Sundry Notes: July

The Other Nazi Olympic ritual, Israel & Identity Politics, and personal updates

Very often, I have many scattered thoughts which I want to write about but don’t want to turn into essays. I’ve decided to try collecting these in a monthly series, “Sundry Notes.” Here’s the second one.

I.

The Paris Olympic games are about to begin, and with it all manner of civic rituals designed to initiate those recurring events. Of course, there’s that most well-known and venerable torch relay and lighting, an “ancient” tradition first initiated not by the original Greeks but, by, well …

While the pageantry appeared to reprise a sacred ancient Greek tradition, the Olympic torch relay was actually a piece of modern political theater carefully scripted and paid for entirely by Nazi Germany.

The Nazi torch relay is hardly the only civic ritual that opens the games, however. A more crucial but less celebrated one has already begun in Paris, the “relocation” of thousands of homeless people:

The French government has put thousands of homeless immigrants on buses and sent them out of Paris ahead of the Olympics. The immigrants said they were promised housing elsewhere, only to end up living on unfamiliar streets far from home or flagged for deportation.

President Emmanuel Macron of France has promised that the Olympic Games will showcase the country’s grandeur. But the Olympic Village was built in one of Paris’s poorest suburbs, where thousands of people live in street encampments, shelters or abandoned buildings.

While that New York Times article focuses only on the homeless immigrants being transported, quite a few activist groups in Paris have made clear it’s not just immigrants, but all homeless people. The difference is that most of the French homeless citizens in Paris are being jailed, instead.¹

Lest you think that the Parisians have come up with this kind of tactic, you should know that this is one of the truest modern Olympic rituals. I lived briefly in Vancouver, Canada, just before the Winter Olympics there, and witnessed much of this happening. Just before I left, there’d been quite a bit of debate over one particular plan: putting all the homeless on barges (during the winter, yes) during the event.

Arresting and relocating homeless people was also part of the opening ceremonies for London’s 2012 games. Well, also for Rio de Janeiro in 2016. And before them, Beijing did this in 2008. Oh, and also Athens in 2004. And I think you get the point.

And guess who we have to thank for initiating this civic tradition of relocating “undesirables” away from cities before the Olympics? Well, the same folks who brought us the Olympic torch rally:

Before Berlin hosted the 1936 games, the city’s Roma population were arrested, interned and relocated to a prison camp in the distant suburb of Berlin-Marzahn. 

There’s also something else you should know about this. It isn’t just that the Olympics is preceded by mass social cleansing, but also that the Olympics actually creates more homelessness.

The neighborhoods that find themselves in the path of pre-Olympics bulldozers are almost always populated by low-income families. The neighborhoods that replace them are often see significant reductions in public housing that is replaced with higher-end homes geared toward people with larger incomes.

The Olympic games are sold to cities as a way to force the “renewal” of some of the poorest neighborhoods where property prices are cheapest. Again, I witnessed this in Vancouver, where the homeless population exploded as low rent apartment buildings were razed for the Olympic village. And that’s also why the Paris Olympics were sited in Seine-Saint-Denis: it’s one of the poorest banlieuex of the city, and the one with the highest immigrant population.

Of course, anyone who knows the history of capitalism and enclosure is already aware that this is its core engine. As much as many resist this recognition, the explosion of homeless populations in every urban area of the world is the repetition of the very thing which started capitalism in the first place. People are forced from the land where they live and displaced into cities, which then swell with the poorest and therefore most desperate of peoples. These masses then become a “reserve labor force” which needs to be managed through social and political means until the capitalists find a way to exploit them. In the meantime, they put a downward pressure on workers who become terrified of ever becoming homeless too, meaning they’re more willing to work for lower wages and accept more social control.

The problem for the capitalists — and, well, also all of us — is that it won’t be possible to exploit the labor of this reserve force. We’ve reached a limit on how many factories we “need” and therefore how many workers are needed. So, this surplus worker population can only be shunted around from one place to another until a point that there’s no where else to move them.

And what happens then? Well, something like this.

II.

“Everyone is losing their fucking minds right now. But maybe in a few years they’ll find them again. We just need to wait.”

That’s what I told my gym trainer the other day, the only thing I could possibly think to say. She was telling me about friends of hers who’ve suddenly become ideologically captured by some really quite frightening ideas. She’s younger than I am, and not nearly so politically engaged, and this kind of thing is quite new to her.

I’m not sure how helpful my response was, because the optimism it contains felt a little hollow when I said it. The ideological deathscape has really gotten absurd right now, and people are really losing their fucking minds, and I’m not actually sure everyone will find them again.

It’s not helping that the definitions of things are being changed so fast that you cannot keep up anymore. Take, for example, “antisemitic.” My memory’s good enough to remember when there was a clear difference between criticism of Israel and hatred of Jews, and when “Nazi” actually meant something. Sure, there were always extremists, especially on the far-right, who were constantly insisting “Jew = Israel,” which was also what many Zionists were insisting. But these were the ideological fringes, and only Christian, Jewish, and Islamic fundamentalists seemed to fall for that.

