A culture of innocence, part two

Truth is that which hurries on the break-up of the colonialist regime; it is that which promotes the emergence of the nation; it is also all that protects the natives, and ruins the foreigners. In this colonialist context there is no truthful behaviour; and the good is quite simply that which is evil for ‘them’. Thus we see the primary Manichaeism which governed colonial society is preserved intact during the period of decolonization; that is to say that the settler never ceases to be the enemy, the opponent, the foe that must be overthrown.
Franz Fanon, Les damnées de la terre

Last month’s meditation in this space on the media’s black-and-white vision of a world divided into the good and the bad, the innocent and the guilty, victims and victimizers (see “A culture of innocence” in The New Criterion of April, 2025) was not yet set in type — in fact, the copy had been filed only an hour or two earlier — when President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine provided an even better example than that of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass of the operation of the culture of innocence. I’ll explain what I mean presently, but let me first return to Mayor Bass for a moment.

Readers will remember that she, much criticized for having been out of the country when wildfires devastated much of her city, sought in an interview with Fox News to avoid any culpability for the fires by presenting herself as their victim, alongside those who had lost their homes or businesses. Any normal politician, if there are any such anymore, would have seen at once what a bad look this was for someone wishing to recommend herself to Los Angeles voters, most of whom must have known real victims of the fires, if they were not victims themselves. But Ms Bass is one of those big city Democratic mayors who has risen to her present eminence not out of any demonstration of administrative competence, but principally by virtue of belonging to certified victim groups.

If she herself and pretty much everybody else saw that her principal qualification for office resides in her victimhood, it was perfectly understandable that she should be unwilling to yield the precedence in suffering to more privileged victims, even when they have lost everything. She belongs to a political tendency founded upon an assurance that half the world has always and everywhere victimized the other half and that she, by identifying herself as one of the victimized (or, like the media, as a champion of the victimized), therefore belongs to the party of innocence in its eternal warfare against their guilty oppressors.

Ultimately, of course, this kind of thinking comes from Karl Marx who located a quasi-divine innocence in the early industrial-age working classes, which he called “the proletariat.” For Marx, the proletariat were the chosen people of History — chosen by History in loco Dei, to effect the historically inevitable overthrow of bourgeois democracy and capitalist exploitation — in which cause the proletariat could do no wrong. Because History can do no wrong.

Even in Marx’s day, however, “the proletariat” was proving to be a slippery concept. The class structure in so-called “capitalist” countries was maddeningly fluid. The proletariat, in other words, wouldn’t stand still to enjoy their immiserated but, paradoxically. also privileged status as the agents of History but kept wandering off into other classes, or in the direction of some indeterminate class that didn’t fit into the neat Marxist model at all.

It therefore became incumbent upon the intellectuals who would be Marx’s latter day followers to find some new class of holy innocents, some honorary proletarians, as it were, to step into the breach created by the proletarian diaspora and take their place as History’s darlings. A signal example is that of Franz Fanon in the passage quoted above. For Fanon, The “settler” is guilty by definition, guilty of being a settler, just as the colonized are innocent simply by virtue of having been colonized. Anything that the latter does to kill or otherwise eliminate the former from his position of dominance is good; similarly, anything that the former does to defend himself or his family against even the most appalling barbarities committed by the latter is bad.

Such, pretty obviously, is the dialectical logic behind the revolt of America’s privileged youth — most recently against attempts to deport the pro-Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil — at our most prestigious universities against what they see as those universities’ implication in the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza. But there is something else at work here of which we need to take notice, and that is the assumption among these young people that the fight of those they call “the Palestinians” (as if the Jews were not Palestinians too) against the Jewish state is in some exigent sense their fight and that, therefore, like them, they may perform any act that seems tactically advisable without prejudice to their own innocence.

Their advocacy on behalf of the Hamas terrorists, that is, is also on their own behalf. It is a bid for admission into the most privileged class of all, next to which the Ivy League itself is but a paltry thing: that of the intellectual gate-keepers who get to decide which aspirants belong to the revolutionary vanguard of the innocent and which do not and who, therefore, themselves partake in full measure of the chosen ones’ innocence. Like the colonized of Franz Fanon’s theory, they can do no wrong so long as they are on History’s side.

