nukes. Sponsoring terrorism might get you, not just invaded, but nuked to arma-fucking-geddon.  

(Remember the CIA-sponsored car bomb that killed eighty people in the civilian

quarter of West Beirut in early 1984?)

No, because it happened in March 1985. The Saudis paid off Fadlallah after failing to kill him.  

The same applies to radical nationalists, although we conveniently overlook the malfeasance of the bands we support.

We want to kill our enemies & are happy if our friends do it for us. Also we wipe our own bums, not the bums of strangers. How very strange! 

For the present, however, the wall-to-wall nonsense about terrorism can in-

flict grave damage.

It can cause Said to shit himself while watching Donahue.  

The difference between today's pseudoscholarship

like that of Said 

and expert jargon about terrorism and the literature about Third World national liberation guerrillas two decades ago is interesting.

No it isn't.  

Most of the earlier material was subject to the slower and therefore more careful procedures of print;

Journalists dashed off such books quickly enough. So did 'academics'. Soldiers were a different kettle of fish. Some of their work looks quite good at first glance. But that is just spit & polish

to produce a piece of scholarship on, say, the Vietcong you had to go through the motions of exploring Vietnamese history, citing books, using footnotes

i.e. spend a couple of hours in the library

- actually attempting to prove a point by developing an argument. This scholarship was no less partisan because of those procedures, no less engaged in the war against the

enemies of "freedom," no less racist in its assumptions; but it was, or at least

had the pretensions of, a sort of knowledge.

If it made testable predictions, it was knowledge till proven otherwise. If it was mere paranoid ranting- like Said's- it wasn't.  

Today's discourse on terrorism is an altogether more streamlined thing.

The same people were doing it under Reagan as had done it under Nixon.  

Its scholarship is yesterday's newspaper or today's CNN bulletin. Its gurus - Claire Sterling, Michael Ledeen, Arnaud de Borchgrave - are journalists with obscure, even ambiguous, backgrounds.

Said had obscured his own background. He was from Cairo not Jerusalem- though he was born there because his parents believed Egyptian hospitals were shit. In Jerusalem, there were good Jewish midwives & doctors.  

Most writing about terrorism is brief, pithy, totally devoid of the scholarly armature of evidence, proof, argument.

i.e. it was like Said's own dreck.  

Its paradigm is the television interview, the spot news announcement, the instant gratification one associates with the Reagan White House's "reality time," the evening news.

There were plenty of such TV interviews in the Sixties.  

This brings us to the book at hand, Terrorism: How the West Can Win , edited

and with commentary, weedlike in its proliferation, by Benjamin Netanyahu,

the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations.

Netanyahu is now occupying a goodly swathe of Lebanon while bombing the shit out of Iran.  

A compilation of essays by forty or so of the usual suspects - George Shultz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Lord Chalfont, Claire Sterling, Arthur Goldberg, Midge Decter, Paul Johnson, Edwin Meese 3d, Jean- François Revel, Jack Kemp, Paul Laxalt, Leszek Kolakowski,

etc. -

some of whom had genuine influence. They didn't teach Literature to cretins.  

Terrorism is the record of a conference held two years ago at the Jonathan

Institute in Washington, Jonathan Netanyahu being Benjamin's brother, the

only Israeli casualty of the famous raid on Entebbe in 1976. (It is worth noting

that victims of "terrorism" like Netanyahu and Leon Klinghoffer get institutes

and foundations named for them to say nothing of enormous press attention,

whereas Arabs, Moslems and other nonwhites who die "collaterally" just die,

uncounted, unmourned, unacknowledged by "us.")

It is also noteworthy that few American Presidents have praised Hitler or Tojo. How very strange!  

The sections into which the book is divided roll forth with a reassuringly

steady acceleration:

In other words, the book serves its purpose quite well.  

"The Challenge to the Democracies" and "Terrorism and

Totalitarianism" are succeeded by (of course) "Terrorism and the Islamic

World," which in turn brings forth "The International Network" and "Terrorism

and the Media." These are followed by "The Legal Foundations for the War

Against Terrorism" and "The Domestic Battle," yielding in place to the final,

the biggest, the choicest subject of all, "The Global Battle." Compared with

earlier works on the subject (for instance, Walter Laqueur's Terrorism)

Lacquer was a smart Israeli. His 'Last days of Europe', published in 2007, warned of creeping Islamization.  

this one has shed all the introductory attempts at historical perspective and cultured con-

text.

Because it was obvious that A-rabs be kray kray. Their culture consisted of chopping off heads & licking the blood.  

Terrorism is now a fully formed object of more or less revealed wisdom.

There are some low-level oddities about this book that should be noted quick-

ly. Very few efforts are made to convince readers of what is being said: sources

and figures are never cited; abstractions and generalizations pop up everywhere;

and, except for three essays on Islam, historical argument is limited to the single

proposition that terrorism has never before presented such a threat to "the

democracies." I was also struck that the verb in the book's subtitle, How the

West Can Win , doesn't seem to have an object: Win what? one wonders.

The War on Terror. There's a reason Netanyahu is the longest serving Israeli PM. Now Vance is saying he tricked Trump into the Iranian quagmire. You've got to be pretty smart to manipulate POTUS. 

So great is the number of contributors, so hortatory the tone, so confident and

many the assertions, that in the end you retain little of what has been said,

except that you had better get on with the fight against terrorism, whatever

Netanyahu says it is.

Bibi is a friggin genius!  

No wonder, then, that Mario Cuomo, who consults on foreign policy with

Netanyahu, an official of a foreign government, has endorsed the book in a

jacket blurb, urging "presidents, premiers, governors, mayors," to read it for

its startlingly "valuable lessons": that "state-sanctioned international terrorism

is purposeful and often conspiratorial, and that the world's democracies are

targets of terorism."

Bibi had ingratiated himself with both parties. He was only 37 years old.  

If Cuomo's presence in this august company is designed

to make him appear serious and presidentabile by association, he really ought

to reconsider for a moment.

He should take advise from a shithead. 

Because the whole book is unfortunately staked

on the premise that the Western democracies and their leaders are gullible,

soft and stupid,

which is what Vance is now saying. Bibi bamboozled my boss!  

a condition whose only remedy is that they abandon their

"Western" essence and turn violent, hard and ruthless.

Like cowboys? John Wayne was Chinese- right?  

And if,in addition, they could be led by the Netanyahu family, Yitzhak Rabin and Moshe Arens (all of them contributors to How the West Can Win), their successful transfigu-

ration would be assured. At that point, however, would a liberal Mario Cuomo

stand any chance at all?

He was right not to stand. The Dems needed 'Workfare' Clinton not an East Coast tax & spend liberal. 

In fact, Terrorism: How the West Can Win is a book about contemporary

American policy on only one level. It is equally a book about contemporary

Israel, as represented by its most unyielding and unattractive voices.

Those are the voices which prevailed- thanks to terrorism.  

An attentive reader will surely be alerted to the book's agenda from the outset,

The good thing about the book is that the title says it all. You don't have to read it.  

when Netanyahu, an obsessive if there ever was one,

So obsessive that he has run Israel for 18 years 

asserts that modern terrorism emanates from "two movements that have assumed international prominence in the second half of the twentieth century, communist totalitarianism and Islamic (and Arab) radicalism." Later this is interpreted to mean, essentially, the KGB and the Palestine Liberation Organization, the former much less than

the latter, which Netanyahu connects with all nonwhite, non-European anti-

colonial movements, whose barbarism is in stark contrast to the nobility and

purity of the Judeo-Christian freedom fighters he supports.

Netanyahu's party- Likud- was in alliance with the Labour party. In 1985, Reagan made financial aid conditional on economic reform (the Stabilization plan) & Israel signed a free trade agreement with the US. This fundamentally changed how Israel was perceived by its neighbours. As it turned into an affluent knowledge economy, Arab countries felt that it would not seek to grab territory so as to achieve fiscal viability.  

Unlike the wimps who have merely condemned terrorism without defining

it, Netanyahu bravely ventures a definition: "terrorism" he says, "is the deliberate

and systematic murder, maiming, and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear

for political purposes." But this powerful philosophic formulation is as flawed

as all the other definitions, not only because it is vague about exceptions and

limits but because its application and interpretation in Netanyahu's book de-

pend a priori on a single axiom: "we" are never terrorist; it's the Moslems, Arabs

and Communists who are.

Said is putting words into Netanyahu's mouth. The fact is, Bibi wanted to keep a distance between himself & Begin & the terrorists of the Stern gang. Still, the Israelis gave up killing each other so as to focus on bread & butter issues. The Arabs didn't.  

The view is as simple as that, and it goes back in time to the fundamental

and inaugurating denial in Israeli history: the buried fact that Israel came to

exist as a state in 1948 as a result of the dispossession of the Palestinians.

