The cognitive decline of western imperialism.
As soon as Marc Zuckerberg announced that Meta would stop fact checking, I decided to terminate my Facebook account. I hardly used it to begin with and most visits to this social media platform made me feel nauseous because of the uninvited US-based right-wing propaganda that somehow always managed to get around my attempts to block them. The other reason I started to associate Facebook with sickness were messages about genocidal acts in Palestine, committed by the state of Israel and cheered on by hate-filled propagandists of western media and politics.
I am fully aware that opposing a genocide committed by Israel now qualifies as antisemitism, just as supporting any action to stop a genocide may now qualify as terrorism, while actually murdering Palestinian civilians queuing up for food or water still qualifies as humanitarianism. The disdain with which western media and politicians violate and abuse common sense is disgusting and reprehensible. I still hope that the day will come that the cheerleaders of genocide, regardless whether they are filled with racist hatred, have been enchanted by cynical opportunism, or have been compromised by corruption and illicit acts, will face judgement. I also hope that those who preach genocide as justified self-defence in the name of ethnocratic nationhood and those who carry it out will also face judgment. I have very little hope that this will ever happen during my lifetime.
I face the prospect, that for the rest of my life I will have to endure the nausea caused by the revolting combination of evil, stupidity, cynicism and arrogance. Thus, yesterday I decided to check if my facebook account had actually been cancelled and discovered it still exists. Trawling through it, it still contained the same sickening content, primary focused on the situation in the UK, where Keir Starmer – one of the biggest cynical cowards that currently walk this planet – is using every opportunity to destroy democracy to save his own skin, just like his master, Donald Trump and Trump’s master, Benjamin Netanyahu. When combined, Cowardice, Stupidity and Evil generate the worst kind of political culture.
The sickness of Facebook is no joke. It is a collection of perverse contrasts: genocide and genocide-denial, celebrity news and conspiracy claims, football-gossip and aggressive racist diatribes, liberal cheerleading and war propaganda, and now and then there is a more reasonable post from an old friend, lost in the swamp of diabolical entertainment and manipulation. Facebook is the emblematic symptom of the cognitive decline of western imperialism. It is much worse than what Adorno and Horkheimer observed when writing about the Dialectics of Enlightenment.
Facebook is also exposing the shallowness of 50 years of “Communication Science”. One does not need complex discursive formations framed around misleading cognitive schemes to manipulate the masses and conquer their minds and hearts, one only needs is an overflowing of garbage to fragment reality into smithereens. The attention span of the average world citizen is now about 140 characters and perhaps 20 seconds; in many cases even less. However – and this too is important – despite the deliberate engineering of collective cognitive decline, the majority of the people in the world have not been swayed by Hasbara and still cling on to what they can see with their very own eyes: the live streamed genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of the whole of Palestine.
Netanyahu’s claim that this is the result of an organized campaign to vilify Israel might be the preamble to both a massive increase in spending American Tax-Payer’s dollars on Hasbara, or it might also be an announcement that media outlets and platforms are going to be extorted or bribed to increase their censorship and filters. Facebook has tried its best to ban pro-Palestinian outlets and posts, but still people reject Hasbara lies and the propaganda of Western media and politicians. The means by which cognitive abilities have been perverted and eroded by mainstream media and social media platforms are the same means that now resist Zionist Hasbara-propaganda. That is indeed a negative dialectic that Adorno did not foresee.
How else can one explain that in the UK hunderds of people have been arrested in the weeks following the utterly perverse proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization, by the deeply compromised and corrupt UK Labour Party? They are willingly risking being sentenced up to 14 years in prison for publicly supporting Palestine Action. One could call this courage, one could call this moral strength, one could also call this stupidity, but what matters is that the official mouth pieces of the state, the façades of Justice, Human Rights and Democracy, are being exposed as cowards, liars, cheats, corrupted, disloyal, unfair. To remain part of any elite today is to have to sacrifice one’s own dignity and sense of self worth. Of course, not everyone is compromised by forms of legalized tax evasion or video-recorded sexual abuse children, some are simply cheap, stupid, power hungry or easily flattered.
The story that does not seem to go away – who is on Jeffrey Epstein’s client list? – is the story of dirty old men being above the laws they impose upon the rest of us. It is the story of the accumulations of wealth, power and sexual perversions that explains why these men are also often referred to as the filthy rich. They are the billionaire class who are waging a global class war, while feeding us lies in order to ensure that we keep killing each other. They are responsible for breeding paramilitary militia through the cultivation of hatred. Sometimes, these are referred to as an army, like the IDF. But we have all seen what the IDF mostly consists of: sadistic cowards.
When 200 members of the IDF, mentored by several specialists from the Israeli security services, “visited” Amsterdam between November 5th and 8th, they believed that they could behave as if they were in Israel, chanting “death to the Arabs” and “we will rape your women” and other “ordinary hooligan stuff”, before violently attacking locals. This time, however, the locals fought back. Despite being untrained and unprepared, the locals showed courage and bravery against an extremely well-prepared and well-organized paramilitary-style group of hooligans. The latter had to call in the help of the police and later of leading Dutch politicians to transform themselves from perpetrators into victims (and the mainstream media and politicians could then be their saviors) – by involving their new magic word “antisemitism” – and some even got pay-outs as a reward for their racist performativity.
An interesting side-line to this story is the media-framing. Mainstream media and politicians tried to frame this as unprovoked – thus anti-Semitic – attacks. I am sure that soon, the question whether it was provoked or not will not have any effect on the accusations of anti-Semitism, however back in November 2024 narratives of causation still mattered. It were the video-recordings of a 14 year old Vlogger called Ome Bender that exposed the lies and propaganda and showed that the Maccabi hooligans were engaged in paramilitary style organized street violence, even threatening Bender while he was recording.
Another interesting side note: footage from public transport agencies that could have shown unprovoked instigations of Maccabi hooligan violence were erased because the camera system had been replaced five days after the riots, conveniently preventing the prosecution of Israeli hooligans. As of April 2025, two victims had been officially awarded compensation by the Netherlands’ Criminal Injuries Compensation Fund, receiving approximately €1,000 and €2,500, respectively, based on the severity of their physical and psychological harm. Whereas legal representatives from Dr. Gideon Fisher & Co. and a Dutch partner law firm continue processing claims. So far, their representation includes around 30 victims, with further applications ongoing and more expected to be compensated in the coming months. Being a hooligan can be profitable if you can provoke violent retaliations and call it anti-Semitism.
Events like this do not help Hasbara, because believe it or not, local people do not need media to tell them what happened in their city. You may be able to fool all people some of the time, you may even fool some people all of the time, but you cannot fool all people all of the time. Mediated persuasion no longer works well, it can only fragment, undermine coherence and subvert cognitive abilities. Negative dialectics ultimately destroy the coherence of any ideology or narrative and all that remains is cynicism and disbelief. That is the world of Facebook. That is our world right now.
Disaffected Sociology 
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