"Death! Death! To the IDF!"

And other exercises in self-defeating rage

If you’re in the habit of keeping up with current affairs in British politics, especially those affairs concerned with the bandying around of radical rhetoric from the safety of an elevated platform, or are interested in the underbelly of British independent music, you might have noticed a radical two-piece going by the name of Bob Vylan¹ has risen to an unusual level of fame—especially considering their aesthetic creation and recreation centres around the natural meeting point of grime and punk rock. As I’m sure you’re well aware, my reader, the audience crossover for a band of this kind and for the self-indulgent musings of the author is practically a perfect circle. Their history is, presumably, as well-known to you as the broad strokes of S. K.’s life’s work; therefore, we will pass over it in silence.

Lead singer Bobby Vylan in the throes of a performance. Source.

However, there is an uncomfortable rumbling coming from the grime-punk scene with which I am oh so familiar: indeed, the shrill and indignant voices of respectability have invoked the irony of liberal modernity to propel this unusual two-piece into the popular discourse and make their at-first-witty-but-subsequently-annoying “punny” name a matter of reflective disorientation. It is, as the eye-catching title alludes, a call for violence against the Israeli Defence Force:

As noted above, the response to this “breaking through” moment, where a new force of personality breaks into the comfortable patterns of modernity and expresses something altogether impolite for the ongoing conversation, both pro and contra, has been unbearably shrill and twee. The reactionary-to-conservative crowd has set up in its indignity and pearl-clutching, identifying yet another radical act of antisemitism, this time more antisemitic than the last and less antisemitic than the next; the liberal-to-left crowd has set up in its indignity and pearl-clutching, identifying yet another figurehead onto which they can ascribe some level of virtue (whilst also dismissing the bourgeois notion of moral values, etc.)—leading to an altogether disappointing reaction to what is essentially an artist expressing a message.

As with all the over-educated and under-socialised, whether right or left, the possibility that the message could ever teach us something² is little more than a trivial notion for an academic to broach in a paper published ten years into the future, to middling-to-satisfactory reviews from the five or six people who read it. No, my reader, there’s something amiss here that is brought about by the desire for outrage, the will to lose oneself.

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Once again, my reader, we turn to the BBC:

The prime minister has condemned UK punk duo Bob Vylan for urging “death” to Israeli troops in what he called “appalling hate speech”.

Glastonbury Festival organisers have also said they were “appalled” after frontman rapper Bobby Vylan led chants of “free, free Palestine” and “death, death to the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]”.

In a statement, Sir Keir Starmer said the BBC had questions to answer over its live broadcast of the group's performance on Saturday…

He said: “There is no excuse for this kind of appalling hate speech… I said that Kneecap should not be given a platform and that goes for any other performers making threats or inciting violence.”

The prime minister is the latest in a string of cabinet ministers to denounce Bobby Vylan's comments in the 24 hours since the group appeared at Glastonbury.

Directly after the set, a government spokesperson said Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy had pressed BBC boss Tim Davie for an urgent explanation of the broadcaster's vetting process.³

This entire controversy, by which I mean the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, shouldn't be a mystery to you, my reader. Unless you have the convenient excuse of escaping away into the wilderness for the past 40 days and 40 nights 20 months, you will have likely been exposed to the atrocities that rain down upon Palestinian children and act as the objective collision of our collective moral failure to intercede with an ongoing genocide. There are a number of Christian responses to this, each more academic and detached than the last, that I am sure that an academic and detached crowd would enjoy engaging with polemically; however, that’s the business of a serious thinker and not the business of the author here. Instead, we shall take a step back, to elucidate what happens on the ground that leads us to these situations—only through reflection can we identify the role of repetition in the creation of “the Crowd”.

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A history of the ongoing Israeli crisis and/or the international popular reaction against it would be inappropriate here. My point isn’t to dig in and illustrate the ongoing particularities of some particular way of life, but rather sketch out the backdrop onto which our current crisis amongst crises emerges—and besides, if you have merely engaged with me, my reader, simply to set ideological flames alight, I presume that there is some particular source which adheres piously to your desired position and any possible suggestion I would make would fall on deaf ears. As such, we leave that to one side and set to identifying the swelling tide of “the Crowd” in the newest controversy amongst controversies.

Once upon a time, there had been concerted efforts by a small but vocal faction to boycott, defund, and sanction Israel by the fittingly named BDS Movement. Mirroring the social pressure politics of the South African apartheid, the movement’s goals—or, at the very least, initial goals—were to apply social pressure to the Israeli government for the ongoing הפרדה policies that separated Israelis and Palestinians, on the whole, into two different groups living within the greater area. This movement, although a “reasonable” and “respectable” face of protest, quickly found that it was identified as anti-semitic and sympathetic actors, supposedly free to engage in the operation of their business as they should please, were barred from participating in BDS action.⁴ Having established a seemingly “reasonable” face of protest, it was quickly turned into the object of a pro-Israeli campaign to identify potential BDS contributors as participating in a movement to harm Jews on the grounds that they are Jews—straightforward anti-semitism.

Needless to say, this pleased some and displeased others. State governments with alliances with the state of Israel found themselves back in the driving seat with a tactical weapon which has, on the whole, been very successfully wielded: to oppose Israel or Israel’s actions in this manner would be tantamount to anti-semitic attack and, therefore, immoral and unacceptable. While not everyone may have been convinced by this particular turn of rhetoric, invoking a counter-moral charge against the morally-laden language of the BDS movement allowed for a kind of “settling of the debate” in its most dangerous temperatures and, then, turning down the heat overall on the inter- and intra-state perceptions of Israeli-Gazan relations. The issue in these identifications of victimising language is that moral language, and especially the misuse of moral language, has an increasingly ironic effect on the antagonising party—to invoke the moral wrongness of the other is to invoke their ire at the same time, especially if one doesn’t “settle the score” outright, so to speak.