Israel had no choice but to side with the Allies. Sadly, the Grand Mufti sided with Hitler. To the victors go the spoils. The British thought the Jews might create a fiscally viable state. The Palestinians were incapable of any such thing. This remains true to this day. 

Said is silent about the dispossession of the First Nations by Europeans.  

In the early 1970s there was, I believe, a subliminal recognition on the part of

Israel's leaders that no conventional military option existed against the Palestin-

ians, who number 650,000 inside Israel, 1.3 million in Gaza and the West Bank

cheap labour- nothing wrong in that.  

and 2 million in exile,

their hosts would soon turn against them 

and that therefore they would have to be done away with by other means.

Bore them to death by getting them to read Said's shite. 

That recognition was certainly the result of the emergence

of post- 1967 Palestinian nationalism as a force resisting Israel's occupation of

historical Palestine in its entirety.

It failed in its entirety.  

The principle of "armed struggle" derives from the right of resistance ac-

corded universally to all peoples suffering national oppression.

Like the right of resistance of the American First Nations.  

Yet like all peoples (including, of course, the Jews) the Palestinians resorted on occasion

to spectacular outrages, in order to dramatize their struggle and to inflict pain

on an unremitting enemy.

They failed. Pay for slay backfires if Israel trades blood for land.  

This, I have always believed, was a political mistake with important moral consequences.

It was a necessity. If Palestinians become peaceful they might prefer to live under Israeli rule. Their own politicians are utterly shit.  

Certainly Israeli violence against Palestinians has always been incomparably greater in scale and damage. But the tragically fixated attitude toward "armed struggle" conducted from exile and the relative neglect of mass political action and organization inside Palestine

such action & organisation would focus on bread & butter issues. It would end with integration into Israeli society.  

exposed the Palestinian movement, by the early 1970s, to a far superior Israeli military

and propaganda system, which magnified Palestinian violence out of proportion to the reality.

The reality was worse in Jordan & then Lebanon & so forth. Nobody wants Palestinians.  

By the end of the decade, Israel had co-opted U.S. policy, cynically exploited Jewish fears of another Holocaust and stirred up latent Judeo-Christian sentiments against Islam.

Not really. The Americans wanted the Rodgers Plan & a path back to pre-'67 borders though maybe the Golan heights would have to be annexed for military reasons.  

An interesting article by the Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk in the

February 1986 issue of Le Monde Diplomatique suggests that it became a con-

scious aim of Israeli policy in the mid-1970s to delegitimize Palestinian national-

ism in toto by defining its main expression - the PLO - as terrorist, the better

to be able to ignore its undeniable claims on Israel.

Not to mention its claim on Jordan, Lebanon etc. Assad, of Syria, had turned against the PLO by 1976.  

The major consequence of this policy was, of course, the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, allegedly carried out to defeat terrorism but in reality designed to settle the fate of the

West Bank and Gaza, particularly given the fact that the PLO had scrupulously

observed a cease-fire between July 1981 and June 1982.

It is believed that the Abu Nidal group carried out the attempted assassination of an Israeli diplomat which was the cause of the war.  The war was a failure because Maronites are crazy mofos. The Lebanese Shia turned out to be a far more formidable opponent than the PLO.  

Yet one of the complexities of the 1982 invasion was that it showed the West

a side of Israel hitherto well hidden.

That was the side people liked. 

All the more reason, therefore, to efface the picture of Sabra and Shatila

where Lebanese Christians took revenge for some previous massacre 

by waging a full-scale ideological and cultural battle against terrorism - a battle whose main thrust has been, first, its selectivity ("we" are never terrorists no matter what we may have done; "they" always are and always will be), and second, its wholesale attempt to obliterate history, and indeed temporality itself.

This so terrifies Said that he shits his pants again.  

For the main thing is to isolate your enemy from

time, from causality, from prior action, and thereby to portray him or her as

ontologically and gratuitously interested in wreaking havoc for its own sake.

Very true. That was Eisenhower's strategy. Churchill couldn't understand it because he thought 'ontology' was about the study of ontes- which is what camels are called in Bangalore, where Churchill was a subaltern.  

Thus if you can show that Libyans, Moslems, Palestinians and Arabs, generally

speaking, have no reality except that which tautologically confirms their ter-

rorist essence as Libyans, Moslems, Palestinians and Arabs, you can go on

to attack them and their "terrorist" states generally, and avoid all questions

about your own behavior or about your share in their present fate.

You can avoid all questions from shitheads by telling them to fuck the fuck off.  

In the words of Benjamin Netanyahu:

The root cause of terrorism lies not in grievances but in a disposition toward un-

bridled violence. This can be traced to a world view which asserts that certain

ideological and religious goals justify, indeed demand, the shedding of all moral

inhibitions. In this context, the observation that the root cause of terrorism is

terrorists is more than a tautology.

It is a policy prescription. Kill terrorists. Kill their families. Kill people who might become terrorists. Suddenly, you run out of terrorists though you may now face a proper army.  

To reduce the whole embroiled history that connects "us" with terrorists (or

Israelis with Palestinians) to Midge Decter's tiny, scornful phrase, "the theory

of grievances," is to continue the political war against history, ours as well as

theirs, and leave the problem of terrorism unsolved.

Netanyahu knows how to wage actual war. Said would get confused & think one should bomb the fuck out of the History Department/ 

Consider now the rigorous selectivity of this approach. Julie Flint, a reporter

for The Guardian of London, described an Israeli intervention in Lebanon in

early March of this year, just as Farrar, Straus was getting the Netanyahu com-

pilation ready for the bookstores. Looking for two missing Israeli soldiers, an

Israeli military unit accompanied by South Lebanese Army men (Israeli

mercenaries) entered the village of Shakra: "Throughout the week, every day

at daybreak, the Israelis herded all Shakra's men into the courtyard of the local

school for interrogation. 'We've spent the whole time sitting on the ground,'

Mr. Nassar [a young merchant in the town, just returned from several years'

absence] said. 'If we stood up they hit us.'" Flint's report continues in terrifying

detail;

Said just shat himself again.  

I shall cite it here at length because it is not likely to be found in any

American publication, so powerful are the restraints against printing material

that openly discredits the Israelis and compromises their antiterrorist stance.

The point about terrorism is that it licenses in advance any and every evil shit. Clint Eastwood played 'Dirty Harry' not 'Squeaky Clean Harry'.  

It should be set against the items regularly produced by the U.S. media that

purport to describe the U.S. -Israeli view of "terrorism," for example, the hand-

outs given to and dutifully reproduced by Thomas Friedman of the New York

Times.

As opposed to the hand-jobs Said dutifully supplied to Arafat.  

(A particularly egregious instance was an article on February 16, 1986,

in which we were treated to such solecisms as the Israeli intelligence notion

of the "terrorilla.")

Neologism not solecism. The Israelis were trying to convey the notion that an insurgent force may operate like both a rural guerrilla army as well as a cell-based urban terrorist network. Why? My guess is that some in the Israeli defence establishment want to annex southern Lebanon and displace its indigenous population. One can either exchange land for peace or exchange war for land. Forty years after Said's article, we are still guessing

The evidence from Shakra undermines, to say the least, Netanyahu's definition of terrorism as applied exclusively to the PLO and the KGB:

he defined terrorism as the deliberate targeting of innocents as opposed to collateral civilian casualties or action taken against hostile populations in occupied territory. There is a legal angle to this. Bibi isn't a lawyer but has Masters in Management. There are ways to break the law while minimising 'command responsibility'.  

The Irish [UN] troops tried to send in water, milk and oranges, but the Israelis

and the SLA men threw it all on the ground. Then on Friday, the routine changed:

men, women and children - the youngest a day-old baby - were all locked in the

courtyard and interrogated in two schoolrooms. Villagers say the first interro-

gation was with Israeli soldiers and the second with SLA thugs - in a room where

bloodstains were still to be seen last week on the floor and on two school desks.

Scattered all over the small room were objects villagers said were used in the

interrogation - chair legs, wooden sticks, cigarette butts in ash trays still sitting

on electric stoves, electric coils, and nails with which the interrogators reportedly

pierced ears. Throughout the day, the Irish were refused access to the detainees,

although screams could be heard and several people could be seen badly hurt

in the schoolyard. In the late afternoon, five men were thrown into the street

outside the school, still crying and some unable to stand upright.

They had been brutally sodomized. The Irish- having been buggered senseless by evil English toffs for centuries- were greatly traumatized. It was with great difficulty that they were persuaded to swallow a spud or two. 

They were taken to the hospital. Although UNIFIL declines to discuss "full documentary evidence"

i.e. did not give an inventory of all the objects retrieved from the rectums of these simple Semites 

in its medical report, reporters who visited the five saw they had been brutally

beaten and burnt on the back with cigarette ends.

