In whose ranks do you stand? Three autoethnographic fragments on supporting violent revolutions

That evil is embodied by the others is a most intuitive assumption. The idea that others reveal their true face of evil in conflict is also well known and studied (e.g. by Oskar Verkaaik 2004). But how do we recognise friends? Especially, how do we recognise friends in the unclear zone of shared ideological grounding and solidarity with the causes of others, where the question of “us” is not already decided by firm markers of identity? This question is important for the understanding of how we judge evil, because intuitive solidarity and trust are as crucial for committing atrocities as is the recognition of the enemy as so evil that atrocity is the only proportional and reasonable way to deal with them. People who speak in hateful tones about their enemies as being full of hate, and promote extreme action against the latter, often at the same time describe themselves and their own in terms of love. There is a link between love and evil that is deeper than mere opposition.

My question about the recognition of “us” is a specific one about ideological, moral identification. Being myself raised in a communist milieu that was essentially constituted by such moral identification, I ask this question by means of three autoethnographic vignettes. The first tells of a political disagreement that put a friendship at risk; the second recounts a journey of discovery that remained foundational in spite of shifting ideological views; and the third addresses affective commitment and revolutionary music.

First vignette, about a failure to support revolutionary violence

Today, there is widespread agreement in circles sympathetic with Palestinian people that Israel is acting with a genocidal intent in Gaza, seeking to kill and displace its inhabitants in a systematic manner so as to make Gaza no longer a Palestinian city (either no longer a city, or no longer inhabited by Palestinians, or both). But before there was a genocide, there was a short and intense period of excitement about a war of liberation among many of the same people. I failed to share that excitement, and could “just see more death and darkness” ahead, as I noted in my diary on 8 October 2023. My failure to share the excitement was as shocking to some friends of mine as their excitement was shocking to me. The outcome was my failure to support a cause that could have been ours together.

This was the explicit topic of a discussion I had with an Egyptian friend in Berlin in early November of the same year, a moment when the short-lived euphoria about imminent liberation of Palestine had already turned into shock and anger about the Israel’s apparent determination to destroy Gaza step by step. I was shocked by my friend’s insistence that the attack across the 1948 line of control was not only justified but also useful and positive. That friend was shocked by me questioning its justification and its consequences. We had stood on the same side in the Egyptian revolution, and we had until then thought that we stood on the same side on the Palestinian cause. We argued our points and listened to each other. It was not pleasant. We did not agree. We parted with a hug.

In a moral sense, we have not been able to agree on this. Our shared rejection of the Zionist project of creating an exclusive Jewish homeland by means of conquest, deportation, and most recently, mass murder has failed to translate into a shared support for a war of liberation. Our disagreement cannot be solved by evidence, because each of us is committed to a different ontology of violence. For my friend, revolutionary violence can never be equated with the violence that enabled ongoing oppression and conquest, a view that is in line with Frantz Fanon’s vision of a world divided in two by colonialism (in the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon 1963). The Israeli occupation is the cause and source and evil, and they were going to do what they are doing in any case regardless of what Palestinians do. Fighting back with all available means is necessary to stop them. For me, the two kinds of violence (conquest and resistance) are mutually constitutive in a process of escalation that Gregory Bateson (1935) called schismogenesis. The Israeli occupation has become increasingly brutalised in the course of a long and ongoing confrontation, making those working for it willing to do things today that they were not willing to do decades earlier when it would have been easier to do them than today (and the Palestinian resistance and solidarity have become increasingly brutalised as well). Further escalation will result in more brutalisation. From the point of view of each of us, the facts prove our view.

Politically, we have lost much of our former capacity of coming together as “we”. And yet at the same time, both of us have made an effort to maintain our friendship and sense of mutual recognition as in some way belonging to the same community of “us”, even when doing so has occasionally required interrupting discussions before they can cause too much damage. Notably, I have at the same time not made a serious effort to talk about these issues with any of the few open supporters of Israel I know among my friends and family. With those, I do not feel that they and I share enough to justify a probably futile and frustrating effort. The serious effort invested by my friend and me thus means that something about our belonging to an “us” is disturbed, while at the same time we remain connected in a community of “us” intact enough that it may be rescued and repaired.

However, for the purposes of an anthropological understanding of how humans attribute love and judge evil, my friend was right. Shedding tears for the enemy indeed goes against the grain of an existential war framed in terms of either survival or annihilation. Recognising evil as part of a process in which also “we” participate is opposed to the emotions and the reasoning that need to be cultivated in a binary struggle. German pro-Israeli media and government have proved this point abundantly in the following months and years. Many people have asked me how come so many Germans can support a genocide. My answer is that they don’t think that they are supporting one – and a few among them claim that they are preventing one. They are told by pro-Israeli media and politicians that Jewish people are facing an acute threat of a second holocaust. They are offered plenty of information and imagery to sympathise with those who experienced horrors during the 7 October attacks or in captivity. They have not been celebrating the killing of Palestinian children – instead, German radio stations have played to them melancholy songs longing for the return home of the hostages. Repeatedly and persistently grieving for the victims of Hamas and its allies on 7 October has become the key emotional technique towards not grieving for the victims of Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza and the mass murder of its people since then. This is a case in point of love in alliance with mass murder.

My friend was probably also right in a second historical sense. Catastrophic losses on the side of the people whose freedom and dignity one supports may, in the long term, provide a path towards an ultimate military victory insofar as those losses strengthen the international of solidarity and weakens support for the enemy. There is an inverse relation between Palestine and Palestinian solidarity: the more of the first is lost, the stronger the latter grows. This can be a winning strategy insofar as it ensures the continuation of the struggle until a day when the balance of powers may shift. The path towards a possible final victory along these lines is long and devastating, may result in catastrophic defeat instead, and in case of success will likely require the death of millions (since Israel’s nuclear arsenal will be employed as a weapon of last resort, and since a lot of people will have a lot or revenge to take) – but it is a plausible path, not the most likely outcome at the moment, but more likely than a peaceful two-state solution.

This disagreement between friends, along with my later recognition of ways in which my friend was right, raise two questions that are useful to understand the complex constitution of “us” in us-and-them and good-and-evil confrontations. The first is: how come were we shocked in the first place, knowing that we come from different places with different histories? And following that shock, how come did we invest emotional work into maintaining our friendship? To this question, the history of my own family members in choosing sides in revolutions based on personal encounters even across ideological differences can offer some clues. The second question is: how come would someone who grew up with a revolutionary faith and participated in a revolution fail to support revolutionary violence although there are good historical reasons to support it? To this question, I believe my own trajectory as growing up with the peculiar ambivalence of communism between affective commitments to world peace and political violence offers a partial answer.

Second vignette, on how my father supported the Cultural Revolution

In 1969, my father travelled to China to witness the Cultural Revolution. Twenty years of age at the time, he had gone to seamen’s school and joined the West German merchant navy. Due to his class position, my father was unable to join the student movement at the universities. But at the seamen’s school and the port of Hamburg as well, discussions took place at the street corners, and the possibility of a revolution was in the air. The Cultural Revolution that was unleashed by Mao in 1966 against the cadres of his own communist party, held great promise among young people in Western countries. But few people from Western countries could visit China or see more than was shown to official delegations – with the important exception of sailors on merchant ships. Thus, my father hired as a deck hand on M/S Mai Rickmers that at the time transported cargo between Hamburg in West Germany and Shanghai in China. “I was curious”, he said when I asked him about his motivation.

He has told me the story many times, with different emphases but the same key events. They travelled around the Cape of Good Hope (Suez Canal was closed after Six Days War), and stopped in Thailand to bunker fuel. During the fuelling stop, people came to the ship on small boats, selling drinks and food. Women sold sex. The poverty and misery were intense and impossible to overlook. When they arrived in Shanghai, they encountered a radically different, well-ordered port and city, with dedicated bars for sailors and rickshaw drivers. The comparison with misery in Thailand was crucial in the story, and in this version of the story, my father highlighted his positive impression rather than censorship and isolation: “When I saw that, of course I was for the revolution”, he said when telling the story in 2022.

Supporting the revolution did not mean that they were credulous and compliant. My father and his friends were only allowed to drink at the international sailors’ bar, which was expensive, and they were followed constantly by a political officer. They got bored and escaped the officer, and found their way to the more affordable rickshaw drivers’ bar. They had a good time there. Afterwards, they were reprimanded by the officer. All radios had been confiscated from the ship during their stay in Chinese waters, except one used by the ship’s radio operator. During their stay in Shanghai, the Apollo 11 crew landed on the moon, and the R/O spread the news among the crew. My father and his friends retaliated to the political officer by telling that the Americans had just landed on the moon, which the officer refused to believe.

In spite of such ridiculous excesses of censorship, Shanghai presented an impressive face of a revolution creating order and progress. He brought as a souvenir a printed image of Shanghai which hung on the wall of my childhood home in Helsinki. Also today, it is prominently placed in his home.

In spring 2026, we looked at photographs of the trip he had collected in an album. A page titled “At roadstead Thailand” shows a leisurely atmosphere with small boats selling goods and young sailors drinking beer. There are no pictures of China in the album. After the pictures, he added: “I thought I was travelling to the future, but we were the past.” In this comment, two different lines of storytelling come together: The Cultural Revolution, for my father in 1969, was a powerful possible future. But his way of travel was about to become the past: break-bulk carriers like Mai Rickmers would be replaced by container ships soon afterwards. Thanks to the long discharging and loading times of break-bulk cargo, he had access to a kind of exploration of the bars of Shanghai that sailors of the container age do not have. The future turned out to be one of a dialectical transcending (Aufhebung in the words of Hegel and Marx) of the Cultural Revolution and bulk carriers alike: a capitalist China led by the Communist Party providing the world with industrial products in giant container ships.

The Cultural Revolution began as a chaotic and violent popular rebellion lead by none less than head of the state, directed against functionaries of his own party and government, as well as traditional social and cultural institutions. Seen from abroad, the Cultural Revolution appeared as the most revolutionary a revolution could be: determined to overthrow every remnant of old culture, society, and institutions in a radical bottom-up movement of the masses. It was obvious that violence was necessary (Song 2011). Between one and two million people were killed (World Peace Foundation 2026).

In 1967, Shanghai municipality had been replaced by a people’s collective. By 1969, the People’s Liberation Army had grown increasingly powerful and was busy bringing the radical faction under control. The order and progress that Shanghai radiated to West German sailors in 1969 was in fact an effect of the Cultural Revolution ending with a temporary power grab by the commander of the army. Outside urban centres, China’s economy and administration were in a state of disarray (Yan and Gao 1996: 285-309; 393-395; 463-471).

My father learned these things later. He did wonder how come other people who had seen more of its dark side still spoke in support of the Cultural Revolution. But he did not wonder about his younger self being idealistic enough to have believed in the revolution. My father’s appreciation of his encounters and the effect they left upon him has remained remarkably untouched by his later political transformation. After having been a leftist until his late 20’s, he became a supporter of the free market, and with advancing age began to support nationalist positions that resonate with the populist right. While his ideology has shifted, he has maintained an instinctive working-class solidarity. For him, the reasons to support the Cultural Revolution in 1969 remain valid: he experienced in personal encounters the misery of Thailand and the order of Shanghai.

The validity of personal encounters regardless of a later ideological transformation offers a tentative answer to the first question I asked in conclusion of the first vignette. My Egyptian friend and I may have come from different places with different histories, but we went through the same formative political experience of the Egyptian revolution (in addition to other less political formative experiences later), an experience both of us consider true and valid, even while the conclusions we draw today about new revolutions differ.

