Back in February, I wrote a long and fairly miserable essay about the war in Gaza, and it made a lot of people upset. I expected this. In the essay, I accused the Israeli government of deliberately targeting and killing large numbers of civilians. I said that it has no real plan to replace Hamas as the governing authority in the Gaza Strip, that its war is not being fought for any specific political outcome, and therefore what we’ve been witnessing for the last six months has been nothing more than massacre. But I also said the armed Palestinian factions were doing essentially the same thing. None of them really believe that their small, periodic attacks on civilian and military targets in Israel will materially contribute to any kind of better political outcome. They know full well that there is no military path to a free Palestine, and in the absence of that path, all their actions are also nothing more than massacre. I knew that these were extremely contentious claims. Plenty of people will agree with one half of my argument and not the other; very few will like hearing both. They want to believe there’s something at stake in this conflict, and I was saying that there isn’t. I was leaving myself without natural allies. I didn’t mind. I can fend for myself.
What surprised me, though, was how utterly illiterate so much of the response to my essay was. You people simply do not know how to read. I’m not sure you know how to think. You just loll around in a wet world of half-chewed clichés. Whenever you encounter a piece of extended, argumentative prose, you enter a sudden nervous panic. What is this? Is it on my side? Is it the enemy’s? You don’t read it, exactly, but you do scan through its opening paragraphs for the right kind of cliché. If yours are in there, then all is well and good. But if you encounter something that resembles one of the enemy’s clichés, you quickly spit out a loose bolus of drivel over the offending text. It’s an instinctive reaction. When a turkey vulture is threatened, it pukes up its gizzardful of half-rotten, half-digested meat. Vulture vomit smells disgusting, and it can cause a nasty infection if it gets in the eyes. That’s you. That’s the state of every discussion about everything, now that we’re all online.
My critics were not responding to anything I’d actually said. At best, they were responding to some of my words. At one point, I mentioned that some Jewish anti-Zionists insist that Israel isn’t a particularly Jewish state, just a settler-colonial state that happens to be populated by Jews. I mentioned this only to add that I no longer agree: I think Israel is, for better or worse, part of a specifically Jewish history. But this seemed to have flown right over my critics’ heads, because in response one of them emitted a long furious screed about how Israel can’t be a settler colony since it has a lower foreign-born population than Oman, and how come I only oppose migration when it’s Jews doing it? The man was using language, but nothing like thought had taken place. As soon as the words ‘settler-colonial’ flash in front of his eyes, the gizzard contracts. Meanwhile, another critic saw fit to inform me that actually, Hamas has taken hostages, and they have been known to operate from schools and hospitals. I have no idea who this person thought he was arguing with. Did he think I didn’t know? Did he think I’d somehow slept through the events of last October, and had just woken blearily halfway through a war? But of course he wasn’t thinking either. He saw some material critical of Israel, so he immediately regurgitated some material critical of Hamas. Inevitably, someone else decided to call me a self-hating Jew.
Maybe I shouldn’t be complaining about this. These people are basically just standard-issue internet retards; they ought to be beneath notice. What I need is a better class of critic. Someone like Curtis Yarvin.
For those who don’t know him, Curtis Yarvin is widely considered to be one of the leading intellectuals behind the loose and loosening ideological cluster known as the New Right. (Yarvin points out that there have been several New Rights already. His preferred term is ‘deep right.’ Good luck with that.) According to Jacobin, he’s a ‘racialist crackpot.’ The Nation says he has ‘fascist enthusiasms.’ Gizmodo calls him a ‘fascist influencer.’ Slate calls him ‘odious.’ The New York Times comments that he ‘does not need to be caricatured to make him out to be an enemy of liberal democracy.’ I don’t reproduce all these lines to traduce the man. The point is that he has a lot of enemies, and they’ve thrown a lot of insults at him over the years. Still, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone refer to him as an illiterate. Yarvin consistently refers to texts by Burnham, Carlyle, Macaulay, Burke, Defoe, and Cicero. Even his detractors are forced to admit that while he might be evil, he is at least smart. This is a person that should, we can assume, know how to read.
