Nancy Fraser, New Left Review:

Here, I want to examine a different aspect of Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza: its significance as a ‘world event’, an epochal turning point that also serves to reveal, and so to signify, the nature of the times. I aim to do so in a register that will range between the political, the social, the philosophical and the personal. I argue that ‘Gaza’ signifies a crisis for the moral order that has held sway across much of the West for the past half century. Installed in the United States from the 1970s onward, and serving to justify its global hegemony along with Israeli expansionism, that order was centred on the Nazi Judeocide as the ultimate emblem of ‘radical evil’, delimiting the horizon within which wrong and its rectification could be thought. Today, however, Auschwitz itself is invoked as justification for a new genocide. The effect is to leave the Holocaust-centred Western moral order in tatters, no longer able to conceal or contain the glaring crimes committed by the Israeli state and its American backer. In the current period, ‘Gaza’ bids to replace ‘Auschwitz’ as symbol for the worst human atrocities of our time.

In society’s perception, the reality of constant psychological mobilization and the tense expectation of global military conflict became a way of life to be reproduced by two generations, for whom fidelity to convictions was always inextricably linked to fear and the feeling of powerlessness in the face of fate. The unprecedented destructive power of the new superweapons had a disarming effect on both sides of the invisible front. Henceforth, the strength of either party could only be measured by its capacity to make people accept choices that have already been made for them in advance. Paradoxically, the constant feeling of risk has proven to be one of the most stable conditions of recent modern history, which is why its memory has always prompted so much subconscious nostalgia.

Today, the spectre of the Cold War has returned, and it has roused not only old‑school diplomats, but generals, and/or propaganda hacks, who finally feel that they are once again on more solid ground.

—Ilya Budraitskis, Dissidents Among Dissidents: Ideology, Politics and the Left in Post‑Soviet Russia, (London: Verso, 2022), 19.

I think this is an interesting insight which addresses something of the appeal of both Ostalgia and Europe’s present insistent drumbeat for war with Russia. There is constancy, familiar comfort in having a known enemy.

Jeremy Morris, Red Threads:

What was lost is self-evident to anyone alive today in the Russian Federation: an industrialized workforce with job guarantees and symbolic capital, if poor working conditions. What is preserved is an embedded sense that the rush is shared, that the labour-time and space of others is implicated in your own. That understanding has survived the destruction of the institutions that once structured it, lingering now like feeling a phantom limb.

Ω Ω Ω

What distinguishes the Russian case from, say, the British or even American experience of neoliberal social dispossession is precisely the depth and freshness of that absent presence. In societies where the commons of social reproduction were enclosed centuries ago, their loss has become naturalized, sedimented into common sense. In Russia, the memory is living: it is carried in the bodies and practices of people who themselves used the factory canteen, who themselves were ‘possessed’ by the encompassing domain of the Soviet enterprise. The phantom limb aches because the amputation happened recently enough that the nervous system has not yet adapted. This is what makes the Russia case still valuable for a global left: the trace of the desire for collective social reproduction is still damp, still excavatable. It has not yet fossilized.

I can perhaps make this abjuration of philosophical neutrality in the interest of political liberalism more palatable by referring yet again to the Wittgensteinian analogy between vocabularies and tools.

—Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 55.