Third vignette, on growing up with revolutionary music

I grew up in a world clearly divided in good and evil. Until my late teens I was confident that the political faith of my family, communism, held the concrete promise of a better life for humans in freedom and equality. My homeland Finland was a liberal democracy that held friendly relations with the Soviet Union and posed as neutral in the Cold War. Communism was a popular political movement gaining between 10 and 20 per cent of the vote at the time, and many young people who had been inspired by the leftist revolutionary movement of the 1968, in the early 1970’s joined the radical minority wing of orthodox Marxist-Leninists fully loyal to Moscow.¹ My mother was among them.

At home and in meetings of Democratic Pioneers, the children’s organisation of the party, I learned that powers opposed to communism were the powers of evil: Fascist regimes such as those that had recently fallen in Europe, capitalist democracies under the leadership of the United States, and emerging religious revolutionary states such as Iran. At pioneer camps, I experienced this binary in the fulfilling shape of a summertime adventure. I learned about international solidarity with socialist countries (Nicaragua was most prominent at the time). I also learned to distrust people from the Eurocommunist majority wing in the Communist Party of Finland, and although nobody explicitly told me so, I began to think of them as perhaps even worse than the capitalists.

Around this time occurred also one of the most immediate actions of evil that I have committed: I participated in the collective bullying of a boy in the tent we shared at a pioneer camp. The lead bullies were two brothers, sons of friends of my parents. The older of the brothers, Teemu Keskisarja, would later become a prominent and controversial member of the parliament for the extreme-right True Finns party. His ideology may have changed since we last met, but I see an affective continuation between him as the charismatic leader of our gang of boys bullying the weakest person in our tent, and his style of populist politics in the Finnish parliament today. We constituted ourselves as “us” partly by attacking somebody we recognised as different and vulnerable.

Teemu’s father was a hardline communist revolutionary. My mother later told me that many young men in the party were opposed to serving in the army out of a pacifist conviction (which my mother shared). He, however, insisted that they should all do their military service so that they could fight when the revolution begins.

I learned that the Russian revolution of 1917 had been the greatest positive transformation of the century. I knew of the Russian Civil War that continued until 1922, and I knew that Stalin had gone too far. I was not aware of the death toll. Around nine million people, and possibly more, were killed in executions, concentration camps, forced resettlement, and famines in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s rule.²

I supported the idea of a world peace based on nuclear disarmament and joined peace marches as a child. I was just too young to remember the marches in support of North Vietnam before its 1975 victory in the Vietnam War. My mother tried to give me a pacifist education without war related toys, but she also assured to me that Soviet nuclear weapons were there to protect peace, to prevent an attack by the Americans. When my parents divorced, I projected my existential insecurity into the fear of an imminent nuclear assault by the United States. Until the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, I had a fundamental faith that socialist states were inherently prone to peace and democracy.

My change of mind was not an individual one. I turned away from communism only when the socialist regimes of Europe collapsed, and millions of other people took the same turn. I read extensively about the crimes committed by communist regimes, and travelled to countries whose economies and ecologies were in crisis after decades of actually existing socialism. But I did not find a new political home in either liberalism or anarchism which I flirted with at times.

Throughout this process, communist songs from the 1970’s have remained my favourite music. The radical movement in Finland of the 1970’s was accompanied by an artistically high-quality music scene with a modern pop edge and distinctive sound. As a child, I learned these songs by heart, and learned through them to understand and feel about the world. As a young adult in the 1990’s, I listened to these songs ironically, that irony being part of my process of growing apart from communist ideology. As a middle-aged man, I listen to these songs because I love the emotions they raise in me: hope, compassion, determination, spiced with a taste of tragedy.

Love and violence run through this genre as key themes. Songs of this genre often celebrate revolutionary violence. But they do not describe it in detail. (The violence by Fascists and capitalists is addressed in detail.) Instead, justified violence merges with hope and affection among revolutionaries and between peoples, as in Foundation by the band Agit Prop:

Äiti, äiti, sait jälleen voitosta tiedon.
Muistatko vielä sen ensimmäisen päivän, jolloin ensimmäinen kivääri suojeli syntymäkotiamme?
Muistatko tumman joukon, joka vartioi palmujen alla?
Kansanvalta, kansanvalta!
Se on kivääri kädessäsi, öisillä poluilla valvovan äidin varjo, sisaresi vihreä asetakki.
Kansanvalta, kansanvalta!
Se on lukemaan oppiva ihminen nuotiolla, se on ensimmäinen taistelu ja voitto!

Mother, mother, again you received news about victory
Do you still remember the first day, when the first rifle protected our home?
Do you remember the dark group that kept watch under the palm trees?
People’s power! People’s power!
It is the rifle in your hand, the shadow of your mother guarding the trails at night, your sister’s green uniform jacket
People’s power! People’s power!
It is a human learning to read at a campfire, it is the first battle and victory!³

Not all songs have the same explicit militancy. I’m a communist by the same Agit Prop from 1974, translated from Nâzim Hikmet’s Turkish original, articulates communism as a love for the world in becoming:

Olen kommunisti.
Olen rakkautta kiireestä kantapäähän.
Rakkautta syntyvään lapseen.
Etenevään valoon.

Rakkaus on näkemistä, ajattelemista, ymmärtämistä.
Rakkaus on kehdon ripustamista tähtiin.
Rakkaus on teräksen valamisen vaivannäköä.

I'm a communist,
I'm love from top to toe,
love for a child to be born,
for advancing light.

Love is seeing, thinking, understanding.
Love is hanging a cradle on the stars.
Love is the effort required to cast steel.⁴

A song that for good reasons counts as the most iconic work of this movement takes up the relation of love and violence directly. Written and sung by the poet Aulikki Oksanen as a response to the celebration of love by the late 1960’s hippie movement, In whose ranks do you stand? tells us that revolutionary violence is the condition without which love is a mere illusion.

Ei ystäväni,
ei synny rakkaus maailmaan
odottaessasi taivaan armoa,
vallanpitäjien sääliä

Ei ystäväni,
niin kauan kuin leivästä
jää reikä leipojan käteen
jääköön rakkaudesta puhuminen pastorien houreiksi

Pitäkööt Leijonat makeiskorinsa,
puolueettomat humanistit korulauseensa
Tätä vääryyttä vastaan ei taistella kukkasin
Tätä verta ei pysäytä pehmeä myötätunto
Nälkäisten vatsat eivät suudelmista täyty

Kenen joukoissa seisot,
kenen lippua kannat
Ei synny rakkautta ilman oikeutta
ei synny oikeutta ilman taistelua
ei taistelua ilman yhteistä rintamaa

No my friend,
there will be no love in the world
while you wait for heaven’s mercy
pity by the powerful

No my friend,
as long as crumbles
are all the baker keeps of the bread
talking about love shall remain a delirium of the priests

The lions can keep their candy baskets
the impartial humanists their decorated words
Against these wrongs you don’t fight with flowers
This blood won’t be stilled by gentle compassion
The bellies of the hungry won’t be filled with kisses

In whose ranks do you stand?
Whose flag do you carry?
There will be no love without justice
There will be no justice without a struggle
No struggle without a united front⁵

In hindsight, I consider the tension between love and violent revolution this song expresses a distinctive feature of communism and other radical leftist movements. As a way of being in the world, simultaneously occupying a love for the world and the willingness to destroy for the sake of a new world, it is highly compelling.

My ideological estrangement from communism was only ever a partial one, insofar as it was fuelled by the other face of communist commitment: a love for the world, an idea of humanity having the ability to come together in peace, love, and shared work where everybody gives according to their possibilities and receives according to their needs. It kept drawing me towards leftist circles and finding a sense of comfort in them regardless of ideological friction.

Thus when a revolution began in Egypt in 2011, I supported and joined it because my leftist friends from the countryside supported and joined it. I did it in spite of having only months earlier argued in a conversation that I did not expect or hope for a revolution in Egypt because in a revolution, things get broken, people get killed, and in the end, the wrong people come to power. My awareness of this recurring historical fact was counteracted by the immense power of hope, a love towards a world that appeared to be emerging in that very moment in front of my eyes. When the revolution was defeated by a counter-revolution that I had ended up supporting, the effect was one of an overwhelming disillusionment. The defeat of the Egyptian revolution resulted in a widespread emotional transformation of the defeated and their friends and allies. Some of them held to the idea of revolution and resistance as the very substance of meaningful human existence, while some others became disillusioned with the idea of revolution and preoccupied with the destructive unintended consequences of radical action (Aboughazi 2026).

This short autobiography of affective attachment and ideological friction offers a tentative answer to the second question about how come somebody would fail to support revolutionary violence in spite of ample historical evidence about its effectiveness. My failure to join the Palestinian War of Liberation in 2023 was not only the outcome of a strategic calculation of likely outcomes, and also not a principled pacifist stance (after all, I have supported violent struggles time and again). To an important extent, it was carried by an affective loss of hope, a reverse love for the world that focused on what was being lost, not on what could be won. This is an anti-revolutionary affect. By perceiving "us" as intertwined in acts of evil (in the sense of wilful destruction of lives and possibilities of life), it collapses the meaningful drama between the loving us and the hateful them that revolutionary violence thrives on. And yet, it is an affect grounded in a revolutionary history where the communist love for the world has been complicated by a recognition of the destructive outcomes of revolutions.

In a righteous struggle, love for the people who have been wronged and for the justice and liberation they ought to gain, along with the mutual love of people coming together in struggle, allow us to not look too closely into the destruction we cause while we are winning, nor into our complicity in the losses that our side suffers when we lose a battle we willingly joined. But when that same love is separated from the hopefulness of struggle, it turns into an anti-revolutionary mourning for what might have been saved – an affect that is less useful for determined action.

My family’s and my own political biography shows the capaciousness, the range of stances, as well as some of the likely frictions that can emerge from the communist double commitment to world peace and violent world revolution. That commitment carries a well-known tendency of fragmentation where ideological difference becomes easily so irritating that people who are on the same side cannot bear hearing each other’s view of what is to be done. But it also has a capacity to create senses of “us” that exceed identitarian lines and indeed extend around the globe. Capaciousness is a term usually used with positive judgement (for example by Shahab Ahmed (2016) about Islam). But I insist that it includes the capacity to extreme evil as well as border-transcending love. Both the love and the violence involved in communist commitment are genuine. And there appears to be no necessary pre-determined path whereby one or the other will inevitably prevail. Taking the death of millions for granted as a necessary cost of the great work of revolution is as logical a conclusion of a communist commitment as is striving for world peace to save those lives and enable their thriving in this world. Neither is innocent of the other, in the sense that different and at times contrary commitments emerge in schismogenetic processes from this original dialectic tension, the other part of the tension always being there as a potential, whether realised or not.

(This essay was presented at the workshop “Judging Evil in Anthropology” at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient on 29 September 2026. A revised version will follow in a scientific journal one day. Thanks are due to my anonymous friend, my parents, Asmaa Essakouti, Ahmad Moradi, Alireza Doostdar, Annastiina Kallius, Sana Chavoshian, and Basit Iqbal.)

References

Aboughazi, Mariam. 2026. “Short notes on home: Emotional infrastructures of belonging between revolution, leaving, and return.” Conference paper at EASA biannual meeting, Poznań, 23 July.

Ahmed, Shahab. 2016. What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bateson, Gregory. 1935. “Culture Contact and Schismogenesis.” Man 35: 178-183.

Fanon, Frantz. 1963 [1961]. The Wretched of the Earth. Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. Translated from the French by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press.

Song, Yongyi. 2011. “Chronology of Mass Killings during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).” Mass Violence and Resistance - Research Network, 25 August. https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/chronology-mass-killings-during-chinese-cultural-revolution-1966-1976.html (Accessed 8 October).

