What is the world's oldest hatred?
When fury first cracked like lightning, was it really because of us?
Jews
According to almost everyone, the oldest hatred in the world is antisemitism. If you Google the words ‘world’s oldest hatred,’ you’ll get links to a PBS documentary about antisemitism, a course at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee about antisemitism, a book by John Mann MP—now Lord Mann—about antisemitism, an event last year at JW3 about ‘Israelophobia: The Newest Mutation of the Oldest Hatred,’ a lecture by the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks about antisemitism, and a seminar hosted by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom about antisemitism. There is absolutely nothing on the first few pages about anything else.
This month, the President of the United States gave a speech about antisemitism, which he described as ‘the world’s oldest form of prejudice and hate’ and an ‘ancient hatred for Jews.’ The current war in the Middle East, he said, is a product of that ancient hatred, an ‘ancient desire to wipe out the Jewish people’ lying ‘deep in the hearts’ of the people of Gaza. That same ancient hatred is also fuelling the protesters at home trying to end the war. Antisemitism is everywhere, but it never seems to emerge out of its own era, for its own reasons. It’s always an echo from the dawn of time.
This all seems wrong. I know we’re annoying, I know the combination of sexual perversion, moral smugness, and a high reedy voice is a hard one to love. But the oldest hatred in the world? Is the hatred of Jews really built into the stuff of history? When fury first cracked like lightning and men felt the first hunger to kill, was it really because of us?
If antisemitism really is the world’s oldest hatred, we haven’t been hating for very long. Something recognisable as Judaism only emerged during the Second Temple period, from about 500 BC, and something recognisable as antisemitism only emerged once Jews started wandering off to live ostentatiously separate lives in various cities across the Eastern Mediterranean, from 300 BC. Suddenly you get the whole standard kvetch. These people are strangers, they won’t integrate, they won’t adopt our religion, they won’t work the land, all they do is get rich off someone else’s sweat… Before that, though, when we were just another Levantine hill tribe, nobody seemed to mind us that much. Is hatred really only 2,300 years old?
But in fact, there were already Jew-haters, almost before there were Jews. They produced whole volumes full of hateful rants against the weak, scheming, backstabbing, evil Yids. They wrote that the people of Israel had ‘defiled the land with harlotries and evil,’ and the city of Jerusalem ‘must be punished’ for ‘her wickedness.’ A great cleansing is coming, something that will burn these faithless kikes from the face of the earth. ‘A sword, a sword: it is sharpened, in order to make a slaughter it has been sharpened.’ It’s just that those texts happen to have been written by the Jewish prophets. Adorno once noted that antisemites always unconsciously imitate what they take to be the mannerisms of Jews; most of all, they imitate our infinite talent for self-loathing. But they’ll never be as good as we are. There’s nothing the antisemites can say about us that we can’t say better ourselves.
In other words, the line that antisemitism is the world’s oldest hatred really means that self-hatred is the world’s oldest hatred. All hatred is just death drive, generalised outwards. But its simplest form—the real, pure, uncut, white-hot hate—is the hatred that stayed at its source. Whoever you are, whatever you hate the most is just a substitute or a metaphor for yourself.
Blacks
There are other opinions. According to Frank B Wilderson and the broader current of Afropessimism, the oldest hatred in the world is the world’s hatred for black people. Afropessimists usually focus on the history following the Atlantic slave trade, but the core of their argument is that antiblackness isn’t historical but ontological. The world has always hated black people; it hated black people before there were black people; its hatred for black people is as cemented into the structure of reality as the laws of thermodynamics. Black people, Wilderson explains, ‘are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures.’ The category ‘human’ was constructed to specifically exclude black people. Black people are not even alive. ‘We are a species of sentient beings that cannot be injured or murdered, because we are dead to the world.’ Their status is one of ‘social and ontological death.’ Everyone else is constantly torturing and killing black people, simply because killing them is a way of pleasurably reaffirming that the dead are, in fact, dead. The world ‘finds its nourishment in Black flesh.’ Haven’t living creatures always consumed the dead?
Frank B Wilderson is black—and, therefore, socially dead, inert, utterly inhuman in the eyes of all non-black people. The only value they can see in him is as a quantity of flesh to be violently torn apart. He is also a prizewinning author, playwright, and poet, a public intellectual, and a full professor at the University of California, Irvine.