When calls for boycotting were identified as antisemitic, this created a rupture in the ranks of the malcontents: no longer was there a merely “reasonable” faction that stood in front of a baying crowd, gaping maw agog and ready to set to its omniconsumptive desires, but rather a blank whole in this loose and easily fractured communal effort that introduced a dangerous “nothingness” to proceedings—beneath them, these plucky malcontents found an empty space into which they could move. The dizziness of possibility, dangerously realised by a collective.

Whether the establishment now interacted with the mildly concerned academics, book club enthusiasts, and librarians of the radical tide⁵ or with the out-of-control anarchists and left liberal contingents that did stray dangerously into antisemitic rhetoric, the differences in the “point of contact” were reduced to a nub, a flaccid simulcra that impressed no one—the legal protections for protest had been eroded and the sweeping away of the “reasonable” mouthpiece of the revolution⁶ in the name of erosion had led to the ironical situation where, whether the particular agent was acting antisemitically or not, the only expression of the malcontents was funneled into “the Crowd” in its extra-legal vigour. As the temperature is turned up by the erosion and closing off of modes for legal expression, the “unveiling” of one's possibility because a short, sharp stab in the arm for the rising extreme nature that sits within the now eroded and closed off block.

“Reasonable protest”, when it becomes a political anathema, is then exposed for the very “paper money” it is: of course they would only allow this as it thrives on the inaction of the “reasonable”, the collective head-nodding and complacency of the over-educated and under-socialised, the nihilistic injection of “common sense” to quell the dangerously-driven and put the breaks on their dangerously-driven pursuits of becoming “the Crowd”. The “one”, das Man, is now released from his binds and, bounding on the shoulders of his nihilistic collective, sets to climbing Mount Olympus. As in the Greek stories of old, it appears that these lesser gods of “reasonable” government will find that the overly utilitarian, hive-minded actions of the aforementioned baying maw. Having stepped out from either the nihilism of idealising and despairing or the mass conformity of “the social order”, there was a new potential for a new movement that would draw a greater contingent of the malcontents together in a more forceful point of the spear.

Now, my reader, this is where we find ourselves: at the point prior to the lunge into crisis⁷. Whereas only “the ethical”, e.g., academics, Marxists, Christian international aid organisations with a chip on their shoulder, had once raised the flag against the crisis through the appropriate channels, now we find that “the aesthetes” have joined the mainstream protest in the full view of the world and set to grasp dominance over their inhibited ethically-minded counterparts. A critical factor in the seizing of power by “the aesthetic” is the aesthete’s rather poor attention span: they, by nature, demand a sign of something or other and the display of power. Having emerged from the obscurity and have been placed into the spotlight, the Western aesthete, a product of the consumerist society in which he was produced, cannot resist:

i) The call for dominance and intervention, calling on the object of their protest to take immediate, direct action towards their desired goals, and

ii) Attacking their complicity and possible hypocrisy within the ranks as they attempt to “kill the new Adam” that they are called to become.⁸

This is not a condemnation of these individuals, of course, no matter how much it might have sounded like one. It is the simple recognition, a description, that “the aesthetic” qua Kierkegaardian sphere is noted for its insecurity, its habit of abandoning old projects in order to pursue the new “interesting”—the danger of “the aesthetic” is its demand for a show of power, witnessable evidence that they can affirm, an external “pull” that sates their desires. Have we now reached this point? Will “the Crowd” gain control over the “respectable” modes of protest? Does the Christian have anything to do with this at all? We might suppose that there will be no further developments from this aside from the rise in notoriety for a particular band and the continued existence of a genocide on our periphery.

But, maybe, there is a chance, a distinct risk, that “the Crowd” might become useful in clearing away the immoral by immoral means. The danger of removing the “reasonable” option from the mouth of the inert is that it allows the “one”, das Man, to slip in unnoticed.

“This inert crowd that understands nothing itself and has nothing it wants to do, this gallery-public, tries now to pass the time, indulging in the fancy that all that anyone does happens just so as to give it something to chat about.”⁹

Now that you have understood the aesthetic, turn to the ethical-religious:

1. Note: no relation to Robert Zimmerman of folk guitar and nasal mumbling or electric guitar and nasal-ier mumbling fame.

2. And, note, my reader, I’m not committing to say that it can—simply noting that the idea possibly hasn’t even occurred to our secular front pew dwellers.

3. Starmer criticises 'appalling' Bob Vylan IDF chants, Adam Hale, Zahra Fatima, & Sam Francis

4. UK public bodies banned from imposing their own boycotts against foreign countries, gov.uk Press Release, 19th June 2023

5. Or, in short, the Marxists.

6. Or, in short, the controlled opposition.

7. Of course, my reader, please understand that I mean on a divorced, foreign level and not at the ground level for Israelis and Palestinians.

8. “Toward a Kierkegaardian Understanding of Hitler, Stalin, and the Cold War”, C. Bellinger, Foundations of Kierkegaard's Vision of Community: Religion, Ethics, and Politics in Kierkegaard, p. 225, ed. G. B. Connell and C. S. Evans

9. Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age–A Literary Review, p. 84, S. Kierkegaard