Verkaaik, Oskar. 2004. Migrants and Militants. Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

World Peace Foundation. 2016. "China: the Cultural Revolution." Mass Atrocity Endings, 14 December. https://web.archive.org/web/20240225111424/https://sites.tufts.edu/atrocityendings/2016/12/14/china-the-cultural-revolution/ (Accessed 8 October 2026).

Yan, Jiaqi and Gao Gao. 1996. Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution. Trans. and ed. D.W.Y. Kwok. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.

 

Footnotes 

1The majority within the party adopted a Eurocommunist doctrine that departed from the Soviet model, inspired by Italian communists. The tension between the two wings was strong and also extended to the youth organisation. The uniforms I wore as a pioneer in the radical minority wing were different from those in the Euro-communist majority wing, and children from the two wings attended separate summer camps.

2For an overview of competing estimates and methodologies, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_under_Joseph_Stalin#Total_number_of_victims (accessed 8 October 2026)

3Peruskivi (fundament), transl. Matti Rossi from an original attributed to Nam Giang, performed by the music group Agit Prop in 1972, my translation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C7JebZVgRo (accessed 8 October).

4Nâzim Hikmet 1962, Finnish transl. Agit Prop 1974, English translation from Finnish Juha Rämö, https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?lang=en&id=64427 (accessed 8 October 2026).

5Aulikki Oksanen, 1970, my translation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elMzDEtB26U (accessed 8 October 2026).

More than is necessary to prove my point - Thinking about language, power and truth with George Orwell in 2025

Last week, my wife Asmaa Essakouti was re-reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four for a class on censorship she teaches. I was reading over her shoulder and found it more timely than ever. Even more timely perhaps was his 1946 essay ”The Prevention of Literature”, which Asmaa sent me. An essayistic prequel to his classic novel, it is in many ways a dated piece, most importantly in its historical context of Orwell’s struggle against supporters of Stalin’s Soviet Union among the British left during and immediately after World War II. In other ways, it is surprisingly prescient, observing a tendency towards automation in text production that today has resulted in Large Language Models (also known as AI), and anticipating the gradual replacement of the printed book by the screen. Reading it in the autumn of 2025, Orwell’s essay inspires me to think three thoughts: one about language and power, another about truth and violence, and a third one about how I would like to write.

1. Language is power, or is it?

In two conversations with colleagues in the past couple of months, the discussion turned to the increasing strength of the ethnonationalist populist right in Europe and the Americas, and the relative weakness of progressive leftist politics in comparison. Specifically, we took up the attack from the right against what the latter once called ”political correctness” and now call ”woke.” The people I conversed with (who were European academics) saw especially in North American politics a certain tendency to ridiculous excess in the policing of words at the cost of structural issues, all the while the right wing was using those excesses as a propaganda tool for their successful conquest of institutions.

And yet, I do not think that silly exaggeration is the real problem. Others get away with it. Trump and Trumpists clearly have the lead when it comes to silly exaggeration, boastful disregard of facts, and shameless censorship of dissenting voices. And it does not work to their disadvantage. Trump and Trumpists have at the same time been able to seize the federal government and institutions in a remarkably short time, and forge alliances with major economic players. The self-praise of Gulf Monarchies in marketing themselves as exceptional and superlative is ridiculous, even embarrassing to anybody with a minimum of critical distance. But Gulf monarchies have the money to buy the outward loyalty of those working for them, and to enforce the silence of others with an apparatus of surveillance and violence. They can indulge in exaggerated self-praise because they have enough power to prevent others from challenging it.

This crucial importance of material means of domination accompanying the politics of words, I think, points at a key weakness of the progressive left. At a time when white working classes in the West are increasingly moving towards identitarian politics (which interestingly mirrors similar developments elsewhere, such as the ability of Islamist movements to mobilise across class divisions in many Muslim countries, and the ability of the Hindu right to gain mass support in India in spite of divisive economic policies), the working class that continues to vote for leftist parties in Europe consists increasingly of people of migrant origins who experience a combination of racist and class discrimination. In terms of ideology and values, many of them might feel more home with conservative parties if it weren’t for the unwillingness of the latter to welcome them. Outside that constituency, the progressive left today is overwhelmingly academic and/or urban bourgeois. And among the latter constituency, being able to fluently use the right words matters a lot; words are the way to prove one’s worth, to establish one’s position in class and professional hierarchies.

In this academic, urban bourgeois constituency something I call ”vulgar Foucauldianism” has established itself as a way of doing politics. Michel Foucault famously argued that words play a major role in the creation of institutions such as prisons and mental hospitals, and their subjects: criminals and mentally ill. Vulgar Foucauldianism is a version of the above where institutions and violence are an effect of language: a faith that by describing what kind of things exist and what kind of actions are possible, discourse can actually create reality. Therefore, key struggles are about words: we attack words that we believe to create a reality we oppose, our key victories are about the introduction of words that we believe to structure reality the way we want it to be. What is repeatedly forgotten, moved out of sight in those struggles (although old-school leftists keep ranting about it) are material relations of exploitation, privilege, and resources. Perhaps this is because many of the people who are vocal about verbal justice are quite privileged in terms of educational and economic capital. And perhaps it is simply much easier to change words and narratives than to change the structures that determine who has access to education, and who can get away with exploiting and killing other people.

In either case, what has made the progressive camp weak is not its discourse, but rather the absence of a sufficient popular base and material resources to create the material realities necessary to accompany the discourse. Radical discourse today has neither the finances nor the armies that would allow it to get away with ridiculous excesses. This seems to be why we often seek alliances with people who do have the armies and the mass support even when their aims are very different from ours – a feature of leftist intelligentsia that our time shares with Orwell’s.

While there is an apparent similarity between today and the 1940’s in the prefabricated phrases of political language and the pressure to write in line with one’s political narrative, the differences are also evident. The conversations between my colleagues and me were framed by a sense of powerlessness in face of a successful grasp for institutional power by our enemies. Orwell, in contrast, wrote against the expectation of a successful totalitarian grasp for power by some of the same people who had been his comrades in the Spanish Civil War. By virtue of being a real state with real power, the Soviet Union seemed to hold the answer for the improvement of the human condition. Its crimes were known for those who cared to inquire, but its promises appeared greater because of the material progress it displayed (which Orwell acknowledged). Orwell did not accuse his opponents of getting lost in discourse, but of sacrificing the critical work of independent thinking to ideological orthodoxy and tactical justifications for whatever happened to be the party line: 

”Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship.

[...]

”Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops. This was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.”

The differences between his and our times notwithstanding, Orwell offers to a reader today a healthy measure of doubt towards all and any ideological narratives. In ”Politics and the English language”, another essay also published in 1946, he argues:

”Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Orwell believed in the power of words to remember the past and to reflect the present. But contrary to the vulgar Foucauldian idea that language=power, he did not believe that words can create realities. Orwell’s concern was with the power of language to distort our access to reality by falsifying history and veiling the present. He offers us the useful recognition that much of political language consists of either lies or bullshit. In other words, it either claims something that is not true, or is unconcerned about being true or false. This is usually apparent to those who do not share the political narrative or position of the speaker.

This is not to say that political discourse is never constructive of reality. I do agree with feminists and Foucauldians about the role of language in social hierarchies and administrative practices. The way I speak about the world is a part of how I understand the world, which influences how I act in it. But that does not mean that world obeys my words. My understanding can be mistaken and my actions may fail. Therefore, insofar as it guides us towards mistaken understandings and failed actions, political discourse also has the power to destroy our access to reality. It veils structural dependencies, it presents realities in the shape of our wishful thinking, and by so doing, it gives us an exaggerated impression of our own power. This is not much of a problem for those who command other consequential means of power and domination. But for those who seek to challenge dominant powers, it can result in a catastrophic overestimation of one’s own strength.

2. How can they not see the obvious truth?

In contrast to Foucault who argued that there is no knowledge outside of the systems of power that produce it, Orwell insisted in his essay ”The prevention of literature” that it is possible and necessary to strive for a truthful account:

”What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers.”

The problem I am struggling with in the here and now, while reading Orwell and his struggle against the totalitarian tendencies 80 years go, is what kind of truth is possible when bias and self-deception dominate, when the same words that make some people absolutely convinced can easily be identified as false or silly by others. What are we to do about the phenomenon that other people can be so convinced about things we find so obviously wrong, and so unwillingly to accept the evidence that we find so overwhelming?

In Orwell’s polemical analysis, a key productive feature of political language and ideological orthodoxies is that they make us able to support horrendous crimes in the name of what we consider righteous causes. First, they distract us by directing our thoughts and narratives towards what we want to believe in, and away from what we don’t want to think about. Secondly, they give our actions a moral cover. A particularly effective moral cover in our time is the focus on what the others did or wanted to do. Focusing on the wrongdoing of our enemies saves us the trouble of asking uncomfortable questions about our own actions. The obvious limit of such language of justification by distraction and opposition is that it only works for those who want to believe it. For others, it comes across as silly or incomprehensibly wrong. Within a circle of conversation such as an activist bubble, it is possible to not notice this. Outside such bubbles, substantial amounts of money, command over power to move things and people, and violence are needed able to make obvious bullshit either convincing or at least hard to counter.

Yes, in the back of my mind are the many conversations I have had during the destruction of Gaza in the past two years about ”how can they support that?” It is usually asked as a rhetorical question in the way of pointing blame, and not in the way of seeking an answer. But it can also be asked as a genuine question, in which case the answers are easily provided. An Egyptian office worker in the UAE with whom I shared the room asked me how come people in the West seem to care so much more for Jewish than for Palestinian lives. I answered that it was because of racism: in Europe, we have grown to think of the Jewish people of Israel as being ”us”; and many actually are double citizens of Western countries from which their grandparents once fled or migrated. We have learned to care more for them for that reason. My roommate found my answer informative but frustrating because he considered it a wrong way to think and act. In the context of the conversation, the question was a factual one, and so was my answer. They moved the conversation forward. Had the same question and answer been posed in a political conversation among academics in Germany or another European country, it would have been more likely charged with a tone of accusation and, in case there would have been people with opposing views in the room, counter-accusation and mutual incomprehension. In that context, racism is not a descriptive term nor an explanation. It is an accusation that denies the stances of those accused of it: racist views are not worth listening to in the first place. Therefore, the one accused of racism can only deny it. The conversation does not move forward. Political language, in that situation, becomes a marker of frontlines and not a means of communication.

”How can others not see the obvious truth?” is a question that also reminds us that Western progressives are not quite as lost in discourse as their critics claim. At least when it comes to the mass murder of Palestinians, many of them do believe in self-evident factual truth. But they also do care about speaking that truth in the right words. The question invites a counter-question: How can a truth that so many others fail to see be obvious?

Orwell reminds that the truth about facts is not the same thing as the truth of our politics. The facts, the material events on the ground, are largely uncontested in this case. Over 80 per cent of buildings in Gaza have been either destroyed or damaged. At least 3 per cent of the entire population of Gaza has been directly murdered by the Israeli army (according the current official body count of Gaza’s ministry of health, which only counts violent deaths and does not include excess mortality due to illness, starvation etc.). Other facts are contested but do not fundamentally change the big picture. When others fail to see the obvious truth, what they actually fail in is to agree with the narrative into which these facts are woven: a narrative that calls for liberation as the solution to end the genocide. Paradoxically, this makes it harder for people who do not support the narrative of Palestinian liberation to accept that Israel’s actions during the war indeed are suited to the aim of killing and deporting so many people of Gaza and destroying so much of its physical structure that if the actions were successfully completed, Gaza would no longer be a Palestinian city. And as far as I understand it, systematic killing, deportation and destruction until a city is no longer inhabited by its people is what genocide means according to the UN convention. However, when accepting that description becomes linked with the acceptance of a bigger political narrative about who is right and wrong and what should be the outcome of the struggle, it becomes more difficult for those who don’t share the bigger narrative to recognise the description.