What or who is “antisemitic” or “neo-Nazi” is a constantly moving target, just like who or what is “racist” or “transphobic” constantly shifts. The Azov battalion in Ukraine, for example, whose members wear Nazi symbols and speak of global Jewish conspiracies, are most definitely “not Nazis,” we’re told. On the other hand, as I was told by quite a few social media users responding to this picture I posted on Instagram a few weeks ago, standing anywhere near a Palestinian flag in a photo makes me a Nazi:

I’ll tell you a bit about that photo, and the day I took it. You might maybe know about the general bans on pro-Palestinian protests in Germany. Luxembourg, on the other hand, has no official ban, but there were most definitely more police there than there were protesters. In fact, there haven’t really been many protests in support of Palestine here, and that day I’d just happened to stumble upon one of the very few that people were brave enough to hold.

I’ve heard that, in other places, protests have been more frequent, more massive, and often times filled with rather angry and even openly anti-Jewish rhetoric. This one was none of those. I milled around listening to the speeches given by the communist organizers — several of whom identified as Jews — and nothing of what was said conflated Israel’s actions with Jewishness.

This is a line everyone who hasn’t lost their fucking minds yet needs to hold. Israel does not equal Jew, nor does Jew equal Israel. Both critics of Israel and supporters of Israel must insist on this fiercely, against all the pressures that would try to conflate the two.²

This is also what should have happened with all other identity politics. The left is particularly at fault here. Believing “whites” have inherent traits which make them oppressors or “blacks” have inherent epigenetic trauma is of the very same category of thinking as believing Jews have an inherent “birthright” to Israel or, conversely, have inherent personality traits which make them greedy.

The left really should have known better, especially since anti-communism in Europe, the UK, and the US was often coded with anti-Jewish rhetoric. Remember, Hitler himself saw Communism as a Jewish disease, and “Bolshevik” even still often means “Jew” as much as it means “commie.” A lot of the worst rhetoric against Bernie Sanders followed this same pattern, where it was impossible to tell whether the speaker even knew that not all communists were Jewish, or that not all Jews were communist.

And of course there’s another problem here that has nothing to do with the left. The political ideology of Zionism was itself born from a belief in racial difference. I’ve covered this elsewhere, especially how moving Jews to Palestine was seen as a way of bettering the genetic stock of “degenerate” European Askenazim by mixing it with Mediterranean Sephardim:

This modern sense of being distinct, different, and separate from all other peoples was what led so many early Zionists not only to accept but also perpetuate race-science in their own political dreaming. Perversely, eugenics and the language of “degeneracy,” both of which led to a mass extermination campaign against them, were core founding ideas of Zionism itself:

According to Joachim Doron, Central European Zionists embraced the perception of Jews as a race, since it allowed them to replace religion, both as a source of legitimacy and as an integrative force, with a scientifically sanctioned notion of common biology as the ground on which to base the national identity (1980: 404). Since the rise of the Zionist movement coincided with the growing popularization of eugenics, it is hardly surprising that Zionist men of science - most of whom were either born or educated in Central Europe - appropriated the eugenic idiom to describe the Jews as a race undergoing a process of 'degeneration', and the national project as a path toward ‘regeneration’ and 'racial improvement'

Race theory was woven into Israel from the very beginning, and that’s not something easily unwoven. But it’s also written into almost all politics now, whether left, right, or otherwise. We absolutely must undo this before everyone loses more than just their fucking minds.

III.

I’ve not written much online lately. I’m still doing plenty of writing, but most of it is for larger projects. Also, quite a bit of book editing, and video editing, and accounting, and good gods quite a lot of other similar stuff.

Why? Well, I think I can announce some of this now. The publisher I’ve managed and run for the last nine years is about to expand significantly. We’ll be collaborating with another long-time publisher in a venture called Sul Books, named for the chthonic goddess at Bath more widely known by her Latinized name, Sulis.

What this means is quite a lot, and quite a lot of work. One of the things I’ve needed to do in preparation for all of this is upgrading and redesigning the website for Ritona Books, a process that took about 60 hours of work. It needed to be done anyway, because we’ve decided to change the way we offer our courses.

In a few days, you’ll see an announcement here about those courses, including a very popular one I haven’t had the time to instruct for several years now. That’s the course based on my book on Marxism, All That is Sacred Is Profaned. It will be made available 15 July, along with Alley Valkyrie’s Land: Loss & Reconnection and Asa West’s Five Principles of Green Witchcraft.

Founding subscribers of From The Forests of Arduinna will get a special discount code that will allow them to take both of my courses (Being Pagan will be available a few weeks later) for free. And everyone will be able to take these courses at a discount during July and August. So, look for that announcement.

And in the meantime, here are two more pictures of me, now at the half-way mark of my recent training regimen. I’ve dropped seven kilos now since I started it, with another five to go, and I’ll write about how I’ve done it soon.

Be always well,

—Rhyd

1. Last time I was in Paris (about 8 months ago), only about half of the homeless people I saw camping on the street were of apparent foreign origin. The rest were clearly French, usually older men, and typical of the kinds of homeless people you see sleeping on the streets in US cities.

2. You maybe know this already, but this is also the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish position. They see the nationalization of the Jewish people as a great sin against the Messianic promises of their god, and are often the most vocal critics of Israeli policy against the Palestinians.