You can't tell me things didn't stop there 

Radwan Ashur, a student, had badly damaged hands; friends said his interrogators walked over them in army boots. Another man had his penis burnt with a cigarette lighter. A short

way from his school, young men including Mr. Nassar, were assembled at night

by the village pond. They said they were thrown into it and then, dripping wet

and their hands tied behind their backs, were made to lie until dawn on the floor

of an unfinished shop. "You have to tell us everything about this town," Mr. Nassar

was told. He replied: "I don't know anything. I've just come from Liberia." After

the Israelis finally departed late on Saturday having failed to find their men, the

security report for Shakra showed that fifty-five men and six women, one of them

pregnant, had been taken away, three houses had been dynamited and many

others looted and wrecked, their doors blasted off with grenades. Several dozen

cars were stolen.

The Shias would soon gain hegemony. Karma is a bitch. The odd thing is that Hezbollah was actually less nasty than the Maronite militias. 

The point about this little episode (which features the innocent civilians whom

the United States loves to defend) is not that it occurs daily, or that such behavior

has been characteristic of the Israeli state from the very beginning (as revealed

by revisionist Israeli historians Tom Segev and Benny Morris, among others),

or that it is increasing in viciousness as the spurious excuse of "fighting terror-

ism" serves to legitimize every case of torture, illegal detention, demolition of

houses, expropriation of land, murder, collective punishment, deportation, cen-

sorship, closure of schools and universities. The point is that such episodes

are almost completely swept off the record by the righteous enthusiasm for

deploring Arab, Moslem amd nonwhite "terrorism."

No. The point is nobody gives a shit. Said, because he taught worthless shite, thought that pearl-clutching was important. It wasn't. The dowager who clutches her pearls started off as a can can dancer. Anyway nobody is really shocked that soldiers kill and torture people- more particularly if they are looking for members of their own squad. 

In this enthusiasm a supporting role is played by the accredited experts on

the Islamic world.

Like Said? His supporting role was as that of the pearl-clutching dowager who doesn't understand that soldiers kill people. That's their job.  

Note here how, unlike those scholars of Latin America, Africa

and Asia whose naïveté leads them to express solidarity with the peoples they

study, the guild of the Middle East Orientalists seems to have produced only

the likes of Bernard Lewis, Elie Kedourie and the utterly ninth-rate P .J. Vati-

kiotis, each of whom contributes a slice of mendacity to Netanyahu's

smorgasbord.

Israel is in the region these guys study. They are welcome to express solidarity with it. However their failure to chop off their own dicks in solidarity with Bihari Hijras is truly shocking.  

Far from offering insights about their area of specialization (which

provides them with a living) that might promote understanding, sympathy or

compassion, these guns-for-hire assure us that Islam is indeed a terrorist

religion.

No. They say some Islamist movements say that terrorism is jihad.  

So untoward and humanly unacceptable is this position that the New

York Times's John Gross refused to recognize it in his review of this book.

He also refused to cut off his own dick. How very sad! 

He therefore especially commended Lewis's view - Gross paraphrases freely- "that

there is nothing in Islam as a religion that is especially conducive to terrorism."

But had he read past the second paragraph of Lewis's essay, he would have

found the great man saying that "it is appropriate to use Islam as a term of

definition and classification in discussing present-day terrorism."

Because some terrorist groups are Islamic.  

Gross and Lewis are symptomatic of the whole deformation of mind and

language

which only exist in Said's mind. Does it cause him to scream his tits off & soil his pants? Yes. This is because of the ontological chrematistics of the oesophagus or the peristalsis of something Walter Benjamin mentioned to Berthold Brecht.  

induced by "terrorism." Gross is so ideologically infected with the

antinomian view that, on the one hand, no respectable scholar can say racist

things and, on the other, one can say anything about Islam and the Arabs if

one is a respectable scholar,

This isn't an antinomian view. Christians may be under no obligation to follow the moral law because salvation is by Grace but that has nothing to do with respectable scholarship. Respectable people can say anything about anything. If they say 'suck my dick, niggah scum!', they aren't respectable.  

that he just gives up on reading critically.

i.e. inserting stupid lies he has himself cooked up into the text 

Lewis, who is by now reckless

coz he was a British soldier during the Second World war & had spent a lot of time at SOAS meeting with the elite of the Arab world 

with the confidence inspired by having the New York Times , the New York Review of Books, the New Republic and Commentary more or less at his disposal,

jealous much? Lewis was Jewish. He was an ex-soldier & British diplomat. He had gravitas. Said was a Nancy boy clutching his pearls & screaming his tits off.  

serves up one falsehood or half-truth after another in his essay. `Islam, he tells us, is a political religion, a unique thing. Whereas, he intones, Jesus sacrificed himself on the cross and Moses died before he entered the Promised Land, Mohammed (clever fellow) founded a state and governed it.'

What's wrong with that?  

Those three millennial facts alone are supposed to have determined the whole of Christian, Jewish and Islamic history and culture ever since.

It is a fact that England has three sources of law- Canon Law, King's Equity & the Common Law- because there were three Estates with separate origins, languages, & trajectories. In Islam, every Muslim became a member of all three Estates simultaneously along with the Prophet & his Companions. Islam can have a political horizon in a sense in which Calvinist Geneva or Holland could not.  

Never mind that Jewish and Christian leaders have - to this day - founded and governed

states,

where the sacred was separated from the secular. I suppose, you might say the Papal States were an exception but they weren't really. Civil Law was separate and Roman in origin.  

or that Jews and Christians (quite ignoring the charity of Christ or the

misfortunes of Moses) fought battles in the name of Christianity and Judaism

that were as bloody as anyone else's.

Jews haven't slaughtered each other with might and main in the manner of Christians or Muslims. How many Ashkenazis were killed by Sephardics- none at all. How many Protestants were killed by Catholics- too many to count. The same is true of the various sectarian wars in Islam.  

What matters, says Lewis, is that at the present time there is "the reassertion of this association of politics and Islam" as if it isn't clear that Israel is perhaps the most perfect coincidence of religion and politics in the contemporary world,

It isn't clear at all. Hitler targeted Jews who had converted. Thus, race- not religion- was the binding factor. Pakistan, on the other hand, is a pure example of religion & politics coinciding.  

or that Jerry Faiwell and Ronald Reagan time and again connect religion and politics.

Which proves they are actually Ayatollahs- right? 

No, not at all; it is only Moslems, unregenerate combiners, like their founder, of politics and religion, who are guilty of this atavism. It can make you quite angry to read such

nonsense.

It makes this Protestant Christian angry even though his parents had sent him off to WASP America. They themselves had to leave Egypt.  

Terrorism: How the West Can Win is thus an incitement to anti-Arab and anti-

Moslem violence.

People would read the book & then punch Said in the face.  

It further inflames an atmosphere in which it is considered

natural that when Leon Klinghoffer is senselessly and brutally murdered, the

New York Times devotes 1,043 column inches to his death, but when Alex Odeh,

no less an American, is just as senselessly and brutally murdered at the very

same time in California, he gets only 14 column inches.

Why encourage kids to target the local Arab Mom & Pop restaurant? I think Israeli policy is to allow extradition of terrorists if they killed non-Arabs. This is understandable.  

Have we become so assured of the inconsequence of millions of Arab and Moslem lives that we assume it is a routine or unimportant matter when they die either at our hands

or at those of our favored Judeo-Christian allies?

Arab & Muslim lives matter for economic reasons. We want to buy stuff from them and sell stuff to them. Hopefully, Israel won't nuke its enemies before we found some cheap substitute for the region's oil & gas. 

Do we really believe that Arabs and Moslems have terrorism in their genes?

Sure. We all do. If terrorism is a rewarding profession, it will attract high quality recruits. 

The worst aspect of the terrorism scam, intellectually speaking, is that there

seems to be so little resistance to its massively inflated claims, undocumented

allegations and ridiculous tautologies.

Sadly, Lewis & Co. were right. Said was wrong. 9/11 is the most significant even of the twenty first century.  

What will happen next? I think the US, as a net oil exporter, will retreat from the area. Israel will be off the leash. It will do ethnic cleansing to get defensible borders & do cheaper, more indiscriminate, 'mowing the lawn'. There will be less money for 'pay for slay' as everybody focuses on gaining strategic deterrence. In Europe & America, I think there will be some amateurish tit-for-tat Muslim v Jewish (or Hindu) terrorism possibly involving criminal gangs. But the real interest will be in asymmetric warfare against trade routes- e.g. using drones to lay the straits of Hormuz. The technology may have evolved to a point where a non-State Actor could make a profit on operations of this sort. The truth is being killed by a nutjob is a manageable risk. It is losing your fucking pension pot which is truly terrifying. 