Acknowledgedly, the public opinion in Europe has shifted in the two years of the war. The facts have perhaps not convinced the majority of Europeans of the narrative of Palestinian liberation, but Europeans have become much more sceptical than before about the story that Israel under Netanyahu’s leadership is promoting. And yet, this has not changed the racist hierarchy of lives. European sympathies only flipped when the ratio of killing between Palestinians and Jewish citizens of Israel reached and exceeded the relation of fifty to one. This does not give much cause to optimism.

3. To reach different conclusions

The question I ask myself after reading Orwell in autumn 2025 is: how can I write and describe the realities of which I have good enough knowledge in a way that what I say tells some truth that is intelligible also to people who do not share my narrative about what is right and wrong and what the outcome of our current struggles should be?

To overcome the tendency of political language to veil realities, Orwell calls for a way of writing and thinking language that is precise and original, that does not rely on recycled thoughts and expressions, and does not already know beforehand what it wants to arrive at. This is for me the gist of his essay ”The prevention of literature”:

”To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.”

In our day, the idea of plain language has been seized by the right wing. Some right-wing writers claim to speak in plain words about the natural order of reality as opposed to an alleged woke obsession to invent through words what does not exist in nature. Where the progressive left has sought to complicate our taken-for-granted assumptions, the right wing insists that it’s all really simple actually: some people are destined to rule and others to serve. But this is not what Orwell meant with plain language, which he described as the outcome of fearless thinking. Conservative right-wing thinking is fearful insofar as it is a thinking within limits and in support of limits. The language it produces is not plain but blunt. The populist right seeks to seize the power to speak bluntly, which would not be of so much consequence if it weren’t for their increasing success in seizing institutions that can back up blunt speech by blunt actions.

I have so far offered an unpalatable choice of options: mistaking one’s powerful words for power; making the recognition of factual truths conditional on the recognition of my narrative about them as true; and blunt thinking expressed in blunt language to promote blunt acts. So here comes the option I promote.

A turning point in my career as an academic writer was when I realised that people in Egypt and other Arab countries who are not professional academics were reading things I wrote: specifically, things that were more narrative and descriptive, and sought to recount and understand what I saw in Egypt during and after the revolution, and with Egyptian workers in the Gulf. In those writings, I combined much narrative detail with sparse theoretical analysis trying to understand what was going on. The arguments I make in those writings are often not well-contained. Instead of making a water-proof argument, they are somewhat all over the place. A friendly reviewer once wrote that “it often feels that Schielke has too many ideas.” I have taken this as a positive endorsement. Perhaps there is value in writing in a way that is not waterproof, not concerned with already excluding possible objections, a way that offers more evidence than is necessary to prove my point. By offering more detailed stories and more possible ideas than is necessary for a scientific argument, I hope to offer the reader an opportunity to reach different conclusions than those I am presenting.

As academics, and as citizens speaking in the public, we are trained in fearful thinking. We should be afraid of being proven wrong, afraid of using the wrong words, afraid of serving the wrong narratives, afraid of risking our careers. I understand why such fear is a necessary part of political language. But I prefer it not to be part of our social scientific analysis of the world we live in nor of our literature. This does not mean that I promote sloppy thinking. In a plenary presentation at the conference of the German Anthropological Association in early October this year, Ghassan Hage proposed that our task as scholars is to “think hard”. I understand “thinking hard” as a call to not accept things at face value, to not take ideas and narratives for granted, to not be certain of what we think we know. Instead – at least this is how I understand him – we should take our time, encounter places and people, listen to them, take seriously the possibility that as experts of their own lives they are likely to have the best understanding available, but also be willing to disagree with them if I have reason to, and try to add an insight that others did not yet think of.

Orwell argued for original writing and thinking against a tendency towards automated and standardised text production in his time. That tendency has been radically amplified by Large Language Models. Language models are able to write smoother text than the vast majority of humans, which makes them excellent editors and good translators. They do so by an algorithmic magnification of what Orwell attested to political orthodoxy and commercial culture of his time: as probability engines, they produce the likely next sentence to all sentences previously recorded on the internet, and articulate the likely next thought to thoughts previously articulated. They do so in a smooth and pleasing fashion, and with unprecedented ease. That ease dramatically increases the scope and range of our expression and communication, turning people with no knowledge of coding into successful programmers and others with a difficulty to find the right words into fluent writers. But they do not invite us to think hard, and they do not encourage fearless thinking. The role of literary and scientific writing by humans, if it has any future at all in the age of large language models and decreasing attention spans, is to think unpredictable thoughts and express them in unlikely words. Otherwise we will be confined in an echo-chamber of the Internet citing itself.

When I studied philosophy at the university in the 1990’s, I was taught that a philosophical theory must also apply to itself. In this essay, I have tried to follow different leads that Orwell’s essay invited me to think about. The question of language and power, the question of truth about horrible crimes and proposed solutions to overcome them, and the question of how to write today as an empirical academic researcher together do not add up to one waterproof point. There is too much to say, too much going on at the same time for me to be able to provide that point.

The tentative answers I offer do, however, add up to a proposal: to insist that our words can indeed convey some truth about the world implies a two-fold recognition: first, that the world is not simply an effect of our words and therefore cannot be structured at will without major material resources; and second, the fact that our words can convey some truth does not mean that this truth will ever be obvious to others. Much inspired by Donna Haraway’s idea of situated knowledge, I rather propose that a shared acknowledgement of realities is possible, but also cumbersome and fragile due to the different positionalities of all those who share in the act of knowing and communication. It is also constantly under threat by the ease with which the power of the stronger can overrule the power of evidence and replace the fruits of hard thinking by ready-made slogans that work as long as the processes of violent confrontation and exploitation work.

*** 

Acknowledgements: The first draft of this essay was read by Asmaa Essakouti and Google Gemini whom I asked to point out weaknesses and inconsistencies. I have implemented the suggestions by Asmaa but largely ignored those by Gemini. In addition to the people mentioned or alluded to in the text (those whose names are not mentioned will hopefully recognise themselves), my thanks go to Wael Al Soukkary, Elena Chiti, Pascale Ghazaleh, and Harri Juntunen who by thinking differently from me, have influenced my thinking more than they may know.

Zensur durch Andeutung: Vorläufiger Bericht aus der Sache Ghassan Hage gegen die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Wer erwartet hatte, ein deutsches Arbeitsgericht wäre kein Ort für Gerichtsaal-Dramen, wurde am vergangenen Dienstag eines Besseren belehrt. Fast fünf Stunden lang tagte das Arbeitsgericht Halle am 10.12.2024 zu der Klage, die Ghassan Hage gegen die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft wegen seiner seiner fristlosen, hilfsweisen ordentlichen Kündigung im Februar 2024. Die Entscheidung ist nicht in seinem Sinne. Das Gericht gab ihm nur formal recht, inhaltlich aber nicht. Das Folgende sind meine Notizen der Urteilsverkündung, die nicht im Wortlaut identisch mit dem Urteil sind. Der genaue Wortlaut der Urteilsbegründung wird später schriftlich bekannt gegeben.

„- Das Arbeitsverhältnis wurde nicht durch eine außerordentliche, sondern durch eine ordentliche Kündigung, ausgesprochen am 7.2.2024 und mit Wirkung zum 31.3.2024, beendet.
- Der Kläger und die Beklagte teilen sich die Kosten 50:50.
- Der Kläger (also Ghassan Hage) hat durch seine am 7.10. und 16.11.2023 veröffentlichten Posts erheblich gegen seine Pflichten verstoßen, so erheblich, dass eine Abmahnung nichts gebracht hätte: dies aufgrund mangelnden Mitgefühls in seinem Post am 7.10. und weil er in seinem Post vom 16.11. Israel als ‚Projekt‘ bezeichnet und somit die völkerrechtlich verfasste Existenz Israels bestreitet. Die Kammer ist nicht überzeugt, dass der Beklagten (also die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft) diese Entscheidung aus heiterem Himmel traf. Deshalb war aus formalen Erwägungen die fristlose Kündigung unwirksam. Wir (also das Gericht) haben bewusst nicht über Antisemitismus gesprochen. Die verfasste Staatlichkeit Israels ist hinreichend und das sollte dem Kläger bekannt sein.”

Die Pressestelle des Arbeitsgerichts veröffentlichte dazu die folgende Mitteilung am Tag nach dem Urteil:

„Der Direktor des Arbeitsgerichts Halle kam mit seiner Kammer zu dem Ergebnis, dass die außerordentliche Kündigung aus formalen Gründen wegen Nichteinhaltung der Ausschlussfrist des § 626 BGB unwirksam ist, jedoch die hilfsweise ausgesprochene ordentliche Kündigung das Arbeitsverhältnis mit Ablauf des 31. März 2024 beendet hat.
In der sich an die Kammerverhandlung anschließenden Urteilsverkündung hat der Direktor des Arbeitsgerichts Halle betont, dass der Kläger insbesondere mit seinen Posts vom 7. Oktober 2023 und vom 16. November 2023 und damit, dass er die verfasste Staatlichkeit Israels in Zweifel ziehe, seine gegenüber dem Max-Planck-Institut bestehenden arbeitsvertraglichen Pflichten so massiv verletzt, dass die ordentliche Kündigung keiner vorherigen Abmahnung bedürfe.”

https://lag.sachsen-anhalt.de/fileadmin/tsa_rssinclude/landesarbeitsgericht_11_12_2024_pressemitteilung_lag-arbeitsgericht-halle-ordentliche-kuendigung-der-max-planck-gesellschaft-beendet-befristetes-arbeitsverhaeltnis-mit-ghassan-hage.pdf

Vorher war eine beinahe erfolgte gütliche Einigung gescheitert. Die Parteien hatten sich nach langen Verhandlungen auf einen Text geeinigt, in dem Hage erklärt, dass seine öffentlich geäußerten Ansichten mit den Interessen der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft inkompatibel sind, und die MPG klarstellt, dass der letzte Absatz ihrer Presseerklärung vom 7. Februar sich nicht auf Ghassan Hage bezieht, sondern eine generelle Aussage darstellt. Zudem sollte Hages Antrittsvorlesung wieder online gestellt werden. Der Anwalt der MPG legte diesen Entwurf dem Vorstand der MPG vor, der diese Klarstellung ablehnte. Der Richter hat dennoch mehrmals und erneut auf eine Einigung gedrängt, in der beide Parteien erklären, dass sie keine Meinungsverschiedenheiten haben, aber dies hat Hage nicht akzeptiert, weil der durch die Kündigung und die damit verbundenen Vorwürfe entstandene Reputationsschaden damit nicht beigelegt sei.

Im Anschluss an die Verhandlung fragte ich Hage um eine Stellungnahme. Er nahm folgendermaßen Stellung:

„I am disappointed, but a part of me is not disappointed.”

Ich fragte ihm, welcher Teil von ihm nicht enttäuscht ist. Er antwortete:

„There was a strange comfort in hitting a brick wall at the court. It’s a bit like you realise that what you are facing is a natural disaster, not a social disaster. It has at least some element of a natural disaster. Like, the unthinkingness of what I heard was, wow!”

https://www.facebook.com/samuli.schielke/posts/pfbid02ZBL61pnHrUHDp477pTcphyJaE2MQQMgRA51dArscWpT1P188CvVtZFrdaZnSWdYHl

Ich einem Facebookpost an demselben Abend kündigte ich einen Bericht mit mehr Details. Hier ist er. Eine längere Reportage mit Blick auf die Hintergründe und Folgen der Affäre wird hoffentlich im kommenden Jahr im zenith Magazin erscheinen.