There’s still something here, you just need to dig around a bit. Even within the Afropessimist approach, antiblackness is not actually primary. Black people are despised by the world because they are structurally dead. Behind the small, contingent question of racial hatred stands the hatred of the living for the dead. The living are the living, and the inorganic is the inorganic, but the dead are something monstrous. You recoil at the sight of a corpse. They pollute the borderlands of being. This really might be the oldest hatred in the world: all societies have needed some ritual to safely contain the dead, often literally driving them away, banishing them from the world. Without these rites, they become dangerous. There’s no relative so kindly he can’t end up as a vengeful, deadly ancestor-spirit. Your own finitude, wearing the terrible face of someone you once loved.
Women
According to the radical feminist tradition, the world’s oldest hatred is men’s hatred for women. For Valerie Solanas, one of the most extraordinary and powerful haters of all time, men are literally incapable of love; these blocked, neurotic, impotent, emotively and sexually constipated creatures soon find that the only way they can fully express themselves is in grand displays of aggression and hatred. At best, man ‘is a half dead, unresponsive lump, incapable of giving or receiving pleasure or happiness.’ At worst, he has produced a society that, ‘if the Bomb doesn’t drop on it, will hump itself to death.’ Shulamith Firestone agrees. ‘Men can’t love. It is dangerous to feel sorry for one’s oppressor—women are especially prone to this failing—but I am tempted to do it in this case. Being unable to love is hell.’ Andrea Dworkin does too. ‘Man’s love for woman, his sexual adoration of her, his delight and pleasure in her, require her negation: physical crippling and psychological lobotomy… Brutality, sadism, and oppression emerge as the substantive core of the romantic ethos.’ Men say they love women. But there’s something wrong with this thing they call love: it keeps leaving women dead.
For the radical feminists, men’s hatred of women proceeds directly from biology. But unlike Solanas and Dworkin, Firestone is still a good Marxist; she sees this hatred progressing through history; she even imagines that it might one day end. (To be fair, so does Solanas—once all the men have been killed.) Following Engels, she assumes there was once a primordial matriarchy that was then overthrown by the patriarchy that survives into the present day. This event was what got the entire nightmare-engine of history going: the first form of private property was property in women. (She’s more guarded here than some: in the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, she writes, man ‘goes from worshipping Nature through women to conquering it. Though it’s true that woman’s lot worsened considerably under patriarchy, she never had it good… To be worshipped is not freedom.’) Some version of this transition is a weirdly common theme in oral histories. Across the world, the same type of myth crops up: some civilisationally crucial ritual object or technology that’s currently taboo for women was, in fact, first discovered by them. In one from Papua New Guinea, a woman found a sacred bamboo flute while chopping firewood and showed it to the other women. In response, the men banded together and clubbed them all to death—except the little girls, who were forbidden from ever making music again. In one from Australia, women discovered fire but kept it from men by hiding the embers in their vaginas, so the men turned into crocodiles and killed them. In Araucanía the women kept the men as slaves until they rose up in hatred against them. One woman survived the slaughter by swimming across a lake, until at last she reached the horizon and turned into the Moon.
This battle of the sexes might or might not have actually happened; its core message—that the sexual relation always risks escalating into some kind of destructive violence—is still true. Maybe this is an exclusively male violence and hatred; more likely, what Freud called the ‘universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love’ really is universal. (A lot of the radical feminists assumed that lesbian relationships would be genuinely loving and nonviolent. But lesbianism is ordinary now, it’s lost its utopian glamour, and while the forms aren’t always exactly the same, it tuns out women can do brutality, sadism, and oppression just as well as the boys.) It might be possible to love someone with nothing but kindness and gentleness and gratitude, the way flowers love the Sun—but only from a distance. If you want to really bridge the gap between two people, love has to come curdled with just a little bit of hatred. Hatred is a delivery mechanism for love; it shields love against the contingencies of the world. But hatred is unstable. It refuses to simply do its job. Once it’s in play, it can suddenly swell; it can bounce off the beloved object and stick to something else; it can swallow the world, until you forget that all your hatred is just the empty shell of something else.