Nancy Fraser on Habermas's neglect of Hijras

The LRB has an essay by Professor Nancy Fraser of the New School titled-  

After Habermas

Jürgen Habermas may be variously described as the moral conscience of postwar Germany,

make cars not war. It doesn't take much moral conscience to do that which pays better.  

the last great systematic philosopher,

if you base everything on 'communicative acts', you need a theory of communication or else you are an ad hoc philosopher. You aren't 'systematic'. Since communication is information theoretic when it isn't strategic (game-theoretic), a systematic philosopher needs to show what are the preconditions for 'signalling', 'screening' & things like 'zero-knowledge proof'. This is mathsy stuff but it also means a systematic philosopher who has taken this road can explain things like the 'law of increasing functional information'.  

the dominant figure in the second generation of the Frankfurt School

which was shit. 

and the thinker who brought that ‘school’ to an end.

It ended when the SDP adopted the Bad Godesberg program in 1959. Collective ownership of the means of production was off the table. There was convergence to Mixed-economy, Keynesian Welfarism. Everything was now econometrical. Politicians had to spout Statistics & pretend to care deeply about inflation or devaluation or whatever. Saying 'eat the rich!' wasn't enough. 

Others can and will reckon his contributions at that grand scale. What I have to offer is more specific: the reflections of a leftwing North American member of his circle on what she learned from him and what she could only learn by looking elsewhere.

Was anything she learned useful? No. She taught nonsense to stupid people.  

My ties to Habermas were multi-layered. He was an inspiration and a role model; a mentor and an antagonist; a figure who showed me early on how to practise ‘critique with an emancipatory intent’ but from whom I eventually had to distance myself.

He wanted pedants do to donkey work. They wanted to pose as too cool for Skool.  

I first encountered Habermas’s thought in the mid-1970s when I was a PhD student and aspiring philosopher. Fresh out of the New Left,

i.e. making life better for work-shy homosexual drug addicts. To be fair, Nancy is more 'second wave' Feminist. She dislikes the crazy third-wavers just as much as the rest of us. 

I was in search of an intellectual framework that could anchor my political commitments and contribute to ongoing struggles to realise them.

It was Economics- in particular the theory of wage/price/service provision discrimination. The solution is to raise general purpose productivity till factor supply becomes so elastic that there can be no rent extraction or monopsonistic discrimination. Alternatively, you can go down a Coase & Posner 'Law & Econ' road & work on bringing class action suits based on evidence of statistical discrimination. 

Two figures loomed large on the scene: Habermas and Michel Foucault.

Neither knew Math or Econ or Law. They were useless.  

Working through their respective insights and blind spots, I came to see myself as a critical theorist. It was under the sign of Frankfurt,

Which part of Frankfurt? The Red Light district? That's where my friend Praful Joshi studied. He achieved Red Enlightenment so often that his money ran out & he had to return to Mombasa to run the family business.  

I thought, that I could best pursue my project.

Hopefully, she didn't meet Praful there.  

Unlike Foucault, Habermas offered the prospect of a ‘reconstructed historical materialism’.

despite being ignorant of history  

He conceived postwar capitalist society as a totality,

It featured a lot of 'Duality' & was ab ovo a 'mixed economy'.  

riven with contradictions and crisis tendencies,

That may have been true of pre-war Capitalism but Keynesian demand management had triumphed along with Bretton Woods & strong cooperation between Central Banks.  

even as he also rejected economic reductionism.

Because he was ignorant of economics.  

Foregrounding ‘communication’ as distinct from ‘labour’,

Though plenty of people get paid to communicate while others are employed on maintaining & improving communication technologies.  

and ‘lifeworld’

developed by Husserl & Schutz. The latter was influential in American Sociology. I think 'representative agent' theories in Econ are Schutzian.  

as distinct from ‘system’,

or 'structure'.  Both can have a graph theoretical representation. 

he posited the relative autonomy of culture, ideas and politics,

Stalin posited the relative autonomy of Language & culture. But politics is about 'collective action problems'. It is economic when it isn't mere squabbling.  

while also theorising their ‘colonisation’ by bureaucracy.

The German bureaucracy is a fearsome thing. But the DMV is truly the lowest depth of Hell.  

The result was a novel critical theory of welfare-state capitalism

He thought the Welfare State would tame the antagonism between worker & employer. He was wrong. Generous welfare payments forced the better class of employers to offer 'efficiency wages'. The worst employers had to be content with immigrants & drug addicts. The problem was that Welfare States had an incentive to go for 'over-full' employment which was inflationary. Thus it turned out that the real 'class war' was between elderly folk living off their savings & the young 'boomers' who could borrow at negative real interest rates. Once the old exerted political power, the tables were turned on the young.

– the perils it posed and the prospects it opened for emancipation.

Indeed. Many slaves on Southern Plantations were able to escape to the North thanks to tickets on the Freedom Railway given to them by the Department of Health and Human Services

A synthesis of Marx,

who was wrong about everything 

Weber

who, along with Hugo Preuss, ensured that the Weimar Republic would turn into a 'Caesarean' Dictatorship 

and speech-act theory,

Which thinks we obey rules when we speak. We don't unless we teach grammar or are afraid peeps will think us ignirint.  

Habermas’s theory lent systematic heft to New Left intuitions,

Shame they had become adversely selective of imbecility. Kids in Reagan's America wanted to get rich- preferably by performing rap songs about killing cops.  

on the one hand, and to Foucault’s dazzling figurations on the other.

Foucault was genuinely puzzled as to why people with power didn't use that power to torture virgins the way De Sade & Giles de Retz had done. Obviously, some occult force was restraining them. Also how come I kiss Mummy instead of stabbing her repeatedly? Fuck is wrong with me?  

Other intellectuals

who had shit for brains 

of my generation also found inspiration in this synthesis.

of shit.  

But I was less interested than most in the normative level of Habermas’s edifice. While others embraced ‘discourse ethics’ to ground freestanding political theories of democracy and law,

keep saying 'Israel is totes illegal' & maybe the Jews there will take the hint & run away.  

I remained focused on the critique of ‘late capitalism’.

of a type which Reagan & Thatcher put out of its misery.  

Not much moved by Between Facts and Norms (1992), I wrestled instead with The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962),

Which I have discussed elsewhere.  

Legitimation Crisis (1973)

There was nothing of the sort. The problem was that the Arabs & Venezuelans & so forth wanted a better price for their oil. Legitimacy wasn't the problem. Stagflation was.  

and the chapter on ‘the internal colonisation of the lifeworld’ in The Theory of Communicative Action (1981).

Taking lots of drugs enables you to resist this. Sadly, you may end up sucking off sailors at the docks to pay for your habit.  

Structural Transformation taught me to historicise, and problematise, the institutions that appeared to generate the consent of the dominated in capitalist society.

This was already being done by the guys who ran those institutions. They faced 'Baumol cost inflation'- i.e. tendency for non-tradeable services to rise in price relative to tradeable goods. The solution was to make services tradeable- e.g. Indian call centres.  

‘The internal colonisation of the lifeworld’ taught me to understand capitalist society as an institutionalised social order,

like every other type of society which features institutions. It must be said, the German 'Historical School' had similarities with 'Institutionalist' Econ in the US. At one time, you needed German to get a PhD in Econ. I think Harvard only dropped this & put in a Math requirement around 1960. Habermas was a good enough donkey of the German variety- i.e. as stupid as shit but giving good scholarly apparatus.  

comprising state and economic systems, public and private lifeworlds, all demarcated by boundaries that were moveable and subject to contest.

If there is a demarcation, there must be demarcation criteria. What are they? Nancy can't tell us anymore than I tell you where the boundary lies between the Buffy the Vampire slayer part of me and the Beyonce part of me.  

Legitimation Crisis taught me to identify forms of capitalist crisis beyond the economic – crises of political legitimation, to be sure, but also, by extrapolation, crises of social and ecological reproduction.

If you can't turn everything into a crisis, you aren't a hysterical nutter. However, shitting yourself and screaming your tits off is a desiderata.  

In these works, I found the Habermas I was seeking – the one who was helping to invent an unorthodox democratic Marxism for a new time.

One which wasted no time on reading her shite.  

It was never a perfect fit. Having already signed on to Richard Rorty’s radical historicism,

pragmatism not historicism. Still, everything he wrote was meaningless so why quibble? 

I had little sympathy for attempts to establish ‘normative foundations’ for critical theory in the anthropological depths of a putative human disposition to seek agreement via communication.

Yet 'coordination problems' exist. A bunch of guys who don't solve at least some of them soon go extinct. Anthropology is stooopid. Evolutionary Game Theory is not.   

My aim, rather, was to clarify the historically specific conjuncture we inhabited

she was living in some bizarre 'conjuncture' of her own, while the rest of us were voting for Reagan or Thatcher.  