Was bisher geschah

Die Welt am Sonntag hatte Ghassan Hage in einem Bericht vom 4. Februar 2024 mit geschickt zusammengestellten Passagen aus verschiedenen Beiträgen in sozialen Medien porträtiert. Die WaS warf ihm „menschenverachtenden Zynismus“ vor und sprach von einem „Antisemitismus-Skandal“. Der Text zielte darauf, eine ablehnende Gefühlsreaktion der Lesenden auf Hage hervorzurufen, und ließ verstehen, dass er ein unbelehrbarer Antisemit sei. Doch stand nirgends im Text explizit, Hage sei Antisemit oder seine Äußerungen antisemitisch. Diese Auslassung ist wichtig, wie wir bald sehen.

Der Vorwurf wurde von vielen deutschen Medien übernommen, während Hage international eher Unterstützung bekam, darunter auch von Kollegen in Israel. Nach einer Prüfung der Beiträge kam ich zu dem Schluss, dass der Vorwurf des Antisemitismus gegen Hage nachweislich falsch ist. Wohl ist Hage ein entschiedener Gegner Israels und wütend über dessen extreme Methoden der Kriegsführung im laufenden Krieg in Gaza. Er hat auch um die israelischen Opfer des 7. Oktober 2023 getrauert, aber seine Sympathien sind entschieden auf der palästinensischen Seite. Er findet Widerstand gegen Israel grundsätzlich legitim, hat aber extreme Gewalt gegen Zivilisten nicht befürwortet. Wohl befürwortet er eine Einstaatenlösung, in der Juden, Muslime, Christen, Drusen und andere in einem demokratischen Staat mit gleichen Rechten leben. Man kann ihm Idealismus vorwerfen, Antisemitismus aber nicht. Ganz sicher aber sind seine Standpunkte in der Frage über Opposition oder Unterstützung gegenüber Israel mit denen der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft unvereinbar. Die MPG hat entschieden Solidarität für Israel und Trauer für die getöteten Israelis gezeigt. Sie hat keine Solidarität für Palästina und Palästinenser gezeigt. In einer Stellungnahme am 11. Oktober 2023 hat die MPG zwar von „unsäglichem Leid unter der palästinensischen Zivilbevölkerung“ gesprochen, aber dieses Leid ausschließlich der mörderischen Initiative der Hamas zugeschrieben; als ob die Regierung Israels keine Wahl gehabt hätte über den Einsatz der extrem mörderischen Mittel, die sie in ihrem Vergeltungskrieg seitdem einsetzt. Zuletzt hat die MPG Anfang Dezember 2024 ihre institutionelle Präsenz in Israel ausgebaut und ein Büro in West-Jerusalem eröffnet. Dass Hage und die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft sich darüber einig werden, ist nicht zu erwarten.

Beurlaubt von seiner Professur in Sydney war Hage an das Max-Planck-Institut für Ethnologie in Halle als Gastprofessor auf einer vollen Stelle in 2023 gekommen. Die Stelle wurde anschließend als eine halbe Stelle bis 31.12.2024 verlängert mit der Einstufung 15/6 nach Tarifvertrag des öffentlichen Dienstes, und mit einem Bruttomonatsgehalt von 3572 Euro – ein Schnäppchenpreis für einen weltberühmten Forscher. Am 7.2.2024 erhielt er eine fristlose, hilfsweise ordentliche Kündigung. („Hilfsweise ordentlich“ bedeutet, dass falls die fristlose Kündigung widerrufen wird, stattdessen eine ordentliche Kündigung zum nächsten gesetzlich erlaubten Termin erfolgt, in diesem Fall zum 31.3.2024.) Dagegen ging er vor Gericht.

Vorwurf durch Andeutung

Die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft veröffentlichte zur Kündigung Hages am 7.2.2024 die folgende Stellungnahme:

„Der in der Fachcommunity bekannte und angesehene libanesisch-australische Wissenschaftler Ghassan Hage war seit April 2023 am Max-Planck-Institut für ethnologische Forschung tätig. Unter den von ihm in jüngerer Zeit über soziale Medien verbreiteten Ansichten sind viele mit den Grundwerten der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft unvereinbar. Die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft hat sich daher im Einvernehmen mit dem Institut von ihm getrennt.

Die vom Grundgesetz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland seit 75 Jahren garantierten Freiheitsrechte sind für die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft ein unschätzbar hohes Gut. Sie gehen mit großer Verantwortung einher. Forschende missbrauchen Freiheitsrechte, wenn sie mit öffentlich verbreiteten Verlautbarungen die Glaubwürdigkeit von Wissenschaft untergraben und damit das Ansehen und Vertrauen in die sie tragenden Institutionen beschädigen. Das Grundrecht auf Meinungsfreiheit findet seine Grenze in den wechselseitigen Pflichten zur Rücksichtnahme sowie Loyalität im Arbeitsverhältnis.

Rassismus, Islamophobie, Antisemitismus, Diskriminierung, Hass und Hetze haben in der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft keinen Platz.”

https://www.mpg.de/21510533/stellungnahme-ghassan-hage 

Der erste Absatz ist fett gedruckt, danach folgt ein grüner Balken, und die zwei weiteren Absätze sind in kleinerer Schriftgröße formatiert. Dadurch entsteht eine visuelle und semantische Mehrdeutigkeit. Ist der letzte Absatz ein Vorwurf, Hage habe sich des Rassismus, Antisemitismus, der Islamophobie, Diskriminierung, des Hasses und der Hetze schuldig gemacht? Welche seiner Ansichten sind mit welchen Grundwerten der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft unvereinbar? Dank der mehrdeutigen Formulierung sowie der Trennung der Absätze konnte der Anwalt der MPG während der Verhandlung verneinen, seine Mandantin hätte Hage durch einen falschen Antisemitismus-Vorwurf geschadet. Die breite Öffentlichkeit hat das aber klar und deutlich als Antisemitismus-Vorwurf verstanden. Darauf hat Hage auch während der Verhandlung verwiesen. Er argumentierte, dass es ihm vor allem darum gehe, den ihm zugefügten Reputationsschaden zu beseitigen:

„Wie ich bereits erwähnte, habe ich einen Vortrag an der Universität Mainz gehalten. Die Leute, die mich eingeladen haben wurden belästigt und befragt: ‚Wie könnt ihr einen Antisemiten einladen?‘ [...] Der Vorwurf, ich sei ein Antisemit, betrifft mich täglich. Mein Ruf unter Kollegen ist gut, aber was in der breiten Öffentlichkeit geschieht, ist von den Medien beeinflusst und eine andere Sache.“

Genauso ist es auch gegangen. Die MPG hatte Hage in ihrer Pressemitteilung vom 7.2. nicht direkt Antisemitismus vorgeworfen. Aber doch verweigerte der Vorstand der Gesellschaft eine vom eigenen Anwalt verhandelte gütliche Einigung, in der die MPG klarstellen würde, dass sie ihm keinen Antisemitismus vorwirft. Ein expliziter Vorwurf kann als falsch bewiesen werden. Durch den enormen Reputationsschaden hätte eine Unterlassungs- oder Verleumdungsklage Aussicht auf Erfolg. Wohl deswegen haben sich sowohl die Welt am Sonntag also auch die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft davor gehütet, den Vorwurf explizit zu machen. Aber durch die Verweigerung der Klarstellung durch die MPG blieb der Vorwurf bestehen – allerdings unangreifbar, weil implizit. Das Hallenser Nachrichtenportal Du bist Halle hat die implizite Andeutung aber klar und deutlich interpretiert. Es berichtete am Tag nach der Urteilsverkündung: „Arbeitsgericht Halle: Rauswurf eines Wissenschaftlers beim Max-Planck-Institut wegen Antisemitischer Äußerungen und HAMAS-Sympathien bestätigt.”

In einer Stellungnahme am Tag des Urteils hielt sich die MPG zurück, das eine oder andere zu behaupten, sondern stellte nur fest:

„Im Februar 2024 hatte sich das Max-Planck-Institut für ethnologische Forschung in Halle im Einvernehmen mit der Leitung der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft von dem libanesisch-australischen Gastwissenschaftler Ghassan Hage getrennt. Hintergrund waren von Hage in den Sozialen Medien verbreitete Ansichten zur Terrorattacke der Hamas vom 7. Oktober 2023, die mit den Grundwerten der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft unvereinbar waren. Ghassan Hage hatte gegen seine Kündigung vor dem Arbeitsgericht in Halle geklagt. In seiner heutigen Sitzung hat das Arbeitsgericht die Klage abgewiesen und damit die Position der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft bestätigt.“

https://www.mpg.de/21510533/stellungnahme-ghassan-hage

Die Leiterin der Abteilung Kommunikation der MPG verweigerte weitere Erläuterungen, als ich am 12.12. in einer Email um ein Interview anfragte: „Wir sehen mit dem Urteil unsere Position, die wir am 7. Februar veröffentlicht haben, bestätigt. Mehr gibt es aus unserer Sicht dazu auch nicht mehr zu sagen.“ Ich hatte die folgende Frage stellen wollen:

“In der Pressemitteilung und am Dienstag vor dem Gericht hat die MPG es sorgfältig vermieden, Hage explizit Antisemitismus vorzuwerfen. Das spiegelte auch das Urteil wieder. Dennoch hat die MPG eine Einigung abgelehnt, in der sie feststellen würde, dass sie ihm nicht Antisemitismus vorwirft. Warum?”

In Ermangelung einer Antwort von der MPG versuche ich eine Erklärung.

Tendenzträger, Projekt, moralisches Empfinden

Es ist nichts Neues, dass Wissenschaftler Ansichten vertreten, die ihre Institutionen nicht mittragen wollen. Dasselbe Max-Planck-Institut für ethnologische Forschung in Halle, von dem Hage entlassen wurde, hat in seinen Reihen auch Chris Hann, einen prominenten Versteher der Politik von Vladimir Putin und Kritiker der Westorientierung der Ukraine. Manche seiner Argumente in seinen Publikationen (https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/focaal/2024/98/fcl980110.xml
https://ukraine2022.ios-regensburg.de/poland01/) lesen sich als eine verschleierte Aberkennung der Legitimität der Ukraine als Nationalstaat - dabei sagt Hann es nicht selbst, sondern lässt geschickt andere zu Wort kommen, die es sagen. Seine Ansichten sind in der Fachwelt bekannt und umstritten. Trotzdem führt die Homepage des MPI in Halle ihn als aktiven Emeritusdirektor – und das ist auch richtig so. Die Wissenschaft lebt von Dissens und Kritik, darunter auch fragwürdige und problematische Ansichten. Ohne die Auseinandersetzung mit ihnen sind unsere Analysen und Entscheidungen blind, eine bloße Widerspiegelung unserer eigenen Tendenzen.