And yet. And yet. And yet.
I should start by saying that this is all my fault. I started it; I’m the one who went looking for trouble. And now I’m dragging you in. The rest of this essay will consist of me arguing pedantically with another person, who you might not have even heard of. You can call it a takedown if you want. There will be a few entertainingly bitchy barbs in there, mostly because those seem to be one of the requirements of the genre. But if that’s not your thing—and there’s no reason why it should be—you can stop reading now, and I promise to write about something more interesting next time.
Anyway: in my essay on Gaza back in February, I asked a rhetorical question. ‘Does anyone still pretend Israel isn’t deliberately targeting civilians?’ Obviously, there are some people who do still pretend this, including a shrinking number of national governments. (My own government is one of them, although their own lawyers are reportedly telling them something different.) But it occurred to me that there were a few others. So I added a footnote. Here it is in its entirety:
One of the weirder things to come out of this war is the way much of the edgy, radical, iconoclastic, leather jacket-wearing right wing suddenly started sounding like they’d just received a big pile of money from the Atlantic Council. So Curtis Yarvin, dark prince of the dark right, insists 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.’ Yarvin is, as he keeps reminding us, a Foreign Service brat. Does he really expect us to believe that he’s never heard of the Dahiya Doctrine? But his problem is that what’s happening in Gaza indicts his entire ideology. Yarvin is a monarchist: he thinks society should be led by a singular, absolutely powerful sovereign who has total authority over his subjects without any kind of democratic accountability. He has deduced from first principles that getting rid of our current form of government and replacing it with this one will immediately solve all our problems and produce a maximally benevolent and generous regime—because if power is totally unassailable, what possible reason would it have not be maximally benevolent? In other words, Yarvin is a utopian. His real intellectual ancestor isn’t Thomas Carlyle, it’s Charles Fourier. He designs aluminium columns for his phalansteries. But his models do not quite stand up to the messiness of actual reality. What’s happening in Gaza is actually existing neoreaction. The IDF has a rigid top-down command structure. Its relation to the ordinary people of Gaza is one of total power without any accountability whatsoever. But for some reason, it’s not offering them equity in Rafael Advanced Defence Systems, so everyone can profit from their own houses being bombed, or whatever bullshit speculative notion Yarvin likes to cook up. Instead, it is systematically killing them. Whoops! Time for Curtis to go back to the drawing board. If it’s any consolation, his theory is one casualty of the war in Gaza that absolutely deserves its fate.
Yesterday, Yarvin published a 4,600 word response to my footnote, titled ‘Gaza and the laws of war.’ (If I kept up the rate of inflation, this post would have to be as long as a medium-sized book. And it’s long, but not that long. Count yourselves lucky.) I’ll be quoting little bits of Yarvin’s response to disagree with and sometimes laugh at them, but you really should read the whole thing. There’s a lot of words, but since Yarvin reads books from before the twentieth century he’s not a terrible prose stylist, even if he tries a bit too hard to make his writing fun. He does abuse italics even more than I do, but unlike me he writes in nice short paragraphs. If you read the stuff I put out, his should give you no trouble at all. But if you need to, you can skip the proem, where he rambles for a while about how covid was caused by scientists feeding vaccine gels to bats. There’s also an extended bit in the middle where he agrees with my characterisation of his political ideology by describing it at length for the umpteenth time, and if you’ve heard it before you can skip that too. Still, for the best experience, read the whole thing. It’ll only take you fifteen minutes, and it’s not as if you were going to do anything better with your time.
