Several media reports on the last attack on Iran by Israel have embraced a rhetoric of awe over Mossad. This is not for the first time. As child educated on protestant schools in the Netherlands during the 1970s, we were already well informed how fantastic the Israeli secret service is. Part of this can be explained by the fgact that Hasbara is a cornerstone of Israeli information warfare, which has been ongoing since at least 1948. Of course Mossad may have infiltrated western media but this does not explain, why western journalists are so excited about Mossad, to the extent that one may describe their rhetoric as orgiastic.
This fetishism over infiltration, espionage and other illicit activities stems from a libidinal economy in which perversions are as much desired as they are repressed. Sigmund Freud has already written the script on this from a psychoanalytic point of view, which is particularly powerful when connected to his thesis on civilization and its discontents. Deleuze & Guattari criticized the sole reliance on neurosis and offered schizoanalysis as an alternative analytical framework to understand the libidinal economy of capitalism.-
But there is something specific about this dynamic of salivating over the violations of the sovereignty of law. These are akin to rape fantasies. For Schizoanalysis, rape fantasies function in relation to the libidinal economy of micro-fascism. What is not clear is whether this coding is a loss of control in relation to being violated or a loss of control of abandoning morality and civilization. However, the rape-fantasies surrounding the journalistic reporting on Mossad are clearly aligned with the latter. That is exactly how micro-fascism becomes inscribed into political culture. The new-media drooling over Mossad is the libidinal identification with the perpetrators of the rape of sovereignty.
Of course, if this were to be stated as such, it would be denied. There still remains a veneer of shame around identifying with rapists. Hence, it as to be sanitized as “necessary”. The alleged threatening immorality of the victim, as someone who “asked for it”, is usually how rapist justify their actions. However, there is also a second component: the voyeuristic obsession with the details of the rape embedded in a “will to know”, which is a key element not only in the institutionalized libidinal economy of news journalism, but also in the pornographic cultural industry. Indeed, reading the detailed accounts of Mossad’s brilliance is like reading pornography.
For those few who still consider the state of Israel to be a moral entity, the challenge is to apply the same language to the Hamas attacks of the 7th of October. If you cannot do that, it means that you are a racist, hiding behind identity politics to deceive yourself and everyone else that you are a better person because of your race or ethnicity. It could be worse, however, you could also become a fascist in which case you will learn to forget to justify yourself in the name of morality or civilization and simply become a sad, sadistic, coward.
Therefore, if one wants to “condemn Hamas” – as those referring to Palestinians as human beings whose rights have been systematically violated are often asked to do, before being allowed to speak – one is equally obliged to refrain from salivating over the systematic rape of international law by Israel and its allies. Mossad are not “friends of democracy”.
The intersections between libidinal economy and identity politics should be subjected to continuous critical schizoanalysis as this exposes the micro-fascism that we all have to deal with. Libidinal desire is what enables micro-fascism to be so invasive, seductive, and parasitically virulent. In Fatal Strategies, Jean Baudrillard argued that the main rhetorical strategy of political culture has shifted from persuasion to seduction. A similar observation can be found in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Perhaps these are merely echoes of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical analysis of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. What matters much more than tracing intellectual origins, is emphasizing that all of them have pointed out that politics in western democracies have much less to do with reasoned deliberation than with libidinal manipulation.
Identity politics, for example those of nationalism, only have a limited rationality. As an ideology, it merely says that your nation is superior, because you were born of/in it. However, as a libidinal, often purely Oedipal, desire it is much more powerful. From pseudo-homo-erotic fantasies about the depth of unbreakable bonds between men (e.g. military brotherhood, team spirit within a national football team) to abandonment (by the mother) and castration anxieties and daddy issues (often labelled as “patriotism”), nationalism can feed a rich plethora of disoriented affective attachments. To align oneself with the nation is to supplement these relational desires and anxieties with fantasies of collective individuation – the becoming-one of a mass-movement.
The libidinal economy of nationalism engenders the desire to “die for your country” – especially among those who do not even own any land in that country. However, in extreme situations, such as in Israel, it also engenders a collective-barbaric sadistic jouissance. As 8 out of 10 Israeli Jews support the actions of thr IDF in Gaza, celebrate war crimes such as murdering women and children, bombing schools and hospitals, torturing and raping civilians, and actually enjoy the complete demolition of international law, the world is now confronted with a cultivated mass movement of perversion that we may call democratic fascism. It is the democracy of the lynch-mob, sustained by official news media, entertainment media and social media. They celebrate their own perversions as expressions of national pride.
This is the legacy of Zionism, a political culture nurtured on deception and cowardice. Whereas many Jews fought European nationalism, fascism and anti-Semitism with the international solidarity of socialism, communism and trade unions, many Zionists preferred to refrain from organized self-defence against the Nazis. Instead, like an old-fashioned Disney Princess, she waited for her knight in shining armour on a white horse, – western imperialism – to create a Jewish State in the promised land. The Warsaw ghetto uprisings were not the work of Zionists. The last commander, Marek Edelmann, later condemned the founding of the state of Israel and supported Palestinian resistance. Today, comparing Gaza the Warsaw Ghetto is considered offensive or even a hate crime.
Again, the libidinal desire of perversion rules in this world. The only reason why Zionists do not feel the need to adhere to international law is because they do not have to. They do not believe in equality and human rights, as they believe in birth rights. They do not believe in justice, as they believe in force, and they do not believe in peace as they believe in violence. In what universe can genocide be justified? In a universe where equality, peace and justice are considered weaknesses. This arrogance of perversion cannot last, as the only vectors it sustains are those of radicalization and escalation. The State of Israel lives on borrowed time, but it will still get a lot worse before it will get any better.
Disaffected Sociology 
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