On Death Cults and Decadence Israeli lessons for disdainful Americans. Bruce Bawer
https://www.frontpagemag.com/on-death-cults-and-decadence/
If you haven’t read Douglas Murray’s latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, you’ve very likely read about it. Released in April, it’s still near the top of the bestseller list, and it deserves to be.
In part, it’s a piece of first-rate reportage – truly historic, world-class reportage of the kind that the legacy media used to publish at their best. Immediately after the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, Murray flew to Israel and has spent much of his time there ever since, experiencing things to which neither you nor I would gladly expose ourselves except in the service of truth. Which is to say that Murray takes the title of journalist very seriously: to him, plainly, it is a calling, a trust, a profession in the best and noblest sense of the word.
Of course, to speak of journalism in such terms is to be reminded just how grotesque it is for most of the big legacy-media names – the ones who pull down the million-dollar salaries for staring into cameras, perfectly clad and coiffed, while reading scripts written by other people – to claim the same label for themselves. The day before I am writing this, I turned on CNN, with the usual dread, in hopes of hearing the latest news about the riots in Los Angeles. [Note: This piece was written before Israel and Iran began firing on each other.] I happened to catch the opening moments of Christiane Amanpour’s program. She began with what was meant to be a summing-up of the situation in L.A. She must have spoken eight or ten sentences before I switched the TV off. Why did I switch it off? Because every single sentence that came out of her mouth was a bald-faced lie.
This is the legacy-media landscape of our time: a landscape of lies. More and more of us can see through it, but millions of Americans are still being blue-pilled by Christiane, Wolf, Anderson, Jake, Rachel, and the rest of the whole crooked, compromised crew. For years these millions of Americans have been fed, and have swallowed, lies about Trump – the Russia hoax, the “fine people” hoax, the bleach-drinking hoax, and so forth. But even the lies about Trump aren’t as deeply twisted as the ones surrounding the events that Murray recounts with extraordinary precision and passion in On Democracies and Death Cults.
At times during this post-October 7 era, it has seemed almost as if the legacy media’s lies about the situation in Israel have rewired the minds of half the American population. Perhaps it just seems that way to me because I have so many friends (or “friends”) on social media whose age, sex, color, educational background, and job description render them most likely, for whatever reason, to fall for those lies. In other words, they’re college-educated white women in late middle age who belong to what you might call the creative class – poets, playwrights, composers, musicians, artists, actors, etc. – and who live, most of them, in New York or Los Angeles. More correctly, they live in a bubble of culture – an echo chamber of opening nights and poetry readings and vernissages. You might call it decadence.
I will let one of them stand for all. Anne, as I’ll call her, is a graduate of a boutique liberal-arts college, and when she read, a few weeks ago, that protesters who’d established a “student encampment” on the campus of her alma mater had just been arrested, she was outraged at this violation by the police of those peaceful, idealistic young people’s right to express their moral opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza. For that was what she’d been told about these student encampments, which had sprung up all over the country: they were all about the highest of principles – about peace and love, about empathy for the put-upon Palestinians and resistance to brutal Israel genocide – and certainly not about hatred for Israel or for Jews.
In fact, as Murray shows in On Democracies and Death Cults, the explosions of anti-Israeli sentiment on American campuses began on October 7, while Hamas was still slaughtering Israeli children. Murray quotes from professors at Yale, Albany, CUNY, and Cornell who, on that very day, took to the social media to cheer Hamas’s butchery. Soon afterwards the tent encampments began to materialize. From the start, they seemed to be part of a coordinated operation. (The U.S. director of national intelligence later cited evidence suggesting that they’d been funded by Iran.) Murray quotes some of the slogans shouted by the purportedly peace-loving students at the encampments: “Hamas, we love you!” “Hamas, give them hell!”
Distressed by my friend Anne’s confusion about these matters, I sought – as did another one of her “friends” – to straighten her out. But nothing could budge her. She’s Jewish, and refused to believe that any of the anti-Israeli rhetoric in those encampments had anything to do with anti-Semitism. It didn’t help when another old friend of mine, a celebrated octogenarian artist whom I’ll call Cal, jumped onto the thread to assure Anne that she was absolutely right and that I was absolutely wrong. Welcoming Cal’s support, Anne proceeded to wax poetic about her abiding determination to imbue the artworks she creates with a higher truth that elevates the people who experience them and thereby contributes to greater peace, harmony, and understanding in the world. I found Anne’s words terribly sweet and sensitive. And painfully naïve. They might have been penned by a teenage girl, not a woman in late middle age. They certainly had no connection whatsoever to the events on the ground in the Middle East today, or to the very different cultures and moral values of the parties involved, or to the centuries of history that have led to the present crisis. But I don’t mean to single Anne out for criticism, because in her naivëte she was speaking for an entire cohort of big-city American creative types, most of them well past starry-eyed adolescence, for whom the harder facts of life are irrelevant to the higher truths of the heart – and of art.
Murray touches in his book on people like Anne. At the site of the Nova music festival, he encounters a “bright, sparkly, and vivacious group of young women,” first-year members of the IDF, who are collecting the fragmented remains of some of hundreds of people who were murdered by Hamas in their cars on that horrible day. He asks one of them her age. She’s nineteen. He’s stunned:
These girls were the same age as a student going to college in America or Britain. They were the same age as people in the West who are treated like – and often act like – children. But these Israelis were not children. They were young women. And young soldiers at that. And it struck me, not for the first time, that these women had already seen and gone through more in their lives than their contemporaries in the West would go through by the time they die. But this wasn’t a curse for these young women. It was a blessing. To know something about life from its outset and to know what matters from the start of the journey.
I would take Murray’s point even further. These teenage IDF are more mature, more in touch with real life, than many of my middle-aged (and older) creative friends in New York and L.A. who are convinced that they know everything there is to know about the situation in the Middle East – and who actually believe that by composing a piece of music or covering a canvas with paint they’re contributing in some indirect way to the improvement of that situation. I would suspect that no member of the IDF has bragged as much in his entire life about his contribution to humanity than many of these creative types have done in an afternoon. Then there’s this little question, which none of these creative types, in their conviction as to the universal power of their own creations, seems ever to have considered: how much of a difference can even the best artist make in the faceoff between Israel and Hamas, given the incontrovertible Islamic injunction to destroy any work of art that conveys a message at odds with the teachings of the faith?
I’ve mentioned the reportage in Of Democracies and Death Cults. But Murray’s book is also a work of reflection – on life and death, on good and evil. On the price of civilization. On the question of what to do about a culture made up of people who actually have been brought up to worship death. And on the question of what to do about a culture made up of people who are so cultured – so sophisticated, so sensitive, so sentimental, and so prepared to sympathize with “the Other” – that they simply can’t conceive of a culture made up of people who actually do worship death. In the West, there’s a widespread belief that, as Murray puts it, “people around the world are the same everywhere and essentially want the same things” – namely, “to just live in peace and bring up their family in safety.” But, Murray warns, “some people do not” want those things. They don’t want love or peace or art or understanding. They want Jewish corpses. They want a West brought to its knees. Until foolish people in the West snap out of their naïve illusions and grasp that point thoroughly – and allow Israel to do what it has to do to protect its people, and its little oasis of civilization – the major cities of the West will soon be no safer than the Be’eri kibbutz at dawn on October 7, 2023. And the kind of civilization that makes possible the pretty poems and paintings of people like Anne and Cal will be gone with the wind.
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