Break the Dam, Release the River
Set the questions free
1.
In The Lord of the Rings, my favourite historical documentary, a group of Ents and Huorns rise up against Saruman's Isengard. The Uruk-hai had left for Rohan, you see, so all that was left protecting Saruman were Orcs. And Orcs kinda suck. Saruman the tree killer, as one of the Ents called him, had left a major vulnerability unattended. In his arrogance, he did not take into account the fact that the great big dam nearby, the one holding back the river Isen, could very quickly become an ex-dam.
In one of the coolest scenes of the mov… I mean, documentary, Treebeard orders the rest of the leafy gang to “break the dam, release the river!” Just like that, Saruman the White, he who used to be important, he who was the first of the Istari/Wizards, the first emissary of the Valar sent to Middle Earth to help the Free Peoples of the World to counter Sauron, he who turned his back on the entire point of his existence, was defeated.
Saruman the White became nothing more than Saruman the tree killer.1
2.
The thousand year reich lasted 12 years.
3.
Dam-related metaphors and images have been with us for as long as we've had dams. Tolkien obviously loathed them. So do I. I wrote an entire chapter - and an article, and another one - on the successful attempt by activists in Lebanon in stopping the Bisri dam. They tend to be very bad at what they do, and one of the most inspiring moments in recent years has been witnessing the global indigenous-led efforts in releasing the rivers - like the Klamath.
4.
Dams have had this additional layer to them, one which we've seen manifested in the cultural sphere. They represent this need to stop the flow of something that feels inherently chaotic, out of control. Rivers are in flux. They're always changing. We tend to fear change.
5.
God is change. Octavia Butler said so, and Octavia Butler was always right.
6.
I don't know the history of dams everywhere, but I suspect that they have followed the same trajectory as the one I was involved in opposing in Lebanon. States like the USA and the USSR believed them to be a great way to store water and generate electricity. They also look big and impressive which must have felt appealing for the manly men who toxic-masculinity-ed the fuck out of the 20th century. My dam is bigger than yours.
7.
Back to the cultural sphere. This fear of change takes multiple forms. Crucially, change doesn't even have to be on the horizon for us to fear it. We may fixate on perceived changes as a way of avoiding real ones. For example, and this is totally unrelated to anything that is addressed in the points below, we may (fever) dream up an invasion by Radical Islam as a way of avoiding dealing with our own culpability in, say, a genocide or, say, our historical role in genocides or, say, us being cowards.
8.
Suzanne Schroter is the “founder and director of the Frankfurt Research Center on Global Islam.” She posted this meme on the Nazis’ favourite website, X.
We see a dam called Israel protecting Europe from Radical Islam.
9.
Don't think too much about what that actually looks like. You might conclude that slaughtering toddlers and starving them to death in Gaza doesn't feel very heroic.
Stick to the meme. Yell Deus Vult or something at your screen. There's plenty of German phrases you can use too if you're not one of those people pretending to know Latin.
10.
Replace ‘Global Islam’ with ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’, ‘Israel’ with ‘the Reich’ and ‘Europe’ with… actually you can keep it as ‘Europe.’
This starts feeling like something else we've seen.
10.
The book of the founder and director of the Frankfurt Research Center on Global Islam doesn't have correct Arabic on it. The letters are broken up, which is famously not how Arabic is written.
Germany has high standards for its experts.
11.
Eichmann liked to portray himself as an ‘expert’ on all things Judaism.
He was paid as the ‘expert.’ Other Nazis often sought his advice.
12.
Back to dams. We've seen these images before.
Europe is an island, a fortress, a little ol’ village in the mountain where Heidi lives with her heterosexual family and goes to church every Sunday while dancing with all of her neighbours because they're all on good terms with one another and they don't have Je.. I mean Muslims/Arabs/Africans ruining that idyllic picture that people like Susanne (fever) dream of.
13.
It's so annoying how untermenschen like the brown globalist man writing these words keep on ruining things.
14.
Why is Europe so barren in that image?2 Why is it that so many of Europe's self-appointed ‘defenders’ these days have such an ugly image of Europe?
