Notes 7/24/2024

Norman Finkelstein

Norman Finkelstein gave a talk at Sovereign House, an event that was bound to happen sooner or later simply because Finkelstein is such a renowned local crank, a guy who will randomly spawn in his speedo out in Brighton Beach and give you one-off missions to do when you feel like distracting yourself from the main quest line. Though he’s also more than just a crank, maybe you could call him a crank-hero, a hero in that his anti-Zionist lifework has been vindicated, his feud with shit-eating bastard Alan Dershowitz has been vindicated, and so on. As most readers probably already know, these were all things for which he was once cancelled, in the real academic sense (rather than the narcissistic scenester one that casts any criticism as cancellation)… a noble, dignified crank who channels his stubborn eccentricities against a particularly odious truth-regime of fascist colonial doublethink, against its Nakba-denialist revisionist histories, against its powerful accomplices who will fuck your life up if you challenge them. So all this endears him to the younger generation that’s more sympathetic to Palestine across the political spectrum. But the crank-hero is still a crank, he's still out of step with the woke this or that and trans politics and trigger warnings, all in a pretty generic free-speech boomer way, and that’s on top of some other idiosyncratic Palestine positions of his, like his opposition to BDS. The sorts of things that will make some of the activists at the Columbia Gaza Solidarity Encampment suspicious. Get with the program or get out of the way, old man. But to Sovereign House, he’s their guy, he’s totally based, let the old man cook, and he gets a very warm welcome from the “dangerous” audience he’s been warned about, maybe a little too warm...

Finkelstein’s talk at Sovereign House is on the question of academic freedom. He’s wearing a custom T-shirt with a picture of John Stuart Mill. He starts off talking about his younger, Maoist days, how everything you could ever ask was answered by the science of Marxism. The trinity of Marxism–Leninism–Maoism. The whole world was singing with Mao Zedong Thought, you’d go out to the country and the fields would be alive with ecstatic people of all races singing these beautiful Beach Boys harmonies about Protracted People’s War and One Divides Into Two, and you didn’t need anything else. You didn’t need anything else because you had the future, you didn’t need anything else because you knew the sun would rise in the east and the sun was Mao and the stars were the masses, and all the other shit was bourgeois propaganda. You were just a kid back then, and you had the whole world ahead of you. Drop your class on Ancient Rome, that’s all mystification that obscures the one necessary trajectory of human history—we don’t need that where we’re going. And so for Finkelstein that all went swimmingly until ‘76, when Mao died and Maoism itself was overthrown in China, and when he realized that the Chinese people were generally happy about it. This was a profound humiliation. It revealed how wrong he was about the world, how misguided his own self-certainty was. And so he was bedridden for weeks, mourning the place in his heart where that beautiful idea of Mao lived. I think about how that’s something that the downtown Sovereign House crowd could never possibly understand, of course, even though they listen along fondly to Finkelstein’s story and laugh at his punchlines, they could never imagine the heartbreak from such lost illusions because they could never throw themselves into such poetic ecstasy in the first place. That’s why the luminaries of the New Right are absolutely convinced that they can’t possibly be “fascist,” because they imagine fascism as something that requires absolute totalizing commitment, and the New Right merely picks and chooses which elements of the fascist mystique to dress up as on any given day, one costume among many. Maybe they can’t imagine the commitment, or maybe they just don’t want to, or maybe it’s all such a big joke that it doesn’t matter, “just find another ideology to LARP,” I don’t actually know. But I’ve thought about this a lot. The illusion of Christ can’t compare to that of Mao in this same way, none of the downtown Catholics lose their faith with such intensity. And good for them. They could never imagine the pain of the Maoism comedown—can’t eat, can’t sleep, stress migraines, vomiting, rapidly graying hair, sad thoughts of the estranged comrades who send death threats and spit on your memory (and even if they don’t spit on your memory they certainly don’t reach out), the strange shame from the awareness of all your past arrogances, all those “revolutionary” postures that seemed like they were true and good but really just cruel and stupid, hurting the people around you over nothing. Either way, you certainly don’t need to experience the literal Great Helmsman himself dying to experience this sublime loss—“Mao” to me was always already dead, like how Ovid is dead, a marble bust, a past dream that you could pick up out of time and carry it into the future, an erotic hallucination, the New Art, the Revolutionary Art, Mao was a face on an acid tab, something that blows your little white boy mind, the way for me to liberate the true weirdness of my creative vision, to break out of a predetermined Amerikan petty bourgeois class myopia, maybe it was a Promethean mania, maybe it was always already a petty bourgeois Amerikan Mao, but this dream was always flexible, you can fill that place in your heart with a sort of “Brechtian” idea, for instance, a Mao that’s really just Brecht, or one that’s really just Godard, or really just Bolaño. There are lots of possibilities. There are lots of different ways to humiliate yourself, there are lots of different ways to become disillusioned, and then you’ll find the dark hippies at Sovereign House welcoming you with open arms…