– and to disclose possibilities for emancipation within it.

She could have been emancipated from studying & teaching worthless shite. 

Writing on the public sphere, I challenged Habermas’s neglect of transnational and ‘subaltern counterpublics’,

why didn't he undergo gender reassignment surgery to show solidarity with Dalit Hijras in Haryana? Was it because he was a RACIST?  

while scrutinising their capacity to pierce bourgeois hegemony.

by stabbing them & stealing their cool, shiny, stuff?  

On the colonisation of the lifeworld,

Men have colons. Women have vaginas. We want the vaginisation of the lifeword.  

I felt that, in essentialising the system/lifeworld distinction, he masked historically specific forms of male domination and missed the transformative potential of feminist movements.

Also he was masking the incessant rape all women are subjected to by the 'male gaze'- more particularly if the male in question is Praful Joshi.  

In both cases, I sought to reopen the space foreclosed by him for a democratic-socialist alternative to ‘late capitalism’.

i.e. fisting yourself while screaming your tits off about how Israel is totes evil.  

If the first intervention was well received, the second led to a breach that lasted five years.

During which Nancy created a democratic-socialist alternative to 'late capitalism'. Sadly, the Taliban stole it from her. Afghans can be very sneaky. 

In the meantime, the world was changing. As the ‘pathologies of juridification’

e.g. Jews not being killed in Concentration Camps 

gave way to the chaos of neoliberalisation,

see above 

critique needed to shift as well.

to gassing on about transgender peeps in the Turd World piercing or sodomizing bourgeois hegemony.  

Crisis critique, especially, needed reviving.

Habermas is dead. Why? Capitalism refused to abolish death so as to make money out of the Funeral business.  

How else to grasp such glaring system ‘dysfunctions’ as global pandemics

Which began when our species began 

and planetary heating,

which Graciella Chichilnisky showed could be tackled by Carbon trading. 

skyrocketing debt

which is the other side of the coin of skyrocketing financial assets 

and nosediving wages,

Wages in the United States increased 4.60 percent in January of 2026 over the same month in the previous year. Wage Growth in the United States averaged 6.15 percent from 1960 until 2026, reaching an all time high of 15.54 percent in April of 2021 and a record low of -6.12 percent in April of 2020.

retrenched public services

Baumol Cost-disease. The workaround is making the thing tradeable.  

and decaying infrastructure,

which requires investment not scolding 

hardened borders

protecting real wages for unskilled workers 

and persecutory scapegoating,

like Biden trying to put Trump in jail?  

de-democratisation and militarisation, genocide and hot war – and how else to grasp them not as contingent ‘bads’ but as non-accidental outcomes of capitalist dynamics?

You could simply say everything is the fault of the Jews. Did you know that the Pope is Jewish? So is Ayatollah Khameni. Trump himself is a Rabbi. That's why, as he says, the Iranians offered him the job of Supreme Guide.  

In search of non-economistic forms of crisis theory, I landed once again on Habermas.

rather than Hitler. Good choice.  

Legitimation Crisis had the great merit of grounding my generation’s shift to ‘post-materialist’ values in the structural-institutional transformations of capitalist society.

i.e. living in your own fantasy world where you have teamed up with Karl Marx & Shulamith Firestone to sodomize the Great Spaghetti Monster until it says 'boo to Capitalism!'  

But two of its principal theses did not ring true. I was convinced neither that a political crisis of legitimation had displaced an economic crisis of accumulation,

Accumulation is a good thing. There's a crisis of legitimation if the Army isn't obeying orders & Revolutionaries are hanging Cabinet Ministers from lamp-posts.  

nor that democratic citizens should replace oppressed subalterns as the primary agents of transformation.

Yet, that's what happened in India- the birthplace of subaltern studies. Just when Dalits & Tribals were becoming Chief Ministers, these nutters started pretending that Dalits & Tribals (& all women, according to Spivak) could not speak.  

I turned elsewhere: to Gramsci on hegemony and counterhegemony;

 Meaningless shite. The Italian Communists should have given up their 'Workers' Control' stupidity. 

to Althusser on ideology;

kill your wife to combat Capitalism 

to feminist theorists on social reproduction;

how come men are still refusing to give birth to babies? Is it because Capitalism is surreptitiously putting wombs into girls because it needs babies to be born so as to enslave them & make the work long hours in factories or coal mines? Fuck you, Capitalism! Fuck you, very much! 

to eco-Marxists on capital’s ‘natures’;

e.g. the cunning way Capitalism is using beavers to beaver away at building dams. Did you know 'beaver' is a term for vagina? Connect the fucking dots, sheeple! 

to Daniel Bell and Luc Boltanski on its cultures;

Let me guess. Are they wicked? I suppose so.  

to Rosa Luxemburg and W.E.B. Du Bois on racialised imperialism;

Which disappeared long ago.  

to Edward Said

who settled in Turtle Island.  

and Rashid Khalidi

who handed back his American real estate to members of the First Nations- thinks nobody at all.  

on settler colonialism;

i.e. the US of fucking A.  

to Karl Polanyi

who thought the slave economy of Dahomey was marvellous.  

on fictitious commodification and social struggle;

His brother was a good Chemist & Economist.  

to David Harvey on neoliberalism;

Why not David Icke?  

and to Marx on the logic of capital.

Did you know the capital of logic is Mogadishu?  

And yet I felt that Habermas was somehow with me at every step.

Because he was equally stupid.  

Habermas first lit my path as a critical theorist.

Rather than as a lighted fart.  

I remain deeply grateful for that.

But no one is grateful that Nancy turned into a hysterical shithead though, admittedly, there are crazier & stupider people. Look at Amia Srinivasan.  

But over the years the light he cast flickered and waned – until, with his stance on Gaza, it seemed to go out.

Germans should cheer when Jews are raped & decapitated.  

Historians will eventually decide whether that stance was an anomaly or the culmination of a long process in which Frankfurt School critical theory turned into a form of liberalism that was too often complicit with US imperialism.

Moreover, it sucked off the American Emperor who is descended from King George Washington.  

I’m inclined to side with those who hold that Habermas at first revivified critical theory

by saying there's some rule involved in communication such that if only we talk enough stupid shit, everybody will agree to collectivize everything.  

but ultimately ended it. If so, he nevertheless inspired, by his extraordinary presence and intensity of thought, many

useless shitheads 

who remain committed to ‘critical theorising with emancipatory intent’ and to the democratic-socialist ideals associated with it.

Mamdani read Habermas- thinks nobody at all. Mamdani is cool.  

Some of us may no longer be Habermassians, but we learned from, with and against him what it means to keep faith with critique.

No. You became part of a Credentialist Ponzi scheme which is now collapsing. Still, you did well out of it. It is your student's students who will pay the price.  

Joseph Heath on Habermas's legacy

Joseph Heath writes in 'Persuasion' magazine.  

Suppose that you had been born in Nazi Germany.

In that case you would find it wrong or repugnant to suppose any such thing unless you are in fact a Nazi cunt. It's like saying 'suppose you had been born in the Jew-nited States of America.'  You can't do this unless you are a raving anti-Semite planning to marry your sister-Mommy as soon as Grampa-Daddy's corpse is shifted out of the trailer. 

Suppose that you found yourself, at the age of 12, in a Hitler Youth summer camp, singing “Deutschland über alles” alongside your friends. Would you have been able to figure out that you were supporting the wrong side of the war?

The wrong side is the losing side.  

If so, what intellectual resources would you require to arrive at this conclusion?

You would need a bit of economic & military nous. Previously, if you didn't like your country, you could emigrate to the US where it was only the niggers & the Injuns who were being fucked over. But the US had greatly restricted immigration. The Great Depression hit everybody hard. If you had a job in one place, you didn't give it up just in case you could get something equivalent in a country whose regime you approved of. 

Moreover, what is there to stop a totalitarian regime from denying such resources to its people?

The same thing which stops regimes from performing lobotomies on all and sundry. Doing evil shit costs money. It uses up resources.  

These are the questions that animated Habermas’ critical theory.

Critical theory means the theory is wrong but maybe not all its theorists are evil shitheads. 'Sovietization' had failed in the East. Collective ownership of the means of production was bad for workers, consumers & everybody else- even bureaucrats. 

By 1959, the SDP had embraced the Godesberg program which is 'mixed-economy Keynesianism' and is as fucking Utopian as you can get. Habermas objected to this because maybe talking is more important than working or consuming. Maybe if everybody talks enough to everybody else, nobody would want to own anything. 

Like many Germans of his generation, his work was haunted by the specter of totalitarianism.

You can't be haunted by a ghost who lives just across the border from you. What haunted German academics teaching worthless shit was gaining a reputation for erudition while virtue signalling like crazy.  

