On Groyper and Zionist Anti-Bolshevism

 

By: Fakhry Al-Serdawi (He believes in a one-state solution where Larry David is the Prime Minister)

The phenomenon of Nick Fuentes during the Gaza War challenged the Pro-Palestine movement’s rejection of anti-semitism for tactical and ethical reasons. This rejection was ethical, refusing to conflate Judaism with Netanyahuist Zionism as a civilizational collective punishment against Jews, and it was also tactical because you were always in a war of containment with AIPAC. Fuentes created an unusual instance where tactics and ethics seem to be at odds with each other; yes, he must be condemned on moral grounds, but tactically, he could become not exactly an ally but a contradiction in American politics, useful in isolating AIPAC. Yet after the US regime change attack on Venezuela, it turned out that the “Fuentes contradiction” is just a ruse, and he is just as a naked Imperialist as Ben Shapiro and both equally should not be given the nuclear codes.

Nevertheless, last autumn, the anti-Zionist podcast sphere, Tucker Carlson, Crystal Ball, Dave Smith, Ana Kasparian, Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy (Sneako), and many others, not only platformed his ideas, or worse, had him as a guest, but also were content with the prospect that he would become the future of the Republican Party, eventually becoming the President. Those pro-Palestine activists have surrendered to anti-semitem, under a pessimist and nihilistic pretext: “If AIPAC is going to cancel us as jew-haters, why bother? Why not have Fuentes on the show?” Their doomerism; nevertheless, backfired, and their show host turned out to be a delighted Venezuela hawk. Unlike those who were fooled by Fuentes, Edward Said argued decades ago that ethics and tactics should never be separated when rejecting anti-semitism;

“Anti-Semitism and any racial theory of that sort is our natural enemy as much as it is the enemy of Jews: that almost goes without saying. I am happy to say, parenthetically, that the leading Arab organization to which I belong, the AAUG, has gone on record publicly to condemn the proposed march through Skokie, Illinois- a predominantly Jewish Chicago suburb- of the American Nazi Party”.^[1]

The Dangerous Redefinitions of Neoconservatism

The obvious reason why Nick Fuentes is apparently anti-war in Gaza and pro-War in Venezuela is his hatred for Jews. But that is not his only motive. Netanyahu celebrated the attack on Venezuela, and Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodríguez said that the kidnapping of Maduro had “Zionist undertones”; giving Nick Fuentes good reasons to continue the charade of his anti-semitism disguised as anti-war activism. Yet Fuentes supported the attack because of its almost non-boots on the ground efficiency, as he said: “Initially seemed like a solid operation to cleanly, bloodlessly, and quickly remove Maduro from power last night”. He also called for expelling undocumented Venezuelans to Venezuela “Now that Venezuela has been liberated”, urging the US to “Take the oil, remigrate the foreigners”. Later on, Fuentes said that “We will come in and… we will kill all of you. Our military will come in and wipe out your regime and we’ll take your oil.”

It is not that Fuentes’ opposition to neoconservatism was fake all along; it is more that he had his own self-surving interpretation of neoconservatism to oppose. For him, neoconservatism’s biggest sin is not invading and bombing other countries; it is state-building; he confirms that when he says: “But this new policy of ‘running Venezuela’ with US soldiers sounds like a massive over-commitment. I have zero confidence in nation-building. Big mistake”. Fuentes’ distorted understanding of neoconservatism did not happen in a vacuum, but in an environment where Netanyahuism itself induced significant and dangerous redefinitions of neoconservatism that made the term practically meaningless, allowing everyone to pretend that they were “punching up”, “speaking truth to power”, and creating their own hyperbolic brand of the “anti-imperialism of fools”.

Even Tablet Magazine had the audacity to pretend opposing neoconservatism while blindly supporting Netanyahu, claiming that Biden wants regime change in Israel many times, including after October 7. Two years into the war , it turned out that the opposite was true: not only did Netanyahu’s regime remain firmly in place, but also Biden and Trump helped him conduct the most significant regime change operations in the Middle East since 2003. This ongoing process has engulfed Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, alongside Israel’s participation with its regional allies in interfering in Sudan and Somalia, yet Tablet and The Free Press, being the nationalist inverted Third-Worldists that they are, ludicrously still claim that Netanyahu is the victim of American regime change attempts.