During the last century there was plenty of evidence of what comes of this kind of thinking. Also writing in these pages last month, Gary Saul Morson quoted Czesław Miłosz on the Communist conceit of “History” as the inevitable and therefore innocent perpetrator of revolutionary atrocities:

The sense that it isn’t I but someone else
Performing these deeds of mine.
So that to break someone’s neck is a trifle.

Breaking someone’s neck does seem a bit of a trifle too, compared to burning someone alive, which is what today’s pampered Hamas apologists have got to defend as the handiwork of their good friend History:

It is the 21st century and we are searching among ash for the remains of Jews. Following decades of the cry, ‘Never Again’, humanity once more found itself foraging in the blackened remains of a building for the incinerated remnants of the Jews who lived there. This detail from the new UK parliamentary report on the barbarism of 7 October should chill the blood of everyone who reads it. For it is 7 October’s clearest echo, among thousands of clear echoes, of the Nazi atrocities of the last century. This report leaves no doubt: 7 October was more than terrorism, more than a war crime – it was a savage rupturing of human civilisation itself.

That’s Brendan O’Neill of Spiked Online putting it in the starkest terms. And he’s exactly right. Civilization depends on the assumption of personal agency and therefore personal responsibility for observing the elementary rules that allow people to live together in communities not perpetually at war with each other. For the revolutionary, however, “civilization” has never been anything but a mask behind which lies the hidden colonialist — or capitalist, or imperialist, or white, or patriarchal, or heterosexual or cis-gender — oppressor.

Yet the actual murderers, rapists, torturers and hostage-takers are not usually the ones who plead the Will of History as an excuse for their actions. Pre-civilized societies don’t recognize any need thus to justify themselves. It’s their sympathizers in what remains of the civilized West who have reasoned themselves into overlooking such terrible trifles committed by their revolutionary allies of the Third World. These have had the wit to align their aims with the mental model of the neo-Marxist left, whose adherents dominate Western universities, media and government, though they themselves are so far confining themselves to burning Teslas rather than Jews.

Those two forms of revolutionary violence are not morally equivalent but both are among the things that the rupture of civilization and of civilized standards tend to produce — and both readily find their apologists among the once-civilized when they present themselves as the work of History’s revolutionary army of innocents. Our revolutionary elites have just enough left of the habits of civilization inherited from pre-revolutionary times not to glory in the burning of cars as the Hamas terrorists gloried in their burning of Jews on October 7, but late night comedians are thought to be very clever fellows by their peers for giving a nod and a wink to this latest and very American version of left terrorism.

Civilization ultimately depends on an appeal to reason. To reason effectively against something you first have to understand the reasons for it. Otherwise how can you hope to show that those reasons are unsound or inadequate to demonstrate what they purport to demonstrate? But our intellectual left, taught by such neo-Marxist masters as Franz Fanon to regard the putative oppressor class as being without any reason, apart from the perpetuation of its own power, no longer need to bother with old-fashioned reasoning. Now they reason only with curses and insults — or, like the Tesla burners, Molotov cocktails and AK-47s.

I first wrote about the style of argument arising out of the culture of innocence in connection with Lee Siegel’s Why Argument Matters (Yale University Press) three years ago (see “Reality Check” in The New Criterion of June, 2022). Mr Siegel, you will no doubt remember, hailed the consignment of reason and logic in forensic combat to the Marxian ash heap of history in favor of mere existential assertion: something like Luther’s “Here I stand; I can do no other” but without the 95 Theses. (Also without “So help me God.”). But my criticism of this view was not just because I took a different one. It seemed to me that the difference between the new idea of “argument” — as Mr Siegel, seemingly schooled by Twitter trolls, still wished to call it — and the old is precisely the difference between barbarism and civilization, which entails civility. The clue is in the name.

Since then, the quality of public debate has continued its long decline. Now, even when the left intelligentsia attempt to frame an old-fashioned argument they seem to have lost the knack of it. Stephen Collinson of CNN, for example, writes that: “Trump’s assault on elites encompasses almost every aspect of American life.” Yes, one is tempted to reply, and what is your point? Mr Collinson makes no effort to demonstrate the innocence of those elites and all of their many threatened “aspects” and thus to justify their continued existence against the Trumpian “assault” — he simply assumes it. Presumably, it was not just Mr Trump’s but any assault that had to be the evil — like colonialism, racism, etc. — by definition, because the elites have taken care, and the media have taken care on their behalf, to present themselves as innocent by definition.