I won’t lie: I was pretty excited when I saw Yarvin had responded. I’m not above a good scrap. I like having a worthy opponent. But if you’ve read his whole piece, you can imagine my disappointment. Yarvin says that I’m a writer he’s always respected, even though I’m a communist Jew, which is very gracious of him. But he doesn’t actually respond to what I’ve written! Instead, he responds to a figure called the ‘shtetlib,’ which is, as far as I can make out, an Israeli who consumes English-language media. Despite having been born in Jerusalem, I don’t speak a word of non-liturgical Hebrew, so I guess that’s me. But as I read his response, I started noticing that while he keeps calling this shtetlib ‘Sam Kriss,’ we are quite obviously not the same person. The whole thing is just a tissue of lazy, underwhelming assumptions. To be honest, I felt cheated.
So, for instance, here’s Yarvin comparing Israel’s military doctrine to some previous conflicts:
Imagine if the US had evacuated Dresden, in February 1945, three months before the end of the war, to protect the population. Imagine if they had evacuated Raqqa, in June 2017, to protect the population. Imagine how mad Sam Kriss must be at these wars.
(To be fair, in one defunct publication, there is a record of Kriss (but not the rest of the weird world of mass-market Byronic Arabophilia) giving a shit about Raqqa. But I would laugh with shock if he gave a shit about Dresden. Not all toddlers, you see, are the same—some toddlers are born innocent, whereas others are genetically guilty…)
I hope he’s ready to laugh! Because as it happens, right after the present war in Gaza broke out, I wrote about the massacres of ethnic Germans and the destruction of Dresden. Here’s the quote:
Estimates of the number of people who starved or froze or were worked to death or mobbed or shot vary wildly. Maybe half a million. Maybe two million or more. Their crimes might have been multiple, but the only crime they were actually punished for was simply being German. Sometimes atrocities are inflicted on the wrong type of people, people we don’t want to acknowledge as victims. You’re not supposed to think about it too much. (It’s always puzzled me: why is it seen as mildly dodgy to mourn the people who were massacred in the firebombing of Dresden, but perfectly acceptable to mourn their Axis allies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?)
Yarvin has somehow managed to track down a VICE article I wrote in 2015, nearly a decade ago, against Western intervention in Syria. I don’t even remember writing it! As anyone who wrote for VICE back then will tell you, we churned those things out for £200 a pop, immediately put the money up our noses, and never thought about them again. This might be why the company is no longer around. But he didn’t feel the need to even check what I might have said about Dresden. Why would he? He knows what the shtetlib is like. He knows what kind of arguments shtetlibs make. Why would he need to actually read anything?
Later on, there’s a really amazing repeat of this tendency. In my original footnote, I summarised Yarvin’s politics like this. ‘Yarvin is a monarchist: he thinks society should be led by a singular, absolutely powerful sovereign who has total authority over his subjects without any kind of democratic accountability.’ Yarvin doesn’t like the word ‘democratic’—apparently it’s ‘literally raping the English language’—but that aside, he appears to accept my account as broadly accurate. His response is an attempt to reproduce my position. This is called an ideological Turing test, and it’s a fun game for political weirdos. Let’s see how he does.
Kriss is an oligarchist: he thinks society should be led by a plural, absolutely powerful bureaucracy which has total authority over its subjects without any kind of democratic accountability.
Kriss calls actual democracy “politics” and thinks it is bad, and any real government needs to be protected from it.
Wait—I think what?
If you’ve read any of Yarvin’s stuff, you’ll recognise this shtick; he’s been doing it since the Bush years. Liberals, he says, love something called ‘democracy,’ which is made of lovely things like freedom and equality and justice and the rule of law. But they hate something called ‘politics,’ which is made of partisanship and gridlock and ugly enthusiasms and nasty powerful people making corrupt under-the-table deals. But oh no, Yarvin says, these terms are actually subtly imbricated. Can you have an apolitical democracy? Much to think about…
This gimmick might have even been impressive back in 2008, when he was talking to a bunch of disaffected computer programmers. You might have noticed there’s been a bit of a populist moment since then. People are not quite so down on partisanship any more! But more to the point—look, Curtis, bubbeleh, I’m afraid that success comes with new challenges, and you’re at the big boys’ table now, where people are simply not impressed just because you’ve read a bit of political theory. It’s not really my field these days, but as it happens I have also read a bit of political theory. I’ve read Jacques Rancière. I’ve read Chantal Mouffe. I’m pretty sure you’ve not touched either, but for what it’s worth, I’ve also read Aristotle, and Hobbes, and Burnham, and Schmitt. When I use words like ‘democracy’ or ‘politics,’ I am not using folk definitions.