Youth
According to the Enuma Elish or the Babylonian epic of creation, the oldest hatred is the hatred of age against youth. The first gods are Apsu, the deep well of fresh water, and Tiamat, the primordial sea. Their waters mingle together and other gods emerge: Anshar of the sky, Kishar of the earth, Lahmu of the slimes, Anu, Ea. Eventually the noise and clamour of these new gods drives Apsu mad. ‘Their behaviour has become hateful to me, and I cannot rest in the daytime or sleep at night. I will destroy and break up their way of life, that silence may reign and we may sleep.’ Ea, who is clever, gives Apsu what he wants: he whispers a spell that sends the god into a deep, untroubled sleep. Then, with his bare hands, Ea tears through Apsu’s sinews and pulls off his head.
Sometimes I understand what it’s like to hate the new. There’s a railway bridge in north London I used to walk across a lot when I was a child. If you peeked over the top, you got a panoramic view of the inner suburbs, with a big tower block rising just where the railway lines met. I used to like that view, twenty years ago. Recently, I ended up crossing the same bridge. I peeked over the top, and found that the view was unrecognisable. A bunch of boxy new housing developments had blotted out my memories; the big tower block was barely even visible. What happened to those twenty years? Back then my body was still growing, and now it’s already falling apart. If I’m going to slip away from myself like this, can’t I at least have one small piece of the outside world that stays the same? One tiny anchor to hold on to? But it was already broken up in the churning of the fresh and salty waters. For a moment, I wanted to blot out the din of the city, its restlessness, its spasms of youth, its overflowing life. So silence might reign. To make the waters still again.
Age
According to Hesiod’s Theogony, the oldest hatred is basically the same thing but the other way around. Cronus was the youngest son of Uranus, the elemental Sky, but he ‘hated his lusty sire,’ so he waited until Sky descended to fuck the Earth and then he cut his own father’s balls off. Later writers would identify Cronus with Chronos, or Time, which is constantly abolishing the past. Time hates everything that exists, simply because it has the temerity to already exist. Get rid. Later, Cronus’ son Zeus does the same thing to him. What a shock! Surely no one could possibly have predicted this.
A big snake
According to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, there are a bunch of things that might plausibly be the first welling of hatred, including the the cruelty of Lycaon and the presence of iron in the Earth’s crust, but one of them is the fury of a big snake called Python that appears essentially out of nowhere. Apollo kills it with an arrow, and then founds the Pythian games, so young men can imitate the violence of the snake through the friendly hatreds of sport.
Speechlessness
According to the Popol Vuh, the world’s oldest hatred is the hatred of the languagebearing for the speechless. The world is created from the male and female principles, Tepeu and Q’uq’umatz, They Who Have Begotten Children and They Who Have Borne Sons. Together they lift the world out of the primordial waters and fill it with plants and mountains. But the world is still silent, so they create living animals and give them homes and pastures. ‘Speak!’ they tell the animals. ‘Speak therefore our names. Worship us, for we are your Mother and your Father.’ But the animals can only hiss and cry. ‘They were not able to say our names,’ Tepeu and Q’uq’umatz observe. ‘This is not good.’ So they curse the animals. ‘Your homes and your pastures you shall have; they shall be the ravines and the forests, because it has not been possible for you to adore us. Accept your destiny: your flesh shall be torn to pieces.’
A person who doesn’t speak your language is always a kind of animal. A barbarian: he looks human, but his mouth only makes the bar, bar sounds of sheep. He eats uncooked meat. He can’t use the correct names for things; he is unable to understand or adore you. Every tribe’s name for itself means something like the people or the speaking people. But the Polish word for a German means mute, and the name Sioux comes from an Ojibwe word meaning, roughly, those who hiss like snakes.
Uniquely among the post-contact Maya codices, the Popol Vuh contains almost nothing in the language of the Spanish conquerors. There’s a single, perfunctory, possibly obligatory mention of Dios, and that’s it. Keep the pure K’iche’ language that Tepeu and Q’uq’umatz gave the first men. And despite everything, that language hung on; it’s still spoken by a million people in Guatemala and Mexico. Others too. There’s a story, far too pat to be true but still illustrative, about a man on a bus who overheard a woman in a hijab talking to her son. Some people can’t stand to hear a foreign language on public transport. Instinctive hatred of the barbarians who bleat like sheep. ‘If you’re going to live in Britain,’ he said to her, ‘you should speak English in public.’ The woman replied: ‘We’re in Wales. I was speaking Welsh.’
What about the animals? People who live near great apes have always maintained that the orangutans or gorillas are actually perfectly capable of talking like humans, but they choose not to, because if anyone heard them speak they would be made to work. Better to be speechless, hated, hunted, better to have your flesh torn to pieces, than to get a job.