Und genau darum ging es im Grunde vor dem Arbeitsgericht Halle: welche Art von Dissens und Differenz ist Wissenschaftlern erlaubt, und inwiefern sind sie als „Tendenzträger“ verpflichtet, die offizielle Linie ihrer Institution mitzutragen? Zum Beispiel sind Priester einer Kirche Tendenzträger eines Glaubens und sollten sich nicht öffentlich anti-religiös äußern. Das Wort Tendenzträger wurde vom vorsitzenden Richter in der mündlichen Urteilsverkündung zwar nicht erwähnt. Aber während der Verhandlung verwies er darauf, dass das Landesarbeitsgericht Berlin im April 2024 (Aktenzeichen 5 Sa 894/23) die fristlose Kündigung eines Mitarbeiters der Deutschen Welle wegen dessen antisemitischen und antiisraelischen Äußerungen auf sozialen Medien bestätigt und eine Revision nicht zugelassen hatte. Jener Mitarbeiter hatte unter anderem geschrieben, eine vermeintliche jüdische Lobby hätte die deutsche Politik unter ihrer Kontrolle. Er hat sich also wirklich antisemitisch geäußert. Dies hat Hage nicht getan. Entscheidend war hier aber nicht der Tatbestand, sondern die Begründung des Berliner Landesarbeitsgerichts, wonach

„der Redakteur als sogenannter Tendenzträger verpflichtet war, sowohl bei seiner Arbeitsleistung als auch im außerbetrieblichen Bereich nicht gegen die Tendenz, das heißt die grundsätzlichen Zielsetzungen, der Deutschen Welle zu verstoßen.“

https://www.berlin.de/gerichte/arbeitsgericht/presse/pressemitteilungen/2024/pressemitteilung.1455787.php

Aus dem umfangreichen Beweismaterial konzentrierte sich der vorsitzende Richter in seinem Urteil auf zwei Posts, die die MPG dem Betriebsrat vorgelegt hatte (Rücksprache mit dem Betriebsrat ist eine rechtliche Bedingung für eine fristlose Kündigung). Der erste Post ist ein Gedicht, veröffentlicht am Nachmittag des 7.10.2023 – also zu einem Zeitpunkt, als noch nicht bekannt war, wie brutal der Angriff und wie hoch die Anzahl Getöteten war. Zu jenem Zeitpunkt waren viele Beobachter noch unter dem Eindruck, es handele sich um eine eher militärische als terroristische Aktion. In dem Gedicht zeigt sich Hage beeindruckt über die Fähigkeit der Palästinenser, Widerstand zu leisten. Der Text ist eine Romantisierung eines bewaffneten Kampfes gegenüber Israels Kriegsführung, aber eine Verherrlichung oder Rechtfertigung der extremen Gewalt durch die Hamas und ihre Verbündeten ist dort nicht zu finden. Zum Zweiten nahm der vorsitzende Richter Bezug auf ein Essay vom 16.11.2023, wo der Ausdruck, „zionistisches ethno-nationalistisches Projekt“ vorkommt. Der Richter wies darauf hin, dass Hage in seinen Äußerungen das ganze Gebiet Palästinas als besetzt bezeichnet hat. Zentral in seiner Begründung war aber das Wort „Projekt“. Israel als Projekt zu beschreiben sei eine Verneinung der völkerrechtlich verfassten Existenz Israels, weil ein Projekt etwas Unbeständiges und Vorübergehendes bedeute.

Das Wort „Projekt“ kommt in jenem Essay nur in einem Satz vor, und zwar in diesem:

„Es gibt natürlich jene unter uns, die trotz unserer Gegnerschaft zum zionistischen ethno-nationalistischen Projekt und aus dem Komfort unserer gesellschaftlichen und geografischen Lagen, und wegen unserer vielfältigen Bindingen, in der Lage waren, für die Opfer der Morde der Hamas zu trauern.“

Hage leugnet in dieser Passage also keineswegs die staatliche Existenz Israels, identifiziert sich aber wohl als Gegner des politischen Projekts des Zionismus. Zudem drück er explizit Trauer für die israelischen Opfer des 7. Oktober aus. Der vorsitzende Richter hatte Hage mangelndes Mitgefühl attestiert. Hier aber steht Mitgefühl schwarz auf weiß. Dies wurde im Urteil nicht in Erwägung gezogen.

Der vorsitzende Richter verzichtete in seinem Urteil ausdrücklich darauf, die Frage zu erörtern, ob diese Aussagen antisemitisch seien oder nicht. Während der Verhandlung wurde aber viel über Antisemitismus gesprochen. Der Anwalt der MPG hatte mit Verweis auf ein Urteil des Bundesverfassungsgerichts darauf bestanden, dass Äußerungen in den sozialen Medien durch ihre Wirkung auf das Publikum auch dann antisemitisch sein könnten, wenn Hage, der mit einer Jüdin verheiratet ist, selbst kein Antisemit ist. Hages Anwalt hatte wiederum darauf bestanden, zu prüfen, ob überhaupt antisemitische Inhalte vorlagen, und das unter Berücksichtigung der Begleitumstände, wie die Antisemitismusdefinition der IHRA als auch die der Jerusalemer Erklärung vorsehen.

Hätte die MPG Hage explizit wegen Antisemitismus entlassen, hätte sein Anwalt nachweisen können, dass der Vorwurf nicht wahr ist. Aber indem sie den Vorwurf weder ausdrücklich erhob noch zurückzog, gab die MPG dem Gericht die Möglichkeit, andere Gründe für das Urteil zu finden.

Mein Eindruck war, dass der vorsitzende Richter sich bei seinem Urteil auf sein eigenes moralisches und politisches Empfinden stützte. Während der Verhandlung sagte er, er wolle keine Dresden- und Nazivergleiche hören (damit verwies er auf eine Erwähnung Dresdens in den von der WaS gesammelten Zitaten von Hage), und dass wenn man über einen anerkannten Staat sage, dass er eine Besatzung und ein Projekt sei, die Beklagte (also die MPG) das nicht hinnehmen könne. Der Tonfall und die Wortwahl machten deutlich, dass es dem Richter nicht darum ging, dass die Ansichten von Hage und MPG inkompatibel waren – das stand nicht zur Debatte. Vielmehr schien er davon überzeugt, dass Hage moralisch und politisch im Unrecht sei.

Was das Urteil für die Wissenschaft in Deutschland bedeutet

Dass das Wort „Projekt“ zum entscheidenden Grund des Urteils erhoben wurde, ist bemerkenswert. Schließlich ist das Wort Projekt nicht allgemein negativ besetzt, und auch entschiedene Anhänger Israels haben Israel als ein Projekt beschrieben. Ein politisches Projekt ist nicht dadurch charakterisiert, dass es vorübergehend ist, sondern dass es unabgeschlossen, in Bewegung ist. Das Wort Projekt trifft gut auf Israels Staatlichkeit zu, denn der Staat Israel wurde zuerst als eine Idee ausgesprochen und erst später als Gebiet erobert; und sein Gebiet ist durch unabgeschlossene Grenzen charakterisiert, die sich durch Kriege und Siedlungspolitik, Expansionen und Rückzuge immer wieder ändern. Am Ende ist aber die Wahl des Richters, dieses Wort anzusprechen, nicht entscheidend. Er hätte auch eine andere Begründung finden können, und die Stellungnahme der MPG am Tag des Urteils führt nur das Gedicht vom 7.10.2023 als Begründung für ihren Standpunkt an. Entscheidend für die Wirkung des Urteils auf die Wissenschaft in Deutschland sind drei Punkte.

- Die Mehrdeutigkeit des Vorwurfs ermöglichte der MPG, Hage Antisemitismus zu unterstellen, aber die Unterstellung nicht als Behauptung beweisen zu müssen.
- Der vorsitzende Richter stützte sich auf sein moralisches und politisches Empfinden und sah Hages Standpunkt als inhaltlich falsch an, auch wenn die Kündigung selbst formell inkorrekt war.
- Durch die Mehrdeutigkeit des Vorwurfs und die Rolle des moralischen Empfindens beim Urteil blieb die entscheidende Frage darüber ungeklärt, gegen welche Prinzipien und Vorgaben der MPG Hages Pflichtverletzung sich richtete. Entsprechend vage und ungeklärt bleibt, inwieweit wissenschaftliche Institutionen ihren Mitarbeitern politische Standpunkte verbieten und vorgeben dürfen.

Sollte diese Interpretation gängige Praxis werden, müssen in der Wissenschaft Tätige in Deutschland künftig erwarten, dass ihre Institutionen ihnen politische Standpunkte vorschreiben und verbieten. Doch ist dies der weniger schwerwiegende Teil des Urteils. Denn jene Erwartung der erzwungenen politischen Linientreue haben viele meiner Kolleginnen und Kollegen in Deutschland schon jetzt. Schwerer wiegt die Art und Weise, wie der Vorwurf des Antisemitismus im Laufe der Affäre immer wieder in den Vordergrund rückte, nicht offen ausgesprochen wurde – aber auch nicht zurückgenommen wurde.

Überhaupt wurde vieles nicht offen ausgesprochen, und das zeigte sich auch in einem Unwillen unter Mitarbeitenden des Max-Planck-Instituts in Halle, gegenüber der Öffentlichkeit zu sprechen. Meine ersten Versuche, dort Interviewpartner zu finden, waren erfolglos. Menschen fanden es problematisch, sich auch nur anonym zu äußern, denn ihre Wortwahl und Argumente würden sie trotzdem erkennbar machen. Aber wovor genau hatten sie Angst? Auch das war unklar. Ein Kollege aus dem Institut hat mir schließlich in einem informellen Gespräch seine Erfahrung mitgeteilt.

Er sagte, dem Bericht der WaS und der Entlassung Hages sei eine große Unsicherheit unter Mitarbeitenden des MPI in Halle gefolgt. Die in der WaS zitierten Fragmenten aus seinen Posts wurden unterschiedlich wahrgenommen. Internationale Mitarbeiter empfanden sie oft als weniger problematisch. Deutsche Kollegen äußerten unterschiedliche Ansichten. Sie konnten leichter verstehen als ihre internationalen Kollegen, warum die Aussagen in der deutschen Öffentlichkeit auf Ablehnung stießen. Dennoch sei so gut wie die ganze Belegschaft des Instituts gegen die Entlassung von Hage gewesen, und bestürzt über die plötzliche und intransparente Entscheidung. Seitdem herrsche unter den Kollegen Sorge und Unsicherheit. Werden jetzt soziale Medien der Mitarbeiter überprüft? Was ist erlaubt und was nicht? Die Leitung des Instituts habe versucht, die Mitarbeiter zu beruhigen. Dennoch sei es ihnen nicht gelungen, das Gefühl der Unsicherheit zu beseitigen. In einem Townhall-Treffen mit den Mitarbeitern, wo die vorher veröffentlichte Stellungnahme vom 7.2.2024 diskutiert wurde, habe der Präsident der MPG Patrick Cramer es vermieden, Hage Antisemitismus vorzuwerfen. Auf die Stellungnahme Bezug nehmend habe er gesagt, beim letzten Paragraph handele es sich um einen allgemeinen Standpunkt der MPG. Eine Klarstellung sei gefordert worden, aber der Präsident habe dafür keinen Anlass gesehen.

Das Bild, das ich im Gespräch mit ihm bekam, deckt sich mit dem allgemeinen Eindruck aus informellen Gesprächen mit Kollegen: durch heftige, aber unklare und intransparente Entscheidungen entsteht ein bedrücktes, unangenehmes Schweigen. Eine außerordentliche Kündigung ist umstritten und riskant, schafft oft mehr Konflikte als Lösungen. Viel einfacher ist es, Verträge nicht zu verlängern und Unterstützung für Förderanträge zu entziehen. Eine solche Zensur durch Andeutung ist viel mächtiger als offizielle rote Linien, an denen man sich entweder arrangieren, oder gegen die man vorgehen kann, wenn man bereit ist, die Konsequenzen in Kauf zu nehmen.