Yarvin could have avoided making a tit out of himself here. But just like the nameless morons, he’s not responding to me, he’s responding to the word ‘democratic.’ Just like them, he’s falling back on a rehearsed bit. It’s not so hard to find out what I’ve actually said on the subject. In 2016, a general nonentity called Owen Smith briefly challenged Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. (Owen Smith is no longer an MP. He’s now a lobbyist for an American pharmaceutical firm. I know, I’m shocked.) Here’s what I had to say at the time:
The battle isn’t between the left and the centre, and it’s certainly not between Corbyn and Smith; it’s a choice between politics in general and something else, between the possibility of politics as a terrain for contention and its collapse into the mere administration of class society as it slowly declines. Jeremy Corbyn, for better or worse, might be the last leader whose politics are still actually political.
You can think my twenty-five-year-old self’s enthusiasm for mass-participatory politics is deranged, if you like, but what you can’t deny is that it’s there. Of course, 2016 was a long time ago. I’ve changed since then. My positions have mellowed. But I have not stopped writing about them. Two years ago, I reviewed the Bunga book, which is about political theory, and somehow managed to produce something more sophisticated than ‘democracy good, politics bad.’ One of my most-read essays in this very space is titled ‘Wokeness is not a politics.’ It’s not an endorsement!
So: I can accurately reproduce Yarvin’s political positions, while he can not accurately reproduce mine. This is not good news for him. It’s hard to defeat your enemy if you do not know your enemy, and Yarvin has done the rhetorical equivalent of marching an army into some really interesting mists surrounded by high, picturesque cliffsides. But maybe I’m being unfair to him here. Yes, I know his work better than he knows mine, but despite being a professed admirer of my writing, Yarvin is also significantly more famous than I am. Unlike him, I haven’t been profiled in Vanity Fair. Maybe it’s understandable if he’s not read absolutely everything I’ve ever written, especially since I no longer agree with much of it. What’s less understandable is that he doesn’t even appear to have read the essay he’s supposed to be responding to.
You might have noticed above that Yarvin describes me as ‘Byronic.’ While I am in fact a troubled but strikingly handsome Englishman with an acid wit and a love of open-air swimming, this isn’t what he’s getting at. He’s referring to George Gordon’s decision in 1823 to sail to Greece, fight with its revolutionaries against the Ottomans, catch a fever there, and die. This is the material for his entire concluding section. Western leftists, he says, are little Byrons—except we don’t actually go to fight and die. Our horizons are narrower. We just sit in our safe prosperous cities, egging on violent revolutionaries on the other side of the world. Sometimes we send money. Sometimes we lobby our governments for support. And the only effect of it all is to keep the war going, heap more and more suffering on the people we claim to care about. Yarvin is very clear that I’m one of these people. If the conflict ends on his terms, he writes, ‘no toddlers will die. But Sam Kriss will no longer get his colonial rocks off. He will not get to feel like Lord Byron.’
Here is what I wrote in my piece.
There’s a certain kind of discourse I’ve come to really, really hate: the way some people go into rhapsodies over violent Palestinian resistance. The courage! The heroism! Put a red triangle in your display name; hoot at videos of rockets exploding against a Merkava’s Trophy APS like you’re watching the football. Isn’t it thrilling? Isn’t it fun to root for your team? Everyone secretly wants to swoon over men in uniform with big guns, even leftists… Palestinian resistance [is] not beautiful. It’s not inspiring. It’s desperate and futile and sad.
I have genuinely no idea how you can read this passage and conclude that this Sam Kriss guy sure does love to get his colonial rocks off by supporting violent struggles abroad.