They think they're imagining Europe as the Shire, but they act like it's Isengard.
They are in that tower. They imagine that the hoards are on their way.
What they've done instead is destroy the forest. If we destroy the forest, maybe the hoards won't come anymore?
Europe the White? Europe the tree killer.
15.
It's ironic, deeply ironic, but it remains true: the world's self-appointed Jewish state, Israel, is providing the easiest get out of jail free card for the Susannes of this world, with the ‘jail’ here being the duty to remember one's history and responsibility, the ‘jail’ Germany built for itself.
16.
They don't need to deal with the Jewish Question - European antisemitism - that they invented to deal with their own identity crisis, their own cowardice. They can just project all their traditional European reactionary impulses ‘over there,’ where that Palestinian baby lives.
Notes on Assadism, Zionism, Fascism and Hope
This essay does not end like it begins. I considered dividing it in two but ultimately decided to keep it as is. It starts with a discussion of what Assadism sought to do with the Palestinian cause, and it then goes into a broader exploration of the normalisation of fascism in the West today with a focus on how pro-Israel apologia in the age of the Gaza genocide is accelerating it. Finally, I end on a somewhat hopeful note in which I argue for reclaiming public memory, which requires the collective.
17.
The baby's existence is too inconvenient. The baby must die.
18.
Transferring antisemitic conspiracy theories about some kind of globalist movement or cabal unto anything else is still antisemitism.
Painting the Israeli genocide as a fight against Muslim globalists is still antisemitism.
19.
Why is it that all globalist conspiracy theories, no matter what they're about, almost always go back to blaming a Jewish man, Soros?
Let's write ‘Soros’ after Susanne's handle on X and see what comes up.
Shockingly, she seems to be attracting quite a few people who seem to be saying the quiet part out loud.
Oh look:
20.
“A network of left-wing NGOs” is a nicer way of writing that other phrase.
21.
Let's see what Susanne called her other book. Mein, dein, unser kulturkampf.
22.
Ok that's enough.
I for one am not going to let any German who supports the Israeli genocide in Gaza pretend like I don't know what they're doing here, like it wasn't their precious state that sought to perfect the industrialisation of mass murder, like it wasn't their glorious political culture that nearly eradicated a 1,000+ years of Jewish history in a few years.
23.
Germany needs to prove that it can last a couple of generations before doing or being involved in a genocide before it can be.
24.
The Israeli state is 77 years old. My Haifa-born grandfather died in his 80s.
The blockade of Gaza is 17 years old. Israel has killed on average 28 Palestinian children a day since the beginning of the genocide.
The genocide is 22 months old. The genocide is older than thousands of babies that Israel has already killed.
The Génocidaires Can Never Rest
The walls are closing in on the Israeli génocidaires, and this is just the beginning. Two IDF soldiers were briefly arrested in Belgium after the Hind Rajab Foundation filed a report documenting their roles in war crimes. While nowhere near enough, the precedent this is setting should not be underestimated. The higher the cost on the Israelis with blood on their hands, the better our chances at bringing that genocidal regime down.
25.
Part of why this genocide is not being read as a genocide by too many self-styled intellectuals is that it upends decades of European talking points designed to self-sooth.
26.
I repeat what I wrote in 2020: Europe can be a Fortress or it can be a Union. It cannot be both.
I'll add another layer. Fortress Europe can never exist. It is physically impossible. Therefore, the most immediate end result of the ongoing attempts to build it - with culture, with language, with guns, with robots - is the destruction of the European project itself.
Its defenders ought to realise that the enemy is not over there. The enemy is not those racialised untermenschen whose lives are flatted to fit a convenient story. The enemy is the people who insist on making that Europe's central story.
27.
A dam is destroyed from dry land.
The Israel dam in that meme can only be taken down by Europe because Europe is the one who built it.
28.
Beware. If the dam breaks a whole bunch of questions will have to be asked, and I know how scary those are.
29.
Fuck the reich
Yes I cheated because I obviously could not remember all of that. It's from the lord wiki https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Saruman
Credit to that friend who pointed that out. You know who you are.