Before MAGA and Groypers redefined neoconservatism as synonymous with state-building, not actually invading and destroying a country, Netanyahuists have been embracing this redefinition for a long time. In his interview with Douglas Lain, Jacob Siegel said that the difference between the US in Afghanistan and Israel in Gaza is the “US Objective to remake Afghanistan as a modern democratic society as a condition of the success for US forces in Afghanistan,” while in Gaza, “the military objectives are achievable, you can destroy Hamas, then the key question becomes can you leverage the destruction of Hamas into a political settlement that will be durable and achieve a measure of peace for Israelis inside their own homeland”. It is interesting here that Siegel talks about “peace for Israelis in their own homeland” without mentioning the fate of the Palestinians; if not state-building or state-rebuilding because of the Israeli destruction, then what? Ethnic cleansing? Is state-building so bad for the allegedly anti-neoconservative pundit, that even forced displacement is better?

Fetishized Anti-Capitalism and Fetishized Anti-Communism

The other reason why Nick Fuentes is dovish on Palestine and hawkish on Venezuela is that he is reenacting Nazi Germany’s anti-Imperialism against the West on one hand, and its imperialistic appetite towards the Soviet Union on the other. Fuentes wants a two-front war, one with the Jews “running Washington” and the other with Marxists running Caracas. Hence, he supports war in Venezuela because he fetishizes communism as a Judeo-Bolshevik plot.

Moise Postone describes modern anti-semitism as fetishized anti-capitalism that personalizes the impersonal and abstract domination of capitalism and projects its power onto the Jews as a “conspiratorial force”. Postone’s theory did not focus on fetishized anti-communism despite the Nazi embrace of the trope of Judeo-Bolshevism; probably because the Soviet Union itself normalized fetishized anti-capitalism, utilizing Marx’s writings on the Jewish question.

Yet, fetishized anti-communism could be considered as a parallel phenomenon to fetishized anti-capitalism, a one which explains why both Netanyahuists and Groypers celebrated the US attack on Venezuela.

Fetishized anti-communism is a modern manifestation of both anti-semitism and orientalism in the West, a one that intersects with the bourgeoisie disdain towards the working class (similar to neoconservative media contempt towards Nicolas Maduro because he is a former bus driver). This mystification goes against the Trotskyist tradition of viewing failed communism as a Stalinist abstract force, a process that brings down the Soviet system to a level of centralized and oppressive state-capitalism. In contrast, anti-communist ideology in the West always personalized communism and projected it onto certain groups. The idea of the Judeo-Bolshevik plot was central to McCarthyism, and the idea of communist expansion as an invading oriental horde has always been part of the Atlanticist ideology since the beginning of the Cold War. George Kennan, an architect of the US containment policy against the Soviets, said that communists are characterized by the flexibility and deception of the Russian oriental mind, shaped by “centuries of obscure battles between nomadic forces over the stretches of a vast unfortified plain”.^[2]

In his essay on “Racism, the Highest Stage of Anti-Communism”, NYU Slavic studies academic Rossen Djagalov documents with proficiency how the fetishized anti-communism of Soviet dissidents barbarizes itself into pure racism. Joseph Brodsky, for example, described the Vietnamese as non-human, and called for using the hydrogen bomb on Vietnam. Another Soviet dissident Valeria Novodvorskaya called the voters of Islamists in Algeria monkeys and said that “Apartheid is a normal thing” and that the black majority in South Africa, “takes pleasure in arson, murder, and violence”. She also said: “I don’t care how many rockets democratic America will drop on undemocratic Iraq. As far as I am concerned, the more, the better.”^[3]