It’s possible that Yarvin simply failed to make it to the end of the piece. After all, it’s pretty long. He read the part where I go after Israel, but then he got distracted by something on his phone, and even though he kept on meaning to pick it up again, he never did. Happens to all of us. Except—in his response, Yarvin directly instructs his readers to read the whole piece. ‘It is worth it!’ he says. (Substack tells me that so far, exactly 95 of his over 39,000 subscribers have followed his advice and clicked through. That’s 0.24%. Apparently they’re not a very engaged bunch. I expect mine to do better.) So we have to assume he’s read it. But if he’s read it, and if he knows how to read, then why is he accusing me of saying the precise opposite of what I actually say?
It’s not escaped my attention that Yarvin has made this argument before. He did his whole routine about how the concern of Western leftists actually prolongs the war back in November last year. Being a latter-day Renaissance man, he has a well-rehearsed line on every subject—and it’s not always an uninteresting line! But all he has is that line. He can only repeat it, whether or not it’s even remotely relevant. The gizzard convulses, the beak snaps open, and out comes this week’s stream of vulture puke.
But enough about me. What about our actual topic, the war in Gaza? How well does he understand that?
You might remember that what we’re arguing over here is Yarvin’s claim that ‘if Israel could install a technical device on its bombs that would prevent them from killing civilians, it instantly would.’ I said that this is not true, and that Israel is deliberately targeting and killing civilians in Gaza. Yarvin maintains that no, it really is true, and therefore he must believe that Israel is not deliberately targeting and killing civilians in Gaza. This should be a simple thing to argue. But he doesn’t! Instead, he says that Israel is comparatively less bloodthirsty than the armies of the past.
If we merely imagine Israel with the same affinity for macabre war trophies, for instance, felt by the US military in the Pacific Theater—not to mention our knack for “strategic bombing” on the Giulio Douhet pattern—we are in a totally different world. An Israeli officer sends Netanyahu a letter opener carved from an Amalekite armbone. “This is the sort of gift I like to get,” says the Prime Minister, and lights his cigarette.
Well, it’s true that Israeli soldiers are not taking body parts as trophies—that we know of. Instead, again and again, they film themselves rummaging through Palestinian women’s underwear drawers and wearing their lingerie. This is frankly much weirder than keeping a skull, but yes, I’ll admit, less gruesome. Still, some eagle-eyed readers might have noticed that the question in play is not, in fact, ‘are Israeli soldiers collecting more or less gruesome trophies than those collected by US soldiers during the Pacific War?’ It’s ‘does the Israeli military deliberately target and kill civilians in Gaza?’ This is not a compare-and-contrast essay! It doesn’t matter if things were worse in the Pacific War or the Mongol sack of Baghdad. There might be fantastic massacres happening on alien worlds right now, entire solar systems blinking out, dark weapons tearing gashes through the fabric of reality itself. It does not pertain. We’re talking about Gaza. The answer is either yes or no.
Israel’s stated doctrine is to maintain deterrence by responding massively and disproportionately to any attack. This includes the targeting of civilian infrastructure. It’s called the Dahiya Doctrine, after a neighbourhood in Beirut that was practically levelled in the 2006 war with Hezbollah. Over the course of that war, Israel bombed power stations, transformers, water and sewage treatment plants, schools, hospitals, and nearly 150,000 homes. Yarvin had never heard of this doctrine before, but he finds it very exciting. ‘Sounds like a very sensible system,’ he says, ‘which I entirely endorse.’ (I guess in his mind, it doesn’t equate to targeting civilians. Do you need electricity? Do you really need water?) This is on the basis of a quote he found on Wikipedia, in which Gadi Eisenkot says that the doctrine involved evacuating the civilian population and then striking Hezbollah targets. It’s amazing, it really is: Yarvin knows not to trust the newspapers or the universities or any other organ of the nefarious Cathedral—but as soon as an Israeli major-general makes some vague noises about evacuating civilians, his ears prick up and his tail starts wagging and he’s the loyallest golden retriever you ever did see. I know you’re in love—but Curtis, at least try to think about this. Consider some basic facts. Beirut is in Lebanon, which as you might remember is not the same country as Israel. Israel can bomb Beirut, but they do not control Beirut. They are powerless to evacuate its civilian population. As strange as it may seem, the lovely Gen Eisenkot is not being honest with you. The IDF did not evacuate civilians from Dahiya. Instead, they simply decided that anyone living in the neighbourhood was, a priori, a Hezbollah target. Then they fired on anything that moved.