In Habermas’ specific interpretation this took two forms, which we can think of as Orwell’s nightmare and Kafka’s nightmare.
Orwell’s nightmare: Whoever controls language controls thought

Nobody controls language- with the exception of my neighbour's cat who controls anybody or anything crazy people think controls shit. It does this using invisible 'mind rays'. Read the fucking Epstein files- sheeple.  

Karl Marx once declared that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”

This wasn't the case in England or Germany or France. The Aristocracy & the power-elite had different ideas from those of the rising bourgeoisie & bildungsburgertum. The fact is, where there is economic growth & technological change, there is likely to be a lag. In Revolutionary regimes, it is the people who lag behind but in countries whose big Revolution occurred in the late Seventeenth or Eighteenth Century, such is not the case. 

This was based on the observation that, no matter how cruel and unequal the class structure of any society, it was always accompanied by some story that explained why all of the cruelty and deprivation was in fact merited by its victims.

There were many such stories. You paid your money & took your choice. The story might be about Heaven or Racial or Religious superiority but there was also an alethic Economic Structural Causal Model which not merely explained what obtained but which showed how general purpose & total factor productivity could be raised. This might involve finding political solutions to collective action problems. It might occur spontaneously in a 'Coasean' manner. Still 'public signals' can promote these superior correlated equilibria. Habermas blabbering shite helped nobody.  

Acceptance of this story, Marx thought, explains why the poor and downtrodden, who are typically the vast majority of the population, passively accept their fate rather than rebelling.

I rebelled. I didn't go to work. I stopped getting paid. I ran through my savings. In order to eat, I had to stop rebelling & get a fucking job.  

This is Marx’s influential theory of ideology.

Why do people die? It is because they accept some story about 'ageing' cooked up by so-called 'Biologists'. Why can't pigs fly? Same reason. Fuck you biologists! Fuck you very much. 

It implied that certain beliefs were widely held only because society, in some sense, needed people to believe them.

Society needs you to die. It really doesn't like you. Also Society has shown partiality to avian species in denying aeronautical capacity to the porcine community.  

It also gave rise to the suggestion that intellectuals could make themselves useful by criticizing those ideas.

Why let homeless people wearing tin-foil hats monopolise the market? If you have a PhD in worthless shite, you can do just as good a job at screaming your tits off.  

If the acceptance of a legitimating ideology is required for the reproduction of domination,

Then there is no 'domination'. There may be 'gaslighting'  or swindling or the fact that a particular 'ideology' is the focal solution to a coordination game.  

it stands to reason that exposing that story as ideological might make relations of domination more difficult to sustain.

only in the sense that exposing that story as plagiarised from Buffy Season 3, episode ten, would make domination difficult to sustain.  

Unfortunately, the theory of ideology also gave rise, almost immediately, to an enormous number of skeptical problems.

Easily solved by shooting or sacking people or ensuring they don't get invited to the cool parties.  

If the ruling class controls the production of ideas,

It won't rule shit. Why not control the production of farts instead? 

why do they formulate those ideas

or farts 

in a way that makes them vulnerable to criticism?

Criticism doesn't occur if it leads to sacking, shooting in the head, or not getting invited to cool parties.  

Indeed, how are we to know that the criticism is genuinely outside the space of those ideas?

Why should it be? We want a criticism of the solution to an open problem in Math to come from inside 'Math Space'- not 'Porn Space'.  

Perhaps the critic is as much a victim of ideology as the one being criticized?

Why are cunts who teach useless shite so obsessed with victims? Were they beaten & raped till they gave up STEM subject research? 

Thinking through these questions generates what came to be known as the problem of total ideology. If everything is ideology, how can we escape from it?

Nobody wants to escape from what is useful or pleasant. Nor is there any 'victim' involved in what raises everybody's productivity.  

And what is the difference between escaping from it and merely believing that we have escaped from it?

It is the difference between clinical paranoia & being trapped in a nightmare because you really can't wake up. 

Twentieth-century philosophers found these questions extremely difficult to answer.

They weren't really trying.  

While Enlightenment theorists had claimed that we each possess a “tribunal of reason” in our own mind—a sovereign capacity to separate truth from falsity—by the end of the 19th century this view had become hopelessly discredited. Far from possessing an inner tribunal of reason, Sigmund Freud had shown that we understand very little of what goes on in our own mind, much less the world.

He understood that he'd make more money treating healthy people for an imaginary ailment. The truly mentally ill will shit on your couch. Also, they have no fucking money. 

But perhaps more importantly, philosophers had begun to realize the importance of language in structuring our thoughts.

Our thoughts structure language any which way. The reverse is not the case. Otherwise a teacher of grammar could ensure I have the same thoughts as Einstein.  

Language came to be seen not as a code that we use to communicate our ideas to others but as the medium in which we formulate those very ideas.

No one knows what that 'inner language' is. If it exists maybe we could communicate 'telepathically'. 

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in particular, argued that linguistic meaning is not determined by what is in our heads but by the position that our utterances occupy in “language games” that we play with others.

Which is why I am right to insist that you agreed to suck my cock though what you said is 'fuck off you revolting creep'.  

This linguistic turn in philosophy further intensified the problem of ideology. If the meaning of words is determined not by our private thoughts but by what occurs in our external practices of communication, what is to prevent the emergence of a perfect dictatorship, which controls not only all of society but, through its control of social practices, all that is thinkable in that society?

If there is a force powerful enough to cause you to think you don't want to suck my cock, what is to prevent the emergence of a perfect dictatorship where nobody will suck my cock because everybody would see me as a revolting creep? OMG! This has already happened! Fuck you Neo-liberalism! Fuck you very much!'  

This was the challenge posed in George Orwell’s 1984, where “the party” does not just prevent criticism from being expressed but through the inculcation of “newspeak” attempts to make criticism unintelligible.

Tl; dr, Big Brother fucks up Winston using his fear of rats. That 'newspeak's shite was a red herring. Still emojis-eh? WTF? LOL!

Philosophers were troubled by similar concerns. If communication is just a bunch of language games, what is to stop the powerful from organizing or reorganizing the game however they like?

Organizing Premium League football games can make you a lot of money. Scrabble not so much. 

For example, we have the idea that when individuals use force against others, they need to provide some justification for their actions.

Only if we don't have a lot of force. But this is a more a case of talking your way out of a beating or spell in prison.  

What if this turned out to be just an ethnocentric expectation and that, in some distant land, such demands for justification were met with incomprehension or were rejected as “not how we do things around here”?

There's a sink Estate five minutes walk from me, where I could get my head kicked in for sounding like English might be first language.  

Is there anything that rules out such a possibility?

Common sense. 

It has often been observed that critical theorists working in the Frankfurt School tradition became less interested over time in actually criticizing things and more perplexed by the question of how critique was even possible or what might prevent the powerful from making it impossible.

They were useless tossers. Still, if they got paid for enabling credential craving cretins to earn a like livelihood, what great harm had been done? Shitheads we will always have with us. It is better that they teach nonsense than that they become bureaucrats & fuck up the economyy.  

These are certainly the questions that troubled Habermas. What is to prevent the emergence of a perfect ideology, which is not just internally consistent but quite literally impossible to think one’s way out of?

We can think ourselves out of  life, the universe, & everything- or let Douglas Adams do it for us- easily enough. Lots of guys with PhDs in Kantian Mathematics in Teheran were blown up by Trump. According to their ideology, they are now nailing 72 virgins in Paradise. That's more than Epstein ever got to do.  

Kafka’s nightmare: The totally reified society

Not totally. There has to be at least one consciousness which resists its own reification. Joseph K isn't 'that distinguished thing'- which is the death of the scapegoat.  

One aspect of the Holocaust that many people found particularly disturbing was its organizational efficiency.

Which used up scarce resources in a foolish manner. Genocide is better done by mobs equipped with cheap agricultural implements. Still, we understand that presiding over a gas chamber was safer & more comfortable than fighting the Rooskis. Moreover, there were profit opportunities. Schindler did well for himself.  

Much of the killing in the death camps was carried out not by men caught up in the throes of bloodlust but by faceless bureaucrats who documented with meticulous care every aspect of the procedure.

It would have been cheaper to just let peasants from conquered territories loose on the Jews, Gypsies etc.

Even the decision to use poison gas was made because the previous method—a single shot to the back of the head—was considered too expensive, at the cost of one bullet per victim.

That's why poison gas was used in the Great War. Still, it is a bit silly to get our knickers in a twist over gas when our current offensive strategy is based on destroying all life on earth.  

These calculations seemed like a clear-cut instance of scientific rationality run amok,

It was like the 'schweinmord'- the slaughter of the pigs as 'co-eaters'- during the Great War. That backfired badly. Pig manure is useful.  

with considerable technical ingenuity deployed in the discovery of effective means, combined with a complete failure to evaluate the merits of the goals being sought.