Farmers
According to the Old Testament, the oldest hatred is the hatred betwen farmers and pastoralists. ‘Abel was a shepherd of flocks, and Cain was a tiller of the soil. And Cain spoke to Abel his brother, and it came to pass when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him.’
Shepherds and tillers can’t share the same land. Farmers slice it up, section it off, and then intensively scour their sustenance out of their small patch of earth. Pastoralism is low-intensity, but the spaces it requires are vast. Acres and acres to move around in, winter pastures in the lowlands, summer meadows in the hills. The history of the world is the history of farmers inching into the steppeland, building their terraces, digging their irrigation canals, nibbling away at the great plains, dividing them into units of private property with paperwork attached—and then pastoralists pouring in on horseback to tear down the fences, churn up the fields, raze the towns, and slaughter every single farmer they find.
For farming people, the violence and brutality of the steppe pastoralists seems incomprehensible. Farmers are bent, malnutritioned, too exhausted to be anything other than peaceful. Why do these savages hate them so much? The Sumerians lived in fear of ‘the Amorites who know no grain, who know no house nor town, the boors of the mountains, who are not buried after death.’ Herodotus wrote that a Scythian warrior would drink the blood of the first man he killed. Han Dynasty Chinese scholars describe the Xiongnu drinking blood out of a human skull. Over a thousand years later, a Benedictine monk wrote the same about the Mongols. ‘They are inhuman and beastly, rather monsters than men, thirsting for and drinking blood, tearing and devouring the flesh of dogs and men, dressed in ox-hides, short and stout, thickset, strong, invincible, drinking with delight the pure blood.’ A few hundred years after that, the farming tribes who called themselves Americans were terrified of the Apache of the Western Steppe, another impossibly savage, impossibly brutal enemy who also drank human blood. This impression isn’t based on nothing. When an army of steppe-nomads is on the move, each warrior’s horse is also his larder. He lives off milk and blood.
The violence of these pastoralists is not so incomprehensible either. The same land can support hundreds of times more farmers than herders, which means agricultural states can throw masses of conscripts at their enemies. Like the fences, the dense population belongs to a specific way of using the land; massacre becomes inevitable. There might have been wars before this time, as different hunter-gatherer bands squabbled for territory, but the dispute between Cain and Abel is the first time you see an economic engine that guarantees not just one local conflict but thousands of years of hatred and slaughter across the entire surface of the Earth.
What this is not is a war between distinct tribes. Race has nothing to do with it; often, Cain and Abel really are brothers. Peasants get sick of toiling and escape for the hills to join the herders; a few years later they come down to decapitate their old neighbours. During the settlement of America, more than a few Puritan farmers got bored and ran away to join the Indians in the woods. Herdsmen brutally conquer a patch of land, and then decide to start growing grain on it. The Amorites who knew no house or town did eventually stop wandering and found a city. You might have heard of the place; it was called Babylon.
The Bible was written by settled, urban, literate people, but they still remembered the days when they wandered with their flocks. Cain, the first killer, is a farmer; God prefers Abel the shepherd. As punishment for his crime, Cain has to become his brother. ‘When you till the soil, it will not continue to give its strength to you; you shall be a wanderer and an exile in the land.’ Abraham leaves Ur of the Chaldeans, a city of mud-brick temples, to live in a tent in the wilderness of Canaan. The Israelites have to mill about in the desert because they were too afraid to conquer the promised land when they first got the chance. ‘Your children shall be wanderers in the wilderness forty years, and shall bear your strayings, until your carcasses be consumed in the wilderness.’ This is what it takes to turn slaves into warriors. Jeremiah repeats the law of the Rechebites: ‘You shall not build a house, neither shall you sow nor shall you plant a vineyard, but you shall dwell in tents all your days.’ King David was a shepherd-boy. Don’t imagine some sweet rustic. Imagine a Mongol.
In the end, brutality wasn’t enough; the longest war in human history went to the farmers. But their victory is still uneven, and across the Sahel, the oldest war is still going. Farmers plant the pasturelands. Flocks uproot the farms. So the farmers drive Toyota pick-ups into herding villages and mow down the inhabitants with Kalashnikovs, and the herders sneak up on the farms and hack the people to bits with machetes. Fulani and Dogon, Shuwa and Hausa, Dinka and Nuer. Some hatreds really are ancient. But modernity has given them a new pitch. Far away, the industrialised nations pour carbon into the atmosphere to enjoy more burgers and holidays; meanwhile in Africa the desert swells, the arable zone shrinks, the population grows with less land to support it, and with every insurgency more guns pour into the region, shipped in by rich countries far away. To protect democracy. For freedom and the rule of law.