That was 2006. The war then was sparked by a Hezbollah raid that killed three soldiers and kidnapped two others. In the current war, the IDF is responding to the worst attack on its population in the entire history of the State of Israel. More than a thousand Israelis died in a single day. Israel’s stated policy is a massive, disproportionate retaliation against civilian targets. What do you think they’d do? There is an enormous body of evidence that shows Israeli forces killing clearly unarmed Palestinian civilians, over and over again. It has been caught on camera. It has been broadcast on TV. Here’s just one. Meanwhile, Gaza is experiencing an artificial famine, one that Israel could alleviate at any moment, but chooses not to. But Yarvin still thinks it’s totally inconceivable that civilian suffering might be the goal here. He has unilaterally disengaged from the real world.
If you’re arguing for a fantasy, you will inevitably end up saying some very silly things. When Yarvin decides to dispute my claim that Israel is ‘systematically’ killing the inhabitants of Gaza, he puts forward two arguments. One is a thought experiment based on the yellowness quotient of a block, the other is a thought experiment based on the sizes of different fruits. Powerful stuff! ‘How about some logic?’ he begins. I’m such a foppish littérateur, you see, that I simply can’t understand tough left-brain stuff like the yellowness or otherwise of a block. But within a few short lines, logic seems to run dry:
Intuitively, if we compare the Israeli willingness to inflict civilian harm in Gaza today, to the American willingness in Raqqa in 2016, to the British willingness in 1945, to the Germans willingness in 1943, we are comparing a grape to a blueberry to a cantaloupe to a watermelon.
Ah! I see! You have an intuition about this! Are you also getting some vibes? Is this what logic looks like? I’m afraid I don’t have any fruit-based metaphors of my own. But Seth Ackerman has looked at the actual numbers, instead of doing all his research at the greengrocer’s, and found that last year the IDF was exterminating the people of Gaza at 108% of the rate at which the Khmer Rouge exterminated the people of Cambodia. As of February 2024, it’s now dropped to a mere 42%. Less than half! What is everyone complaining about? I’m sure Yarvin would have no problem with only half of the Cambodian genocide happening to his hometown. After all, it’s not the Holocaust. Except, well, he does wear glasses…
These numbers are less fun, less intuitive, than Yarvin’s game of comparing the sizes of watermelons and grapes. Facts in general are, sadly, inelegant. It’s much nicer to float around with hypotheticals. This is Yarvin’s grand argument for why Israel is not to blame. He asks us to imagine what would happen if Israel had a free hand. No US State Department breathing down their necks. No protesters in the streets. No all-powerful Sam Kriss ruining their battle plans. What would they do? According to Yarvin, they would remove the population of Gaza, house them in a tightly policed enclave within Israel, and then wipe out Hamas in the now-depopulated strip. Afterwards, Gaza would be redeveloped as an Israeli settlement, but all its former residents would get a share in the project, so they would all become immensely rich, and instead of fighting Israel they’d all go and live lives of leisure in Dubai. Israel genuinely wants to create this rosy future. But they can’t. Because of woke.