When, as mentioned in last month’s media review, Jeff Bezos decided to take the Washington Post in a direction other than that which it had taken for the previous eight years — the direction, that is, of opposing Mr Trump and all his works, root and branch, Ruth Marcus, an op ed regular and former deputy editorial page editor under the late Fred Hiatt, filed a column criticizing him for it. When the column was spiked, she resigned and took to the New Yorker to explain “Why I left the Washington Post.”

See if you can guess the reason. It was not just that she had had “creative differences” (as they used to say in Hollywood) with the paper’s owner. It was that she thought no difference was possible on the subject of Mr Trump. She, and the old Post, were eternally innocent as he was eternally guilty — guilty of being Mr Trump. That this bedrock fact had simply to be re-asserted again and again, day after day, year after year in the paper, and in any paper so conceived in innocency, was so obvious to her that Mr Bezos could not only not question it, he could not even ignore it in favor of writing about something else entirely, such as free markets and personal liberty.

And so we come to President Zelensky’s striking example of the operation of the culture of innocence. On February 28, he came to the White House, ostensibly to sign a deal for the rights to Ukrainian rare earth metals, and publicly disagreed, in front of the television cameras at a news conference with President Trump, with what Vice President Vance referred to as the latter’s diplomatic efforts to end Ukraine’s three-year-old war with Russia. “He broke the ceasefire,” said Mr Zelensky, referring to Vladimir Putin, “He killed our people. . .What kind of diplomacy, JD, you are speaking about? What do you mean?”

The breach in diplomatic decorum was swiftly answered in kind by the Vice President and then by President Trump himself, and the fact that it was they and not President Zelensky who bore the blame for it in the eyes of the American media could not be unrelated to the fact that the Ukrainian knew the media’s culture of innocence could be relied upon to see things his way in spite of any undiplomatic behavior or ingratitude on his part.

It just goes to show that real victims no less than ex officio ones, like Karen Bass, can be blinded to reality by the culture of innocence. With the help of the international media, Mr Zelensky was so used to considering himself as belonging to the class of innocent victims and their equally innocent champions in the media, and Mr Putin as belonging to that of the guilty oppressors, like Messrs Trump and Vance (who were, of course, immediately branded as Mr Putin’s stooges), that he could scarcely be expected to understand that any hope of peace depended on jettisoning that Manichaean model, however justified it might be, morally speaking, and making some kind of deal with the devil, as his long ago Finnish counterpart, Baron Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim did with Josef Stalin in 1940.

Thus German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock:

I say clearly and across the Atlantic, what is right and what is wrong shall never be irrelevant to us. No one wants and no one needs peace more than the Ukrainians and Ukraine. The diplomatic efforts of the U.S. are of course important here. But such a peace must be just and lasting and not just a pause until the next attack… We will never accept a perpetrator-victim reversal. A perpetrator-victim reversal would be… the end of security for the vast majority of countries. And it would be fatal for the future of the United States.

To characterize peace negotiations on a purely pragmatic basis, which is the only basis on which there can ever be peace negotiations, as a “perpetrator-victim reversal” [Täteropferumkehr], or “victim-blaming” in more idiomatic English, is tantamount to a refusal to negotiate. It implies a demand for Russia’s unconditional surrender — which at best can only mean endless war and at worst becomes “gambling with World War III,” as President Trump put it.

Even Mr Zelensky must see this if he can once look beyond the sense of his own innocence, however justified, and reject the “perpetrator-victim” model — so closely akin to Franz Fanon’s absolute classfication of colonizers and colonized which has had so much to do with keeping Israel’s wars of national survival going for, lo, these many years. Both are forms of the “epistemic closure” which also keeps the left’s Trump-hatred burning as hot as a fire-bombed Tesla and, like most hatred, damages the hater more than the hated. Not that those who treasure their own wronged innocence, or that of their clients, above all things can be expected to care about that.