Ayan Rand was one significant example of the intellectuals who introduced fetishized anti-communism into the pro-Israel American culture, most likely because she was a victim of fetishized anti-capitalism herself in Russia before exile to the West. Her intellectual and literary main theme focused on reverence towards the victim status of the oppressed capitalist, an individualistic libertarian figure against whom the communist horde is always plotting. Now Rand did not particularly personalize this oppressed capitalist as Jewish, but she certainly fetishized his enemies and projected their horde-power upon certain oriental groups. She vehemently expressed this on the Phil Donahue Show;

“If you mean whose side should one be on, Israel or the Arabs, I would certainly say Israel because it’s the advanced, technological, civilized country, amidst a group of almost totally primitive savages who have not changed for years and who are racist and who resent Israel because it’s bringing industry and intelligence and modern technology into their stagnation.”

This AIPAC adjacent culture of modern orientalism as fetishized anti-communism has produced the Netanyahuist version of the Groypers; a prominent example here is Richard Hanania, who is par excellence the Nick Fuentes of Zionists. If the anti-Zionist podcast sphere tried to restore the image of Nick Fuentes after the Gaza War, many center-right outlets have been trying to polish the image of Hanania after the recent rise of Groypers. This ranges from Hanania’s piece on Unherd Magazine lamenting that “It’s the Gryoper’s America Now” to New York Times’ Ezra Klein quoting Hanania’s condemnation of the Groypers, only two years after the NYT described Hanania as an “Unremarkable Racist” enjoying “the Backing of Billionaires”.

I don’t know what’s more: Fuentes’ hatred for Jews or Hanania’s hatred for Palestinians. He, unlike Jacob Siegel, who only wishes to incapacitate Hamas, said that “Crushing Palestinian hopes and dreams is a long term project, but the ultimate path to victory”. He also thinks that the problem is not in organizations representing Palestine, but in all Palestinians, claiming that they “think that Hamas is too moderate and loves Jews too much”. In the beginning of the Gaza War, he said: “300,000 Gazans have been made homeless already, 12% of the population in 6 days. Incredible. There will be a lot of pressure for Israel to stop, but the best thing for all involved would be to put diplomatic and financial effort towards finding new countries for them to move to”. He also propagated on Twitter the debunked myths of Palestinian militants drinking the blood of the Jordanian prime minister they assassinated in 1971, implying that -like communists- Palestinians destroy every country they infiltrate. The Image of Palestinians in Hanania’s mind can only be compared to Nazi caricatures of Leon Trotsky on a mount of skulls.

Many say that Richard Hanania is a white supremacist. I believe -as I have eluded before- in Liberal-Bourgeois supremacy as the last type of superiority accepted under capitalism (in other words, Hanania is abstractly and impersonally a psychopathic narcissistic prick). He is also an Ayan Rand fan; he wants to stand for the oppressed capitalist, too. He wants to defend “capitalism in a world enamored with collectivism”. But if he can only defend capitalism through the absolute dehumanization of the Palestinians, that means his fetishized anti-communism meets right there in the middle with Nick Fuentes’ fetishized anti-capitalism; both are turning class struggle into the into the conflict between the evil/wise Jewish few against the evil/wise crowd of the many.

This unintended collision of Fuentes and Hanania is important for us to put ourselves in each other’s shoes for both ethical and tactical reasons. For the Pro-Palestine activists, Richard Hanania is exactly what it feels like to be Jew listening to Nick Fuentes. For the Netanyahists like Bari Weiss, Helen Andrews, Liel Lebovitz, and crusader against the Woke Right James Lindsy, if you want to put an end to the Nick Fuentes phenomenon maybe you can start by refraining from dehumanizing people the way Fuentes is dehumanizing you.

^[1] Said, Edward W. “The Palestine Question and the American Context.” Arab Studies Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1980): 127–49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41857536.

^[2] Kennan, George F. “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Foreign Affairs 25, no. 4 (July 1947): 566–582.

^[3] Djagalov R. Racism, the Highest Stage of Anti-Communism. Slavic Review. 2021;80(2):290-298. doi:10.1017/slr.2021.83