No, really, this is what he says. I am not misrepresenting him. Read his piece. If you’re a careful reader, you might notice that he’s attempting to justify Israel’s intentions by reference to an entirely imaginary scenario he made up in his head. Apparently, I’m stopping this scenario from becoming real by caring too much about Gaza. But this is not an actual proposal! Absolutely zero politicians have signed up to the Curtis Yarvin Peace Plan. Instead, they keep talking about Amalek and Shechem. Despite this, and for reasons that seriously elude me, this is the second time he’s brought it up. He already described this precise scenario, back in November. (Don’t your readers get bored with all these repeat performances? Or am I the idiot for bothering to produce original material each time?) In my footnote, I pointed out that the IDF’s behaviour does not suggest that what they really want is to offer Gazans ‘equity in Rafael Advanced Defence Systems, so everyone can profit from their own houses being bombed, or whatever bullshit speculative notion Yarvin likes to cook up.’ And instead of responding to that critique, he just sort of… repeated his bullshit speculative notion again. Maybe he’s on autopilot. Shine a bright light in his eyes. See if the pupils contract.
Here’s another, less ambitious scenario. Unlike Yarvin’s, mine doesn’t require any sudden U-turns from the Global American Empire or my fellow all-powerful shtetlibs. Say Israel sweeps into north Gaza, instructs the civilian population to flee south, bombs the city flat, and battles Hamas for the ruins. All this is exactly what they actually did. But then, imagine that once Israel’s secured the north of Gaza, it invites the residents back in. Life will not be the same as before. They will be housed in shipping containers, whose doors will lock automatically at nightfall. But at least they’ll be housed. There will be plenty of food and water, and they will not be bombed. Kids can go to school again. Maybe some basic businesses can reopen. Eventually, who knows? Grozny has skyscrapers now. People like me will complain, of course—but then we were calling Gaza a giant prison camp anyway, so no change there. Israel could do this tomorrow. Antony Blinken would not stop them. But for some reason, this is not what they’ve elected to actually do. Strange! Instead, Israeli forces seem to instantly retreat from whatever territory they capture. In the last few days, they’ve withdrawn again from al-Shifa Hospital. This time, they left it full of decomposing bodies. Some of those bodies were reportedly wearing handcuffs.
I think my account of things—that Israel has no political goals in Gaza, but is deliberately massacring its civilian population to restore deterrence against future attacks—adequately explains the contours of reality. Yarvin’s account—that Israel wants to give every Gazan equity in their own displacement, but it can’t because the global ruling class is made of adjunct professors and freelance journalists—does not. It doesn’t even touch reality. It wibbles away on an entirely separate plane.
Yarvin has a model of who I am, as a person on the left, and what I believe. When it’s time to argue with me, he doesn’t respond to my actual work; he vomits up a standard response to the model. But his model is hilariously wrong. He also has a model of what Israel’s aims and methods are. When it’s time to settle an empirical question—‘is Israel deliberately targeting and killing civilians in Gaza?’—he doesn’t respond to what’s actually happening; once again, he responds to the model. And his model is, once again, hilariously wrong.
Yarvin also has a model of a future society: a monarchical one, in which power is not distributed through a bureaucracy, but concentrated in a rigid command structure. He calls this the ‘next regime,’ and he assures us it will be much, much better than this one. He’s worked it all out in his head. He’s predicted all its possible incentives. ‘It would have no reason to be unbenevolent,’ he says. Based on his prior performance, I have some doubts.
The second part of my argument was that what’s happening in Gaza directly indicts Yarvin’s ideology. The IDF in Gaza has all the major features of his next regime. It controls a whole host of outcomes for the strip’s population, but nobody even pretends that they get to exert any control in the other direction. If it wants to feed them, they are fed. If it wants to kill them, they die. Families sheltering in Rafah are not consulted on which type of missile they would like to vaporise them. The armed Palestinian factions can do a little more to influence the IDF’s decisions, but in the end their power is severely limited by the disparity in arms. This is a monarchy. And even though Yarvin says monarchies have no reason to be unbenevolent, this one does not appear to be gently guiding the children of Gaza to wisdom and prosperity. Instead, it’s going on a killing spree.
