Marco D’Eramo
We are growing habituated to the savagery, day by day. Then we wonder how the Germans could have ignored the genocide that was being perpetrated all round them. We, unbending guardians of Western values, implacable defenders of international law: we dine on mass murder bien chambré. We are deeply pained by the deaths of ‘innocent civilians’, of course, saddened by the hospitals razed to the ground. Our hearts go out to the ragamuffins with no future who assail the few aid trucks that reach the Strip. We are distressed by the number of journalists being slaughtered. But the ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ in Gaza does not stop us sleeping at night, even as the situation worsens week by week.
We supply the bombs and we feel sorry for their victims. Call it compassionate bombing.
It is little wonder that the global South finds the West hypocritical. This would be less apparent if the Israeli government and its supporters would simply state outright that Israel has the right to take revenge for the attack it suffered. Revenge has an ancient if inglorious tradition, enshrined in the Bible itself – ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ – and, one might add in this case, ‘a child for a child’. And vengeance defines its own limits: by definition, it must be commensurate with the offence suffered. [As of 04 March, we have reached almost 40 Palestinian civilians killed for every Israeli civilian killed]. For proclaiming that the goal is not revenge but defence evades the problem of magnitude, of measure: one can continue to kill ad libitum because one is merely ‘defending’ oneself, with armoured vehicles and total air superiority against an enemy that has no heavy weaponry.
My personal experience with political leaders – however sporadic and superficial – allows me to say that the cynicism hypothesis (that politicians are cynics who lie knowing they are lying) is often too laudatory, it gives them too much credit. Politicians almost always end up believing their own bullshit. In many situations, cheating oneself is the only option. There is a stage where the hypocrite lies to himself to such an extent that he is no longer aware of his own hypocrisy. He really thinks he possesses the virtues he affects, defending the values that he tramples. Hypocrisy allows us to reconcile ourselves to that part of ourselves that we do not like but which we cannot do without. And what is valid on a personal level is valid on the terrain of ideology – it pertains to what is socially sayable and what is not. Hypocrisy becomes all the more necessary when it comes to public opinion – its growth has been a fruit of the formation of public opinion, and has become an indispensable tool of politics.
Although La Rochefoucauld’s definition (‘Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue’) is more acute, let us proceed with the conventional one provided by Webster’s dictionary: ‘Hypocrisy. The pretence of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles etc, that one does not possess’. The hypocrite is thus not simply a liar. Con men lie but are not hypocrites. The Prince as Machiavelli describes him lies all the time but is not a hypocrite. The spy who pretends not to understand Chinese in order to gather information dissimulates but is not a hypocrite. The hypocrite is one who performs immoral acts while claiming to defend virtue: who unleashes war in the name of peace.
In what does the success of hypocritical behaviour consist? In not being revealed as such. A lie is effective if it is taken as true. Hypocrisy is useful as long as and only if it does not appear hypocritical.
For Martin Jay [Martin Jay, 2010], hypocrisy is essential to political life. We see its application everywhere. The claim that a regime need only hold elections to be democratic, for example, is clearly false. As can be seen from James Madison’s account of the drafting of the constitution, the founding fathers of the United States did indeed want to establish a republic, but not a democracy (remember that for much of the 19th century the word ‘democracy’ had the same subversive and criminal connotations as the term ‘terrorism’ has today). This hypocrisy is plain for all to see: just consider the case of central banks, which are guaranteed the strictest autonomy and ‘independence’ from political power, i.e. from the popular vote. In such parliamentary (or presidential) republics, the people theoretically have power over everything except the most important economic decisions.
Humanitarian imperialism must provide at least some semblance of benefit for the subaltern nations, just as the elective republic must grant the ‘people’ a sphere, however narrow, secondary and irrelevant, in which they are free to decide. But here there is an added complication. In the words of Erwin Goffmann, this play has to persuade two different audiences; one is the imperialists (persuading them that it is worth investing resources in this ‘imperial-humanitarian’ mission); the other is the subjects, to convince them that this is the best of all possible empires, the most humane, the one that most alleviates poverty and suffering. Sometimes these are simply incompatible. When Gladstone spoke of ‘liberal imperialism’ in the late 1800s, it sounded convincing to British ears, making them proud to shoulder the burden of civilising its ungrateful subjects. But it certainly did not convince the Indians and other colonised people, exterminated by the colonial famines famously recounted by Mike Davis.
Moshe Zimmermann writes: ‘Accepting the monocausal connection between antisemitism and the Holocaust not only supports the argument that criticism of Israeli policies must be automatically categorised as antisemitism, but that its predestined outcome will be yet another Holocaust’. The current crisis is exposing the hypocrisy underlying such narratives. In a sense, this hypocrisy is revealing itself because it has ceased to be sufficiently hypocritical, because behind the right to defence it has shown the ruthless right to endless revenge. Palestinians will never forget this ongoing attempt to wipe an entire people off the face of the earth.
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