Imperfection
According to the sixteenth-century theologian Laurentius Clung, the oldest hatred is God’s hatred for Adam. Clung was originally a disciple of John Calvin, but he broke with him in a rage against his ‘pagan, Popish, and heretical’ opinion that God would choose to save any of His creations. Clung’s logic was simple. First, he said, hate is the recognition of lowliness. We hate filth, we hate insects. Only good people can hate: evil might be able to envy, but true hatred is beyond them. What’s more, it’s impossible for the good not to hate what is wrong in the world, since if you don’t hate an imperfection you must want it to persist, which would make you evil yourself. Therefore God, being infinitely high and infinitely good, can only regard everything less good than He is with infinite hatred. Before Adam was formed, God already knew that Adam would eventually disobey him, and therefore He hated him. He only went ahead and actually created Adam—and, through him, humanity in general—as a form of punishment.
Clung, having divined the mind of God, thought he was much more perfect than his contemporaries. In an age of haters, he might have been the most virulent hater of all. In his various pamphlets he wrote invectives against the Dutch (‘The Devil shits; a Dutchman is born’), the peasantry (‘The only animal too filthy to eat’), Calvin (‘This bawdy weeper in a woman’s blood-clotted rags’), Zwingli (‘By the slaughter of such a God-scoffing flautist, the Pope might yet bargain his way from damnation’), the French (‘A scented rat, but always a rat’), the English '(‘May they choke on their pies’), Luther (‘A perverse and pestilent monk, who left his monastery only in search of new cocks to suck’), women (‘God’s proof that He does not love us’), bread (‘Pale, tasteless filth’), the afternoon (‘This useless desert of time I must endure seven times a week, while fools go grinning in the sunshine—is there not a river to drown them?’), the colours red (‘Vile, Popish shade’) and green (‘The gaudiness of heathenry’), the sky (‘A gawping-cloth for the feeble-minded’), water (‘See how they suck it up, as if Satan were not lord of this world, and the liquid that wells up from its depths were not the very piss of Satan’), and his own fingers (‘Swinish instruments’).
When I was a child, there were a lot of things I hated: onions, tomatoes, bedtimes, going to the park. On my first day of nursery school I decided, on the basis of no information whatsoever, that I hated this too. Whenever I encountered something I hated, I would kick and scream and refuse to get out of the car. I was a difficult child, but I never really stopped; it feels like I’ve spent most of my life adding items to the list of things I hate. By the time I’d reached my teens, I hated George W Bush, people who moved their lips while reading, slow walkers, and the economic system that governed the entire planet. I learned to define myself by the music I didn’t like and the clothes I would never wear. Today, I have a few freelance gigs reviewing books and films and exhibitions, and while I’m sometimes nice about the things I review, it's not often: I literally hate for a living. Something’s changed, though. I don’t hate with the repulsion of a child spitting out his dinner any more. The things I hate draw me in. I love to read opinions I find actively abhorrent, the more poorly written the better. I’ll hatewatch. I’ll hatelisten. I’m obsessed with a few people from my distant past who post incredibly lame and embarrassing stuff on their Instagram stories. I can’t get enough of it. They’re so much lowlier than I am, all the things I hate. I’m so much more perfect than them.
Clung was a better man than me. One volume of his diary survives: in every entry, he begs God to destroy him. He wants God to cast his soul into the perfection of the inferno: to release him from a life he can only live badly, which drags him further into sin with each lopsided day.
Power
According to Friedrich Nietzsche, the world’s oldest hatred is the hatred of the weak for the strong. In his Genealogy of Morals, he imagines a beautiful green meadow full of fluffy-soft lambs, who are occasionally carried off by eagles. The lambs decide the eagles, who keep killing lambs in cruel and brutal ways, must be motivated by a hatred of lambs. So they hate the eagles in return. A bubbling, festering hatred against everything that soars. They decide that ‘these birds of prey are evil, and whoever is least like a bird of prey, and most like a lamb, is good.’ But the eagles don’t hate the lambs. The truly lofty are incapable of hatred. They love the lambs, they love their pink noses and soft coats, and they love the world that gives an eagle the freedom to swoop.