Nachwort, mit Stellungnahme vom Autor

Auch ich habe mich eine Zeit lang als Teil eines bedrückten Schweigens empfunden. Als der Krieg begann, hielt ich mich lange bedeckt, weil ich sowohl die massenmörderische Kriegstreiberei in Deutschland auf Seiten Israels ablehnte, als auch die Rechtfertigung eines Massakers im Namen von Widerstand und Dekolonisierung. Hier und da empfand ich die Unmöglichkeit eines Gesprächs, das über einen genervten Austausch von unvereinbaren Behauptungen hinausgehen würde. Etwas Ähnliches muss Hage empfunden haben, als er nachdem Urteil vom „seltsamen Komfort“ sprach, „auf eine Backsteinmauer vor Gericht zu stoßen.“ Er beschrieb es als „unthinkingness“ der Gegenseite, was sich vielleicht mit „Entschiedenheit, nicht zu denken“ übersetzen lässt. Dabei hatte sich der vorsitzende Richter eindeutig Gedanken gemacht. Aber seine Gedanken und die Gedanken von Hage konnten sich nicht begegnen. Eine feste Mauer von Unverständnis trennte sie voneinander, beide an und in sich stimmig und vollständig.

Die Wissenschaft bietet der Menschheit eine kritische Vielstimmigkeit, die besseres Denken und bessere Handlungen ermöglicht. Diese kritische Vielstimmigkeit ist während dieses Krieges zu einem gefährlichen Ausmaß durch eine Backsteinmauer des laut vorgetragenen Unverständnisses und durch eine bedrückte Stille der Zensur durch Andeutung ersetzt. Ich habe meine Deckung verlassen und begleite den Fall Ghassan Hage gegen die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft aus zwei Gründen: erstens weil diese bedrückte Stille mich und meine Kolleginnen und Kollegen mehr bedroht als das offene Unverständnis; und zweitens, weil Hage und ich die Überzeugung teilen, dass es in diesem seit Jahrzehnten dauernden Krieg andere Möglichkeiten geben sollte, als die Unterwerfung oder Vernichtung einer Seite durch die andere. (Zurzeit hat Israel die Mittel und zunehmend auch den Willen, die palästinensische Seite nicht nur zu unterwerfen sondern auch in Teilen oder ganz zu vernichten. Auf der palästinensischen Seite mangelt es ebenfalls nicht am Willen zur Vernichtung der Gegenseite, aber wohl an Mitteln. In einer anderen weltpolitischen Konstellation in der Zukunft können die Mittel anders verteilt sein. Mit dem Atomwaffenarsenal, das Israel als eine Waffe der letzten Instanz besitzt, kann die Zerstörung dann weit über die Region Palästina-Israel hinausgehen.) Ich habe weniger Glauben als Ghassan Hage an idealistische Ziele und Revolutionen. Wo er eine demokratische Einstaatenlösung für realistisch hält, denke ich, dass ein möglicher Verhandlungsfrieden nur schlecht und ungerecht sein kann, aber immerhin besser wäre als mehr Krieg. Solche unterschiedlichen Ansichten sind wichtig. Sie verdienen Förderung und nicht Entlassung.

Peace as a Local Exception

I. 22nd century, another planet

In an unfinished science fiction novel by Arkadi and Boris Strugatski, the hero of an earlier novel travels to an empire that in a previous novel occupied the role of absolute evil. Submarines of that empire spread destruction, torture and murder in the coastal areas of neighbouring countries. In the unfinished novel, the hero Maxim Kammerer discovers that the inhumanely brutal submarine crews constitute only the outer layer of the empire. Travelling further inwards, he first encounters a middle layer of ordinary people who are neither very good nor very bad, and finally arrives at the centre of the empire inhabited by utterly ethical, peaceful and sophisticated people. When the hero confronts them with moral incompatibility of the different layers, they react with polite condescension: ‘How come, would the world be differently organised where you come from?’ When Kammerer describes the utopian communist society from which he comes from, and which essentially is the same as theirs only without the surrounding layer of brutality and violence, they reply: ‘Such a world can only be imagined. I’m afraid, my friend, that you live in a world that somebody has imagined.’ (Boris Strugatski cited by Erik Simon 2010: “Eine Zukunft mit zwei Enden. In: Arkadi and Boris Strugatzki, Werkausgabe vol 1., ed. by Sascha Mamczak and Erik Simon, pp. 893-95. München: Heyne)

The idea of peace as something that is inevitably surrounded by war and violence is common in our linguistic, cultural, and religious heritage, as well as our political present. The pax romana implied that where the Roman Empire is there is peace; war is in the outside. The Islamic legal pair of dar al-salam (realm of peace) vs. dar al-harb (realm of war) was developed at a time when the early Muslim empires where at the peak of their might and able to provide peace and thriving to their subjects. It associates peace with Muslim rule, and war with the rest of the world. The landlord of my small holiday plot in East Germany recently reminded me that I’m contractually obliged to ‘pacify’ my plot. Or that’s what I first thought he meant, until I understood the correct meaning. The German verb einfrieden, literally ‘to generate peace within’, means to fence in a plot of land. It indicates that peace is the quality of a local or territorial sanctuary, an exception from a dangerous and violent outside - or to use a term coined by Michel Foucault, a heterotopia.

 

II. 2023, Kuwait and Germany

Mid-October last year, I was in Kuwait to meet Egyptian workers for a book I want to write. The new war in Palestine that had begun a week earlier was visible on the television sets of cafés, and on billboards with the koufiya pattern and the line ‘We’re with you’. The contrast of the news on television against the peaceful and orderly routine of life in Kuwait was striking. Waiting for the departure of my flight back to Germany, I wrote into my diary:

 ‘In the taxi to the airport, I looked at the houses and wondered about the normality of peace and the invisibility of histories and layers of violence. In this country, [there is] the small and unspectacular violence of exploitation and ethnic hierarchies, and glossing over the past violence of the 1990 war - but on standards of international politics, this is a peaceful place. They are not being bombed by anybody, and not bombing anybody.’

Later in Berlin, with the war continuing and getting worse, I was haunted again by the contrast of the news and the unchanged normality of my surroundings. On 20 December, after a joyful Christmas party of the institute where I work, I wrote into my diary:

‘I have flashes during my daily life of a parallel reality, or maybe the future. I board the S-Bahn full of people busy with their phones, and I see the train stuck on its tracks, blown up and burned, bodies scattered inside and outside, mine among them. I dance with my colleagues at the office Christmas party, and I see our lecture hall and offices filled beyond limits by refugees searching any shelter, the toilets in a terrible state after the water has been cut, the trees in the garden cut for cooking and heating. I enter a supermarket to choose my favourite cereals from a ridiculously vast selection, and I see a crowd of hungry and irritable people lining for bread at the door, very close to losing their tempers and looting the shop. I encounter young men joking in a bar, and I see them in dirty uniforms descending from buses for a holiday from the front, an expression of excited incomprehension on their faces after they have learned their first practical lesson in murder and rape. I sit on the sofa of our small but beautiful home and I wonder which rooms would be safe from shrapnel and sniper fire, and I realise it would be only the kitchen and bathroom (in World War Two, a bomb destroyed the house next door and damaged badly the rooms that now are our bedroom and living room). I walk down the streets of our beautiful and well-tended neighbourhood, and I see houses shot into pieces, some burned, others collapsed and surrounded by people frantically seeking for survivors in the rubble. I even see entire neighbourhoods and their inhabitants wiped out by a nuclear blast.’

The peacefulness of Germany, like that of Kuwait, is surrounded and underlined by violence in other places and times. Yet only at moments when my attention to that violence is great, does it enter my everyday consciousness at such a degree as to disturb me. In Kuwait, most active violence is small in the sense that it considers only few people at a time: domestic and sexual violence, denial of wages and freedom of movement, and humiliating working conditions experienced especially by the majority of non-nationals working in the country, and also by Kuwaiti people denied of citizenship. In Germany, it is more difficult to exploit and mistreat workers at home and in factories, which is why much of the economic violence on which our peace and wealth relies is outsourced to other countries, just as is the violence of our borders.

Kuwait’s solidarity with Palestinians is largely non-combatant. As a country that depends on a foreign power (the USA) for its defence, Kuwait is not in a position to join other wars even if it wanted to. Germany is involved in wars abroad more directly. It is providing ammunition and weapons to Ukraine but abstains from sending soldiers. The latter would bring some of the war home, which would be much less popular than letting Ukrainians do the fighting and the dying. Germany has been widely in the news for its arms exports to Israel, and yet its contribution towards arming Israel is of a different kind than widely assumed. While Germany does also sell ammunition to Israel, its main and more long-standing contribution consists of submarines, a strategic weapon likely to play a major role in a future regional war but not useful in the current one. (For details on this, see endnote at the end of this essay).

Last but least, peace in both places is preceded by a past trauma of violent defeat and destruction. In Kuwait, the 1990 Iraqi occupation has left an unhealed scar. Those who can afford it, I was told, prefer to invest their money abroad rather than at home. They expect that any neighbouring country could, if they want, come and occupy Kuwait again. In Germany, the Second World War has left a double trauma of a devastating defeat, and of the guilt of having started the war along with committing at least two genocides (against Jewish and Romani people). This double trauma structures political consciousness until today. It is also tangible in the peaceful urban present. The beautiful park with a playground in front of our apartment is the result of a British or American bomb destroying the house next to ours during the war.

The playground in front of our home, temporarily closed during the first Covid-19 lockdown, March 2020.

War on television, Kuwait, October 2023. My friend in the picture asked me to clarify that he was watching the news on a screen on the opposite wall, not turning his back to them. He says: 'There is a difference between living with wars, and beginning to not care about them.'

The peace that prevails in Kuwait and Germany is constituted in part by a violent past of war and destruction, a violent underbelly of exploitation, and a violent regional context of direct or indirect participation in wars elsewhere. What does this say about peace? Is our peace a fake one? What if hidden or extraterritorialised violence is a common constituent of peace?

III. 1999, Palestine and Israel

The State of Israel is one of the places where the constructive tension between peace within and war without is most dramatic and extreme today. This has to do with the special circumstances of its establishment: a colony of settlers who came to Palestine escaping persecution and genocide elsewhere in order to live in peace as owners of their own country. To accomplish this aim, they forcibly dispossessed people whose own country it had been until then. Israel, promised to be a space of peace and safety, was thus established by means of war and conquest against the resistance of the long-standing inhabitants of the land. Importantly, this was done in a time of decolonisation, when doing so was no longer as politically tolerated as it had been before. Due to the new post-World War II international context, and due to the fierce resistance of Palestinians and neighbouring Arab countries, the military victories of the Zionist movement have not resulted in the secure and unchallenged dominance that other, older settler colonies today enjoy. Without settler colonialism, Turkey would not be Turkish, North Africa would not be inhabited by Arabs, and Americans would not speak Spanish, Portuguese, or English. The Zionist movement has not accomplished such degree of success, but it was successful enough to create an enclave Zion as it were, a state within the borders of which peace has been the norm. This was accomplished by locating war outside, in the lives of the Palestinians who had to give way to the Jewish national project. 

I experienced this personally on the two visits I paid to Palestine and Israel as a student in 1997 and 1999. Historically, it was an exceptionally peaceful time (approximately from the end of the First Intifada in 1994 until the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000). On my second and last visit in 1999, the possibility of a two-state solution still seemed within reach, and Israeli and Palestinian people I met expressed cautious optimism. And yet even then, the contrasts were striking and troubling. After visiting a friend in Ramallah, I spent two days in Tel Aviv waiting for my Egyptian visa. The city presented itself to me as a low-cost backpacker idyll by the sea. It was easy to forget other realities. As soon as I received my visa, I decided to continue to Gaza City, only to discover that there was no public transportation. People were not expected to travel that way. By combination of hitch-hiking and a Palestinian minibus service from the last Israeli town, I reached Erez Crossing, a maze of fenced corridors where one was at the same time visible and constrained in a frightening way. Already in 1999, Gaza was surrounded by a border fence unlike the metropolitan area of Jerusalem, where the border was intentionally kept as vague as possible to enable the gradual expansion of Israeli settlements in the West bank (the separation wall was built later, its completion concluding the defeat of the Second Intifada). Six years later, at the end of the Second Intifada, the evacuation of Israeli settlements from the Gaza strip completed this process of enclosure and enabled the blockade of Gaza, turning it conclusively from an ambiguous site of potential expansion into an outside space of warfare. In Gaza City as I encountered it in 1999, Israel was constantly present: in ships guarding the coast, in the currency, in consumer goods, as a place where people worked, through visas they needed to do so, in colloquial expressions borrowed from Hebrew. Gaza, on the contrary, was absent from Tel Aviv in 1999.