Yarvin, naturally, disputes this. ‘Not at all!’ he says. ‘The IDF is responsible to the government of Israel, which is responsible to the US State Department, which is responsible to shitlibs and shtetlibs worldwide.’ (Again, a major plank of his belief system contends that the world is actually controlled by wine moms on Facebook. It’s very silly; we don’t need to go into it.) OK—so if an institution is ultimately responsible to a bureaucracy, then it’s no longer a monarchy, even if it has a monarchical relation to the people beneath it. Fine. But then we also get this:
In every organizational context in which the difference can be tested, monarchies massively outperform bureaucracies. Tesla is a monarchy. The California Department of Transportation is a bureaucracy. Imagine Caltrans trying to build an electric car. Now imagine Elon Musk in charge of California.
This is a very, very funny example for him to choose, because Tesla owes its entire existence to a state bureaucracy called the California Air Resources Board. Somehow, despite seeing the dread hand of the Regime everywhere, Yarvin fails to detect the halo of spook particles coming off Elon Musk. Which institution do you think is more responsible to the US Government, Tesla or the IDF? I think if Musk suddenly decided to send a fleet of Tesla drones to fire on civilian targets in, say, Bhutan, the US Government would make him stop. But while there are elements within the US Government that would like Israel to stop bombing Gaza, they have not managed to impose their will. So Yarvin’s in a bit of a bind here. Either a monarchy is still a monarchy if it’s responsible to a bureaucracy, in which case his preferred form of government is currently committing 0.42 Cambodian genocides. Or a monarchy is not a monarchy if it’s responsible to a bureaucracy, in which case his preferred form of government exists nowhere on the earth, and he is a utopian.
I don’t think Yarvin liked me calling him a utopian. It’s a word people on the right tend to lob at people on the left, not the other way round. But it’s exactly what he is. His only response to being correctly identified is a kind of instinctive ‘no u.’ He writes: ‘The way in which Kriss is like Fourier is that his systems all adapt human beings to their own beautiful logic, rather than being adapted for humans as their messy selves.’ What systems are those, Curtis? Which are my systems? Marxism-Leninism? International law? What on earth are you talking about? When left to my own devices, I mostly write about literature, dreams, and going on holiday. I’m not the one proposing to end the conflict in Gaza with charter cities. I’m not the one who claims to have designed the perfect form of government in his head. That’s you!
You might not believe me, but I really don’t have anything against Curtis Yarvin. I’m a product of the British private school system. For us, this routine disassembly of another person is a kind of sport. No animus. Some kids played rugby, some took up boxing, but I’m lanky and dyspraxic and I got really good at this instead. I guess in the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I did meet Yarvin once at a party. He was enjoyable company, once he’d stopped nervously lecturing on the Ford Foundation’s plot to synthesise the American and Soviet systems, and the conversation had moved on to more properly intellectual topics, like sex. Obviously I stand against everything he upholds, and vice versa. But I find his writing entertaining and I found him enjoyable company. I don’t see any particular reason to freak out about him.
As we’ve seen, lot of my comrades on the left do see a reason to freak out about Curtis Yarvin. They are worried by the mainstreaming of his reactionary, anti-democratic views. I think this is because a lot of my comrades on the left are incapable of thinking strategically. One of the most influential people on the far right has totally absconded from reality, and as a result his entire movement are busy thinking extremely silly thoughts. They’re waiting for an American Caesar. Currently, their best candidate for Caesar is Donald Trump, a fat man who eats hamburgers. They plan to usher in his imperium by holding dress-up parties in New York. They call themselves ‘dark elves.’ If this is what your political enemies are up to, why on earth would you try to stop them?
Anyway, at that party I told Yarvin that my girlfriend had been reading some of his old posts from the Mencius Moldbug days, the ones where he promises to crack your skull open and fiddle around in your brain until you see the world in a totally new way. I told him that her skull had remained strangely uncracked. He asked what her politics were. Left, I said, but not woke. That doesn’t exist, he said. Which sums it up, really. Of course he doesn’t think it exists; there’s no place for such a thing in his model. But the real world is very large, and it exists.