These days, Nietzsche’s philosophy is usually pressed into the service of some very dull, piggish types, who think they ought to have power simply because they don’t resemble lambs. If they preen their feathers, if they keen loudly enough, if they’re capable of acts of careless cruelty, then they must be the eagle. This is one reading. But I like the other implication. If you hate anything, anything at all, even your most despised enemy, if you have the tiniest speck of hatred and resentment in your soul—then you are not an eagle. Screech all you like. You will never fly.
Everything
According to Apethitikes of Ephesus, the oldest hatred is the hatred of everything for everything else. Apethitikes’ major work, Of The Variety of Things, survives only in a brief refutation by Scroto of Rhodes. His contemporaries describe him as ‘the happiest of the philosophers,’ always singing bawdy songs on his lute, often drunk, and famously generous. He’s said to have ‘died of excessive contentment’ in his house on the Icarian coast on a fatally pleasant afternoon. Like many of the other pre-Socratics, he was a monist: he believed that the universe was constituted by a single substance or archē. For Thales it was water, for Anaximenes it was air, for Heraclitus it was fire, for Anaximander it was the apeiron or the infinite. But all these monisms struggled to explain why reality, which is actually singular and eternal, appears to be differentiated and changing. If everything is ultimately one, why does it bother taking on different forms? Why is there so much extraneous stuff? Apethitikes had an answer. It’s there, he said, because the archē is hatred; the universe we live in is made of hatred.
All things, Apethitikes says, are born from bitterness. It is in their nature to be hostile. At the beginning of time, there was only an infinitely small spark, which flared into being because of its hatred of the void. Once it had sparked, it had nothing to hate but itself; recoiling away from its own being, it broke into millions of mutually loathing atoms, which is why there are distinct objects today. Time exists because each instant hates each other instant and insists on being separated from it. The Sun smears itself across the sky because it hates every position it occupies, and light bursts out from its surface in explosive horror. The Moon has its phases because it hates both darkness and light. Rains fall because they hate the heavens. Plants grow upwards because they hate the earth. Everything is constantly in tension and contradiction, and this poisonous churn is what we call life. A world without hatred would be sterile, motionless, and empty. Insipid oneness. A placid speck. Apethitikes of Ephesus loved hatred, and he loved the world hatred had built. To sit peacefully in the afternoon and watch the birds wheeling above the bright blue sea. This million-petalled flower; this treasury of things.
In other news: readers might be aware that over the last few months I’ve been having an extended disagreement with Curtis Yarvin, one of the major intellectuals of the New Right, over the war in Gaza. Briefly: back in October of 2023, Yarvin wrote that ‘it is clear to any sane person that if Israel could install a technical device on its bombs that would prevent them from killing civilians, it instantly would.’ This is simply not true, and I said so in a footnote to an essay about Gaza, in which I argued that Israel has no political goals other than to inflict suffering on the civilian population. (Since I wrote that, the IDF has withdrawn from nearly every position it occupied within the strip. The Israeli and Western media have found this hard to explain, but it’s exactly what my account of things predicts.) Yarvin replied with a long post set entirely within the weird folds of his own brain, which I briefly but systematically took apart the next day. I wondered if Yarvin was ever going to respond to that one. To be honest, I had a hard time imagining how he could, when I’d just demonstrated that his entire ideology is incoherent and he gets all his information from Wikipedia. Anyway, this week he finally responded. Well, sort of. Last time, I encouraged you to read his whole salvo before my reply; unfortunately, this time you really don’t need to bother. His essay is sixteen thousand words long, but somehow none of those words are spent defending his previous positions or responding to any of mine. Instead, it’s mostly about the historiography of the Second World War. I guess he wouldn't be the first middle-aged American to start blabbing about the war when he's backed into a corner. But the headline news is that instead of saying that Israel is not deliberately killing civilians in Gaza, he’s now saying that Israel would actually be completely justified in enslaving them all if it wanted to. (He also manages to include a description of his fantasy solution—in which the population of Gaza are exiled, but offered shares in the new Israeli charter city that will replace their homes—for the third fucking time. Jesus Christ.) Since Yarvin has given up trying to argue the actual point, I’ll take his piece as an extremely rambling concession of defeat.