A newlywed couple gets photographed in the old harbour of Yafa, south of Tel Aviv in June 1999. The city of Tel Aviv was established in 1909 north of the old Palestinian town of Yafa. Today, Yafa is part of the metropolitan area and municipality of Tel Aviv.

Abu Hasira beach in Gaza City, June 1999. The men running the cafeteria offered me free accommodation for a night because I couldn't afford hotel rates.

 

My stay was short. The people I met were open and generous, and there would have been a lot to learn. But I simply could not afford the high prices of the few hotels in Gaza, catering as they did to journalists and international aid workers whose budgets were bigger than mine. I continued my journey to Egypt. My last memory of Palestine and Israel is that of a nervous young Israeli soldier at Rafah Crossing who leaped to restrain my arms when I tried to pull out my passport from a hidden pocket inside my trousers. Apparently, he was trained to anticipate an assault from anybody and at any time.

I had no desire to return. Although Egypt was poorer, more disorderly, and dirtier than the West Bank and Gaza (the latter surprised me by being a more well-ordered city than I had expected), I experienced life in Egypt as more normal and less absurd. I did not know it then, but this was the turning point in my life that would make me an anthropologist writing about Egypt. Perhaps it also indicated my future path as an anthropologist, more interested in everyday life than in violent confrontations and activist stances.

Looking back at Rafah crossing on the Egyptian side, June 1999.

Fast forward to a time of open war, in 2023. The 7 October attacks by Hamas and allied militias across the 1948 line of control caused a shock in Israel and the West. Part of this shock was due to the extreme death toll (with nearly 1200, it was the highest in such a short time since the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982). Another part was due to the unequal hierarchy of care where western audiences tend to care more for murdered Israelis and less for murdered Palestinians. But there was also a third part to the shock. The attack violated a hierarchy imposed by Israel that determined where there can be war and where there is peace. The construction of a fence around Gaza in the 1990’s and the withdrawal from the settlements in 2005 had done two kinds of work: it fenced out Gaza as a site of war; and it fenced in Israel as a site of peace, as in the German verb einfrieden. Crossing that literal fence, Hamas and other militants brought war to places that were supposed to be well-protected sanctuaries of peace for their inhabitants. The kind of violence employed by the militants was appropriate to that purpose. It was personal and close-range, aimed to cause the greatest pain possible, seeking and killing people in their homes, raping many (yes it really happened), and broadcasting much of the events live on the internet. This kind of violence says: Look, there is no peace here for you. This spectacular violation of the border between places reserved for peace and others exposed for war amplified the horror, and by so doing, it also amplified the willingness to support horrible countermeasures.

The Israeli war of retaliation against Gaza appears to have among its aims to reestablish the hierarchy of places exposed for war and places reserved for peace. This is evident in the shocking discrepancy between Israeli and Palestinian losses: By 19 February 2024, 29,092 Palestinians have been confirmed killed according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza (the number does not differentiate civilians and combatants). Israel claims to have killed over 10,000 Palestinian militants, and reports that 236 Israeli soldiers have been killed in action during the invasion. 236 is an extremely low number after months of urban warfare, which is usually close-range and bound to cost many lives on both sides. By losing as few of its soldiers as possible, the government of Israel keeps death in war at a distance from Israeli society while at the same time mobilising for a massive military operation. The only way to do so in urban warfare is to mindlessly bomb entire blocks, even neighbourhoods to the ground and shoot everybody at sight (even if they are holding a white cloth to surrender) in order to avoid the risky confrontation of man to man. It means to bring exceedingly much more death to everybody on the other side, combatant or not. A report by The Guardian cites an Israeli soldier returning from the front: ‘We take some fire and identify a target. For an hour we unload everything we’ve got, our own weapons, tanks, anything we can get. Then we advance and find dead terrorists.’

Contrary to the violence by Palestinian militants on 7 October that was intended to hurt in a personal and close-range manner, the violence of the Israeli retaliation is decidedly impersonal and distanced. It uses long-distance massive firepower, and treats people that come into its way as mere material to be liquidated or pacified, undressed less for the sake of personal revenge through rape, and more for the sake of impersonal processing and potential disposal. This kind of violence says: There is nothing to see here, look away while we restore order. It is the kind of violence that seeks to reconstitute the logic of peace within and war without by maintaining a deadly distance between the two.

Such violent constitution of spaces of war and others of peace is not unique to Israel. It also structures Arab solidarity for Palestinians. Palestinians are frequently venerated as martyrs but often unwelcome as neighbours and colleagues. This, too, is a violent fence of peace. It allows people to live in relative peace and at the same time support the cause of Palestine without having to bear the responsibility nor to experience the devastating consequences of yet another disastrous battle in a never-ending war of liberation.

 

IV. 2024, here

In my recent research work I have thought much about the work towards a normal life that may not be a normative one, and the many things we need to be silent about, ignore, or evade in order to accomplish the visible and tangible means of a good life (Bromber et al. 2023). The current war in Gaza has made me connect these thoughts with the issues of war and peace. I am a person who prefers even a bad peace over an extended righteous war. This is partly due to my character as a person who favours compromises over confrontation. For another part, it is due to my own political views that began with Leninist communism and moved away from it. Last but not least, it is also due to the recent history of my native country Finland, which survived World War II as an independent country thanks to a combination of a righteous war (against a Soviet invasion), the evillest allies available (Nazi Germany), and a bad peace that was nevertheless better than the available alternative of no peace. Motivations aside, there are good objective reasons for my preference for peace. Even a bad peace allows for living and thriving in a way a prolonged just war does not. However, as a proponent of peace, I also realise that it is necessary to look more closely into what goes into its making, especially into those constituents of peace that don’t look good in broad daylight and that contradict the idea that peace entails justice and harmony.

Among Michel Foucault’s most brilliant ideas was that of the heterotopia: a place that is defined by being different from ordinary places. His examples include prisons, boarding schools, hospitals, boarding and insane asylums. Other scholars inspired by Foucault’s intervention have kept finding more and more heterotopias, from battlefields to downtown weekend strolls. I, too, have participated in the inflationary use of the term to describe all kinds of spaces that are significant by being different. But with so many places turning out to be heterotopias, what if it is the ordinary, unremarkable sites that are different? What if we consider war and violence not the exception to an ordinary state of peace? Following this thought, the patches of ordinary peaceful living like those that I encountered on my travels in 1999 and 2023 could be considered exceptions, heterotopic islands demarcated and constituted by various forms of violence. Their peacefulness is thus more like that of the empire described in the Strugatski brothers’ unfinished novel, brutal and evil on its fringes and its invisible underbelly, peaceful and friendly at its visible centre.

It is evident that heterotopic peace is incomplete and unsatisfactory. It does and should cause moral trouble and torment. That better kinds of peace would be preferable is obvious. But the more important question is: what kinds of peace would be attainable?

A pragmatic modesty of ambition is evident in the pre-modern origins of terms like einfrieden and dar al-salam: peace is a local accomplishment, an exception from the general state of the world. Anthropologists today don’t like such conclusions, because many of us are committed to the idea of a radical critique, a search to overcome the normal assumptions of our societies and states. But why exactly should our critique be radical? As a former radical myself, I have seen ample evidence about radical movements, when victorious, turning their violence of resistance into a violence of domination, and building archipelagoes of prison camps in which the violent margins spread out even further than they might otherwise. And when radical movements fall short of their aims, the picture is often not better. Those who today rally the slogan ‘No justice, no peace’ rarely seem to realise that their demand has in fact been fulfilled. There is no justice and there is no peace. Rather than a radical critique seeking to overcome the present for the sake of a revolutionary transformation, I would pursue a pragmatic critique grounded in a sense of responsibility and an attention for consequences.

When the hosts of Maxim Kammerer in the Strugatski brothers’ unfinished novel claim that the communist utopia from which Kammerer arrives can only exist as a work of imagination, this is a humble admission by the authors that the political hopes of their youth could not be realised. The Soviet Union they participated in building turned out to look much more like the evil empire Kammerer travels to than the 22nd century utopia they sketched in their earlier novels. We, too, face this discrepancy between our radical utopias and the constituents of our everyday peace.

In a way, we are all Israel. Not only we the western people who feel more for Israeli lives because we consider them ‘us’. I also mean us pro-Palestinian anti-Zionists. I mean you who is reading this. You are Israel, too, insofar as the peace in which you live is enabled by boundaries of violence that are beyond your everyday experience. The degree of violence may be less extreme, but it is just as constitutive. I doubt whether it is possible to completely remove violence from our patches of peace. But it is possible and necessary to make the violence less extreme, and the patches more encompassing.

Berlin, 21 February 2024. Passage on German military support for Israel updated in April and May 2024. Text and photos by Samuli Schielke. Big thanks to Asmaa Essakouti who read the two drafts of this essay and gave very helpful suggestions for improvement.

ENDNOTE:

The issue of German arms sales to Israel has been in the news, with Germany featuring as the second largest source of Israel's arms imports. According to the same statistics collected every year by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), German arms exports to Israel jumped from tens of millions to hundreds of millions in 2023. Germany rose to the second biggest arms exporter to Israel in 2023, with export licenses worth 326 millions euro, equalling 1.3 per cent of Israel's 25 billion euro military spending in 2023. 

Information about arms exports is to a degree publicly available in Germany, so I have tried tounderstand what exactly has been sold. The leftist nationalist party of Sahra Wagenknecht made a parliamentary inquiry on how much weapons were sold to Israel in 2023. The answer by the government specifies "weapons of war" as a separate category: 20 million euros, mostly anti-tank grenades and rifle munition: https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/ausland/waffenlieferungen-deutschland-israel-100.html  

That is a lot less than the other figure of 326 million that's also been published by the German government, referred to by SIPRI, and then cited by others as indicating Germany's important role in arming Israel. Where does the difference come from? According to press reports about the reply of the federal government to the parliamentary inquiry, the figures don't include Drakon, a new submarine of the Dolphin class that was approved the same or previous year. However, the export license for Drakon does not figure in the 2022 exports either (but half of 2022 exports were submarine related). In fact the last time submarines featured in German arms export licenses to Israel was in 2014 and 2015. The official answer of the federal government to the parliamentary inquiry does include the export list category A0009, warships - but the answer does not give details of what was approved and for how much. So basically, we do not know what exactly Germany licensed for export in 2023 beyond 20 millions for actual ammunition. However, statistics on long-term German arms sales since 2002 show warships and especially submarines as the leading item, amounting to half of the total financial value of Germany's military exports to Israel over the past 22 years. Whenever a submarine is approved of or sold, exports of a single year peak from tens to hundreds of millions. The unit price was 500-700 million USD when the first German submarine was delivered to Israel 13 years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin-class_submarine

Germany's role in arming the current massacre in Gaza thus appears to be less major than widely assumed. However, Germany plays a substantial role in something potentially far more terrible and destructive. The submarine is a strategic weapon that can carry nuclear weapons. The nuclear warheads that will be carried by just one submarine can cause destruction that would make the current war look like a brawl among friends. And a big part of the price of the submarine under construction as well as the previous ones delivered by Germany to Israel in the past two decades has been subsidised by the German federal government. This is strategic military aid that can be extremely consequential if the current war escalates into a bigger one.