Richard Seymour on Gaza, the anti-Deutsch, and threat of global war
Added 2023-12-14 06:00:03 +0000 UTCRichard returns to answer listener's questions on the situation in Gaza, the extent to which Joe Biden's support for Israel is about electoral calculations, the anti-Deutsch tendency and the pro-Israel current on the German left, and the threat of a global war, amongst other topics. Thanks as ever for your continued support for PTO.
Comments
The description of the psychology of nationalism and the infiltration of the far right into middle and working classes, around 30m, is brilliantly articulate.
Matt Davis
2023-12-26 20:25:29 +0000 UTCbut honestly I'm a bit tired of the frisson we get when talking about the absurdities of German memory culture and national psyche - there must be a materialist reason for why Germany has become so bad. If you go back 10 years or so, even conservative media such as FAZ is much more sanguine on this issue, so it's a pretty new phenomenon that the political and cultural elites are so crazy. The publicly funded infrastructure dedicated to fighting antisemitism has increased a lot which self perpetuates and keeps growing, but Germany's renewed dedication to becoming a geopolitical player must be taken into account too. And none of this is impacted by the anti-deutsch in any way.
cap
2023-12-14 13:28:43 +0000 UTCThere's more to say about how Holocaust remembrance and "solidarity with Israel" has become closely entwined with German identity politics, its just their version of white guilt. This explains why liberals such as the Green party of the media class are at at the forefront of the hysteria engulfing the country.
cap
2023-12-14 13:25:35 +0000 UTCLiving in Germany, I feel like the case of the Anti-Deutsche is overstated in the international left, simply because they are such an oddity. I found them bizzare and infuriating too when I first encountered them when I moved to Germany, but the fact of the matter is that the left has absolutely no power in this country. Just look at the circulation numbers of the anti-deutsch publications such as Bahamas, Jungle World or Konkret - they're tiny. Of course there are quite a few people who cut their teeth in one of these magazines and then go on to work for larger, more centrist or even conservative publications like taz or for Springer, or then move on to the state funded ngo world, like Luxemburg Stiftung or Antonio Amadeo. But this hardly makes for a "Marsch durch die Institutionen", its still a very marginal movement.
cap
2023-12-14 13:24:16 +0000 UTC