No. The evaluation was okay. But they could have been left to starve & their deaths should have been used as propaganda or a bargaining chip. 

While Marx had insisted that capitalism was the source of all evil,

He thought Capitalists would be forced to grind down the faces of the workers so as to engender a competitive rate of profit. This was self-defeating. Profits would go to zero. Marx didn't realize that Capitalists would rather spend on conspicuous consumption than put their money into enterprises from which they would get zero return. Workers might have no alternative to working save that of starvation. Capitalists always have the option of going on a long ocean cruise. 

the events of the early 20th century, including the emergence of totalitarianism

replacing Tzarist absolutism which, sadly, simply hadn't been brutal enough 

in the Soviet Union, suggested that hierarchical authority was just as much a problem.

Not Gulags, not pogroms, it was the fact that the Director was under the Joint Secretary who was under the Principal Secretary which was the problem.  

One way of reconciling the two views was to see the emergence of capitalism and bureaucracy as linked.

to the emergence of sodomy & aerobics & rap music

Max Weber, in particular, suggested that humanity was becoming imprisoned in an “iron cage,” governed by a technical rationality that gave us incredible powers of control yet deprived us of the ability to deliberate in any meaningful way about the goals we are seeking.

'Iron cage' prevented him from consummating his marriage with his wife. Also, it forced him to die rather than emigrate to the planet Jupiter.  

According to this view, it was the calculative, instrumental form of rationality, focused on means rather than ends, that was the villain of the story.

Why can't everybody just think good thoughts? Why do they get hung up on gaining useful skills & working long hours doing boring jobs?  

A distinctive feature of the instrumental style of reasoning is that it treats everything as an object, susceptible to manipulation and control (which is to say, it is reifying).

This is a mere reification- a stupid and paranoid one- of an aspect of any type of ratiocination. Essentially, worthless cunts who teach worthless shite are taking up a word they don't understand- 'instrumentalism' in this case- and using it to belabour the smart people doing useful stuff.  

In economic relations, this generates the illusion that Marx called commodity fetishism.

Like when you call rich peeps 'Capitalist pigs' & pretend they worship Mammon & probably sacrifice their own little babies to that pagan god.  

In bureaucratic relations, it produces the ideology of modern management, which

was like ancient management. It turns out the guys who built the pyramids were well paid & motivated by all manners of perks/ 

treats human beings as resources to be controlled in various ways.

As opposed to hiring cretins to build cyclotrons.  

In the realm of ideas, it produces positivist social science,

Not to mention natural science. Did you know Einstein was a Jew? Jews make a fetish out of commodities- i.e. love money. Lots of money in atomic energy. Connect the fucking dots, mate! All this talk of 'Relativity' & 'QMT' is bullshit. We live inside a hollow earth. Hitler was a pure vegetarian who gave all his money to the poor. He abstained from sex even with his beloved dog. Thus he gained spiritual powers & found out the truth about physics. The real reason for the Second World War was that an evil cabal of Jewish scientists wanted to bury the truth. 

which seeks to employ experimental methods

Statistical, not experimental.  

to improve our capacity to predict the behavior of human beings.

Predicting stuff is 'positivist'. It's totes Jewish & Capitalist & homophobic & racist towards lazy, stupid, useless darkies like me. 

This diagnosis of the times, which was pioneered by the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists—Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse—persuaded an entire generation of leftists that they needed to reject not just capitalism but “the System” as a whole.

While teaching shite or publishing shite magazines. Was this subsidised by the 'deep State'? Who cares?  

Whereas Marx had predicted that capitalism would collapse of its own accord, in the post-war period the concern became increasingly that capitalism would not collapse but that it would be successfully stabilized through bureaucratic interventions, creating a vast politico-economic technostructure that would become increasingly governed by its own functional imperatives, unresponsive to human intervention or control.

& Collidge Professors of useless shite might get to live comfortably enough while molesting their students & destroying their life chances.  

This image of a “totally reified society” would be the realization of Franz Kafka’s vision of a bureaucratic system whose operations had a predictable, machine-like quality, but where none of it added up to anything rational and where no one could find out why anything was being done the way it was.

Stupid people who teach worthless shite have no incentive to find out anything.  

Unlike the problem of total ideology,

or the problem of total shit 

a totally reified society

would be totally shit 

would be one in which certain forms of ideology would not even be necessary

ideology really isn't necessary. It's just some shite some shitheads make a bit of money out of for historical reasons.  

because the incentives would always be correctly aligned, impelling us to do what the system needed us to do regardless of what stories we told ourselves about it.

Which is how the world works. I tell myself a story about how Whitey will never allow a darkie like me get a job cleaning toilets but it turns out that once I lower my wage demand from one trillion dollars an hour to ten, I get plenty of such job offers. There is an incentive to hire a cheaper worker regardless of colour. 

Habermas’ solution

Faced with these problems, the naïve response is to search for what philosophers call an Archimedean point based on the plausible intuition that, in order to criticize a system, it is necessary to find some standpoint outside of that system.

An Archimedean point is needed to overturn something (for example by suggesting something better) . Criticism can be done anywhere and be about everything. I personally deplore the planet Jupiter's failure to condemn atrocities committed by Iyengars on Iyers. 

However, the first step to wisdom lies in the realization that there is no such point when it comes to human society or thought.

Evolutionary game theory was such a point. John Maynard Smith explains why uncorrelated asymmetries can give rise to eusocial bourgeois strategies. 

We are condemned to working on the inside (or to engaging in what Habermas, somewhat obscurely, called “postmetaphysical thinking”).

Only if you teach worthless shite.  

After a few false starts, the idea that Habermas hit upon was to search for a solution in the structure of linguistic communication.

Linguistic communication needn't have any fucking structure.  Indeed, it needn't even be linguistic in the sense of using words. 

Since words do not, in general, mean different things when used in different contexts,

They always have this property.  

linguistic meaning is too systematic to be grounded in a set of disconnected social practices.

Linguistic meaning exists even in purely private practices. True, it can be 'grounded' in a disconnected social practice (viz. teaching grammar or studying linguistics) but what matters is 'theory of mind'- i.e. ability to think strategically & act mimetically- not Language. Look at Chomsky. What a fucking worthless waste of space! Even Habermas was less useless. 

This observation led many philosophers to believe that the meaning of our utterances must be determined not by any old language game but rather by the role these utterances play in the specific practice of argumentation.

Why argue with a cretin teaching useless shit? You need to use arguments which carry weight with decision makers. These are based on economic or military or political calculations & are based on statistical and game theoretic methodologies. 

Habermas expressed this idea by claiming that, whenever we perform a speech act, we commit ourselves to justifying the content of that claim (i.e. we raise a “validity claim”).

This may be the case with small children. I want cake. Not getting cake is UNFAIR! But it doesn't apply to grown ups. I don't have to explain why I won't give you a blow job. 

This is not just extra baggage—our understanding of linguistic meaning consists in a grasp of the conditions under which speech acts could be justified.

This is only true of lawyers dealing with justiciable matters. However, they may be wrong. Indeed, even the ratio of the Supreme Court may be overturned subsequently.  

As a result, Habermas claimed, there is an intrinsic, necessary connection between the social practice of justification (what he called “discourse”)

This is not required of us when we act as principals save if justiciability arises.  

and the meaningfulness of our speech. Understanding someone’s speech acts is inextricably tied to the evaluation of that person’s claims,

No. I understand the Doctor wants me to take this pill. I can't evaluate the claims he makes about the manner in which it will affect my endocrine system. I didn't even know I had any such thing.  

and, for similar reasons, the production of a speech act always involves undertaking a commitment to the justification of one’s claims.

This is never the case even when under oath as an expert witness in a court of law.  

Thus, the person who comes along and demands justification is not imposing a new obligation on the speaker but is merely asking that person to make good on a commitment that has already been undertaken.

No. Such a person is called a 'nuisance'. We tell them to fuck the fuck off.  

The structure of interpersonal commitment

is wholly undefined in every single case. Sometimes it can be captured well enough by a directed graph. At other times it can't at all. 

that secures the intelligibility of language

You can have a strong interpersonal commitment to your grandmother back in the old country. But you are mutually unintelligible to each other- save when giving kisses & being rewarded with cookies. 

has an important secondary effect, which is that it allows us to coordinate interpersonal interaction.

This can be done well-enough non-verbally.  

This gives rise to what Habermas called communicative action,

bullshitting 

which differs from instrumental action in that, rather than relying on means-ends reasoning to determine a preferred action, it allows the choice of action to be directly determined by the content of the validity claims raised in speech.

If you teach worthless shite then all you can do is bullshit.  

The type of rule-following that sociologists had traditionally tried to explain by invoking the concept of a social norm is, in Habermas’ view, a primary instance of communicative action.