After that Finkelstein moves on to J.S. Mill, a thinker he would’ve dismissed in his Maoist period, and for the rest of the talk we’re sort of in this regular college philosophy professor lecture about On Liberty. Chapters 1 and 2 are on speech and chapters 3–5 are on the liberty of conduct, which is more problematic. Finkelstein talks about how Mill praises the value of eccentricity, it’s good to be eccentric, it’s seductive, but there’s also a thin line separating eccentricity from mental pathology. There’s no good way to separate the visionary trailblazers from the mentally ill. Then he brings up the case of Woody Allen. The crowd pipes up in excitement. The crowd loves Woody Allen, he’s so based: neurotic NYC icon of masculinity, intellectual-seeming funnyguy, cancelled by the wokes. It doesn’t get any more based than that. “You’d think that marrying your adopted stepdaughter would be a sign of mental pathology,” Finkelstein says, “but he’s been married to Soon-Yi for over 25 years, and for all I know they seem happy, so what’s there to say?” Then I’m back to thinking about the image of Mao, in my own personal Maoist era, the Mao in my heart being really just a semblance of Brecht-Godard-Bolaño, and then the mirror image, the New Right fascisms of Dasha and Matthew Davis and their style acolytes (there are other fascisms but this one fits the analogy the best), in their own personal Catholic eras, the Christ in their hearts being really just a semblance of based Woody Allen, they fucking love him, they wish he adopted them, Woody Allen who died on the cross of woke philistinism, he’s a sensitive man, a poet, an artist, you wouldn’t get it, Crumps…

Then Finkelstein moves on from based Woody Allen back to boring old Mill, Mill’s ideas on speech, the presupposition that truth has an independent value, the intuitive desire by humans to know the truth, that truth is often a bitter pill to swallow, that it is always possible to be in error about your beliefs, the question of discussing abhorrent or obscene topics like holocaust denial, that we should entertain the question of holocaust denial because it’s an invitation for the world to prove you wrong, that things become dead dogmas if they aren’t subject to inquiry and skepticism, that ideas with vitality and depth only develop through free and fearless debate, an anecdote about his reactionary 7^th grade teacher who didn’t believe in equality challenged young Norman on the notion that “all men are created equal,” young Norman couldn’t answer the challenge, it was only a dead dogma to him then, a cliché, it needed debate for its truth to emerge, a debate that can take a lifetime, truth has its own aesthetics and it’s the aesthetics of perfection, the holocaust denier as the devil’s advocate who goes through truth with a fine comb, Mill says we should thank devil’s advocates, the social utility of the holocaust denier, the social utility of obscene ideas, maybe that’s even the social utility of something like Sovereign House, which reminds me of something Tariq said to me when he was last in town, that even if the reactionary salons of New York (and sometimes San Francisco) bring out all the idiot racists and give them a platform to air out their toxic ideas, “legitimizing” them, maybe even connecting them to people who have the ear of presidents and billionaires (dark networking with the PayPal mafia at the Curtis Yarvin wedding on the day of the fake psyop Trump assassination), it also exposes them to potential ridicule, the danger goes both ways, you come out and have to put all your cards down on the table, you could get called on your bluffs, people could realize you don’t actually understand the findings of the IQ studies you cite to justify the hierarchy of races, someone could write that your poetry sucks, then you’ve got Bronze Age Pervert talking about “the New York scene” as a big ghey fed honeypot, true Hitler-pilled frens stay away, stay away my sweet idiot children, find your Männerbund elsewhere, find a safe space, you have been warned…

Back to Finkelstein: there’s one argument that the Mill never addresses, he says, the notion that words can do harm, our modern conceptions of trauma, the innovations of psychoanalysis, words can sometimes cut deeper than bullets, especially when we’re talking about children, the words parents say to their children, though the moment you acknowledge that words can do harm you approve of the concept of censorship, and this, this is what leads to the CATASTROPHE of cancel culture, of wokeness, safe spaces, trigger warnings, and here’s where Palestine finally comes in, here you’ve got the Israeli students at American universities saying that Palestinian student speech makes them feel unsafe, and then the rich university donors withholding funds because they say Israeli students feel unsafe, it opens the door to pure blackmail, and the blackmail works, the billionaire donors like Bill Ackman managed to unseat two Ivy League presidents, leaving the others shaking in their boots, crushing the student encampments, the children are hurt the children feel unsafe, the perpetual children, the problematic age gap between a 30-year-old and a 25-year-old, the hurt feelings of the genocidaires, the children the children, the 25-year-old IDF Brigadier General, just a child, the children, won’t someone think of the children…