Disaster Nationalism and the End of Almighty Algorithms
What is the connection between the floods in Texas and the genocide in Gaza?
What is the connection between Gaza and Texas? At first this might seem like a stretch, but just as the American right wing is a mirror of the disaster nationalism that is the primary weapon of the oligarchy against the American working class, it is the same for Israelis, where this is amplified by psychological torture directed not just at Palestinians but Jews.
I have written that even on my worst days, I have never wished genocide on those who tacitly (or openly) support it, and by that I meant not just Americans, but Israelis. The reason for this is simple: However bloodthirsty and psychotic Israelis are—and I know, firsthand, exactly how expertly these traits are ingrained in Israeli culture—I also know that they are genuinely and likely irrevocably "brainwashed."
I don't love this term, but because it implies an objective, unbiased perspective held by the writer, when of course all of us are brainwashed by our respective societies, and all of us are experiencing, to great degrees, Reality Troubles as our algorithms break down. Perhaps nothing speaks to this more than the rise of realities co-created by "users" with AI therapists and partners. We are all living in an AI girlfriend-shaped reality now.
So when I say brainwashed, what I mean is, we each have an algorithm, and they are more or less good, kind, useful. But they are all merely programs, ones that are determined by our cultures and our individual relationships to them. On October 8, I watched Israelis I had liked and respected suddenly, in my opinion, lose their minds. Their media is so much worse than ours, and a model for how it will control us in the future: with an iron-grip on a para-reality that helps us cope with the loss of our mental and emotional infrastructure.
I have also spent time with MAGA people, almost ten years ago, during Hurricane Harvey, when I reported on the Cajun Navy, a group of self-appointed rescuers from Louisiana who went to Texas to rescue victims of the floods. It was the most interesting reporting experience I've had, in part because they defied my expectations of who MAGA people should be: expectations set by my liberal American algorithm (what people then called a "bubble").
But the members of the Cajun Navy were not rude or crass. They appeared equally as interested in saving black lives as white ones. Nobody talked about God or questioned me on my politics. They were smart, respectful, humane, and above all, very brave.
Do I believe these same people, when activated by Trump and MAGA hysteria, can be racist, mean, and even, from my perspective, evil? Yes. But it is impossible for me to see them as less human because of that, just as it is impossible for me to see Israelis purely as villains. I know that they are casualties of their deeply horrific algorithm, and that if I had been raised along with them, I would be, too.
The common thread here is disaster nationalism, which is the imperial boomerang directed inward. Fascist violence against the citizen, in particular in the form of psychological warfare, is waged by the elite against everyone else. When we are scared, emotional, activated, we are much more likely to behave abominably, and this is all deliberate. The empire looted the world, and now it is looting us, not just our material resources, but our minds and emotions. In Israel, mandatory military service codifies this in a way we have never experienced in America, at least not yet. As we embrace the Israeli police state in America, and expand our paramilitary apparatus, we are likely to become ever more aggressive and angry, more nationalistic, more chauvinistic, and more deadly.
Israelis are not born bad. They are military experiments that are failing in real time. The Israeli soldier who set himself on fire a few days ago described the smell of burning Palestinians, their screams, the sensory effects of PTSD that he could excise neither from his body nor his soul.
The most difficult trauma to recover from is the violence you do unto others. The Israeli state is one massive psy-op, an interlaced network of cults and gaslights, which is why it is failing so spectacularly: the center cannot hold. We, too, are connected by these operations, and they are just as effective on us as them. Witness the liberals suddenly cheering on the deaths of children in Texas because they are defined by our political class as the enemy.
Breaking these cycles of state abuse, and "abuse" is the word we should be using, along with "terror," is the job of the conscientious citizen. This requires facing our own monsters, the mirror of those we despise, in a social mirror so distorted it is almost impossible to recognize who we are. For me, that involved getting to know my "adversaries" up close, and finding that they were mostly a lot like me.