Because you can do empirical work on 'social norms'. This can be marginally useful. Habermas wanted to focus on being not just stupid but also wholly useless.  

An important feature of communicative action is that, because it relies directly on speech acts to coordinate interaction, it is always open to contestation and demands for justification.

Not for grown-ups. If the thing isn't justiciable, you don't have to justify shit.  

As a result, the more heavily human societies rely on language to construct complex systems of cooperation,

Human societies rely on laws & screening, signalling & allocative  'mechanisms'. They don't rely on language any more than they rely on farting.  

the more completely they expose those arrangements to demands for justification

this is why there is no requirement to 'expose' shit about how your family or your enterprise decides things save if the matter is justiciable. 

—a dynamic that one can see playing out over the course of human history, in the process that Habermas referred to, somewhat provocatively, as the “linguistification of the sacred.”

Habermas was pretending that nutters screaming slogans in the street actually wanted or were capable of comprehending 'justifications'.  

How does any of this help with the two nightmares?

Wake up helps dispel nightmares. Being woke is its own nightmare. What if you are secretly homophobic in that you are not currently fisting yourself?  

First of all, it directly rules out the possibility of a society being immunized against demands for justification.

All societies with a kick-ass army are of this type.  

Such a society is logically possible, but it would be unintelligible to us, in the strong sense that we would be unable to understand what anyone was saying.

This fucker could understand the German spoken in the Democratic Republic. But he also knew that the Stasi would beat you to death while you kept demanding it justify doing so.  

(Fans of Kantian philosophy will recognize this as a transcendental argument.

It is nonsense. Transcendental arguments work backward from a universal feature of consciousness. Habermas is working backwards from a feature which, though desirable to shithead Professors, is incompossible with reality. 

One of Habermas’ most important contributions to philosophy is to have pioneered, along with Karl-Otto Apel, what he called “transcendental pragmatics.”)

Any attempt to deny or challenge the truth of something already presupposes the transcendental rules of communicative, rational argument, which Apel calls "transcendental" because he thinks they are unavoidable. This may be true in Heaven. It is obviously false on earth.

So we must justify ourselves and our practices, and no society, no matter how totalitarian or manipulative, can free itself from that obligation.

Every society only requires justification where there is justiciability.  

But what counts as a justification? Here Habermas is a formalist, in that he thinks that what counts as a justification is ultimately determined by what others will accept in discursive practice.

If a judge says it is justification, that is what it is even if everybody else objects. Thus, when asked how you got rich even though you are lazy and stupid, you are justified in saying 'by fucking your mother'. 

That practice, however, is rule-governed, and those rules have content that is not morally neutral.

Practice isn't rule governed though it may have justiciable aspects. In other words, I might say 'I think what you are doing breaks such and such rule. Why should I not inform the boss/professional association/police about this?' You may reply, 'Eat shit & die, mother fucker.'  I discuss the matter with others & find that it is difficult to prove that a rule has been broken without 'exogenous' evidence- e.g. that a sportsman deliberately underperformed. In this case, finding evidence he received money from a 'match-fixer' provides indirect proof that such may well have been the case. But even then the easier thing would be to say that the broken rule has to do with not performance but taking money from a tainted source. 

Specifically, argumentation is governed by a set of symmetry conditions that establish equal standing among participants (anyone is entitled to introduce any argument, a position is valid regardless who introduces it, and so on).

No. Argumentation is governed by uncorrelated asymmetries which dictate bourgeois strategies. Thus, when I get into an argument about the theory of Relativity, the guy with the PhD in Theoretical Physics wins. 

Because of this, and no matter where a society starts out, the reliance on linguistic communication as a central practice for the reproduction of its institutions biases cultural evolution in the direction of greater universalism and equality over time.

No. It biases it towards greater uncorrelated asymmetries. That's why wealth & power & expert knowledge become more concentrated.  

This does not prove these commitments to be correct. If one is looking for a knock-down argument that is guaranteed to convince the Nazi that he is wrong, this will not do it.

Nor will anything else. That is why Churchill & Roosevelt & Stalin bombed & then invaded Germany. Nazis thought they'd win. They lost. That's an uncorrelated asymmetry. The bourgeois strategy that prevailed involved killing, incarcerating & 're-educating' Nazis by threatening to beat the fuck out of them. 

What Habermas’ argument shows, however, is that the more specific moral resources we rely upon to condemn Nazism, such as equality of moral standing or the inalienability of human rights, are not arbitrary but represent rather the expression of a logic that is inherent in communication among persons, that works its way out over time in all societies.

Habermas thought Churchill argued with Hitler till that fool saw the error of his ways & shot himself.  

So much for Orwell’s nightmare, but what about Kafka’s? The totally reified society is also, in Habermas’ view, an impossibility. The central weakness of communicative action, as a means of social integration, arises precisely from its openness to contestation and challenge. “Discursively achieved consensus” is, as we all know, difficult to obtain. As a result, societies that rely increasingly on communication to organize their affairs are tempted to unburden themselves by creating systemically integrated domains of interaction. This is accomplished by instituting a set of incentives that motivate individuals to act in a cooperative manner without explicit reliance on validity claims, but rather on instrumental action. The two primary examples of such systems, in Habermas’ view, are the market economy and the bureaucratic state.

Both explicitly rely on validity claims- e.g. being able to pay for stuff you buy or have a permit or ration-book or whatever.  

The nightmare of the totally reified society arises from the experience of interacting in these systemically integrated domains and wondering what prevents the extension of this mode of integration to all of society.

High cost & negative benefit.  

The answer, however, is straightforward. Instrumental action cannot produce a self-sustaining order; left to its own devices, it produces mere chaos.

 What instrument can be used to let itself be left to its own devices? None at all. We are speaking of nonsense, not chaos. 

The incentive system that sustains the integrity of these systems of instrumental action must therefore remain “anchored” in the commitments undertaken in communicative action.

Yet the Third Reich fell. 'Anchoring; didn't achieve shit.  

If the system expands beyond its proper boundaries, so that it begins to impinge upon these communicative systems, it generates a set of pathological consequences (which Habermas described, for reasons that need not detain us, as “the colonization of the lifeworld”).

Germany was occupied. It wasn't colonized.  

As a result, no matter how extensive and complex these systems may become, they can never escape from the communicative obligation to justify the social order.

Yet that is what happened in both West & East Germany.  

Habermas’ views on democracy, which many have identified as his singular contribution, are downstream from this model of the relationship between communicative and instrumental action.

They are normative for representative democracy- but also for the Chinese Communist party. Everything is supposed to be decided after informed debate by representatives of the people. True, this may be merely ceremonial or conducted in bad faith. 

Habermas's 'constitutional patriotism' would have allowed GDR to continue to exist in a merely cosmetically revised form. After all, its Constitution says it is Democratic and thus patriotism requires its people to suffer in silence rather than seek to escape.  

Although much has been said on this point, it is perhaps worth noting that Habermas was more of a realist on these issues than he is typically portrayed as being.

Hypocrisy could be said to be a form of realism. 

That is because he viewed the state as a relatively self-contained bureaucratic system, populated by individuals who respond only to a narrow range of incentives. He saw democracy primarily as a mechanism for translating everyday arguments into incentives that could influence—not control, but merely influence—the behavior of this system.

The problem is 'preference falsification'. Everybody pretends to really care about refugees. But they don't really want them moving in next door. The result is saying one thing & doing another.  

Finally, it should be noted that despite the extraordinary ambition of his core philosophical project, Habermas was more of a syncretic than systematic thinker.

Sadly he was drawing on obsolete availability cascades.  

Rather than working out, step by step, his own position, he had a habit of presenting the views of others, then showing how they could fit together to solve some problem.

Not solve it, but gas on about it endlessly.  

This creates formidable difficulties for students and interpreters. The number of other things that one must understand in order to understand Habermas probably constitutes the most important threat to his legacy.

The justification for studying Habermas is that you then have to study all sorts of other useless shite. Hopefully, this will keep you from masturbating yourself to death.

I have tried to describe, in general terms, the stakes of Habermas’ project, in order to explain why the investment of time and energy that it requires remains worthwhile.

If you are stupid & have nothing better to do.  

I have also tried to explain, more indirectly, why his death this month has been marked by so many as the end of an era.

Trump's victory in 2016 didn't just end an era. It sodomized that era so severely that it topped itself.  

He was truly one of the giants of 20th century philosophy.

He didn't know mathematical logic & thus wasn't part of 20th century philosophy. Political theory, maybe. But there is a mathematical politics which is actually useful.  

By comparison, contemporary political theory seems almost listless, uninterested in confronting the most fundamental, most urgent problems of the modern age.

It can say 'Boo to Trump! He is a Nazi!' just as well as anybody else.