Customer Reviews

Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel

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"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. (Marx 1845 Theses on Feurbach)"

I find this book informative but its theorizing useless and strange.

It is factually comprehensive as regards state violence in Serbia and in Israel, which, as the author demonstrates, differed in frontier zones (such as south Lebanon and Bosnia after its recognition as a state) versus internal zones (such as the West Bank and the Sanjak).

However, the horrific descriptions of daily life in the West Bank from 1967 to about 2000 only seem to imply that there the Israelis insisted upon a monopoly of force and a formalistic imitation of Western rights which most of the time, but not all of the time, meant that captives were beaten and not slaughtered wholesale.

The author actually wants to believe that as a social "scientist" he has discovered an ontological difference between ghettoisation of subject peoples without the rights of the main ethnic group, and their existence in a frontier.

Strangely, he does not test this theory against the Holocaust, for the Holocaust falsifies his theory.

The Nazis re-created the mediaeval and 19th century ghettos of Poland and other Eastern European countries only as a way station to the Shoah, in which they in fact treated their subject populations (not only Jews but also Roma, confessional Christians, and dissidents) as an internal "frontier".

It is true that in incompletely conquered areas of Russia, einsatzgruppen carried out crude mass exterminations using a variety of uncoordinated troops including the SS and the regular Army but contrary to the theory here, the Nazis seldom countenanced private armies or subcontracted exermination, while the Israelis, we know, subcontracted the Christian militia of Lebanon to carry out the 1982 massacre and Milosevic aided the Bosnian Serbs.

But once it was clear to the Nazi leadership that these actions were ineffective and causing resistance, they ghettoised the subject populations, and proceeded to a step which on Ron's theory wasn't supposed to be taken.

Nor does Ron test his theory against the Tsarist oppression of the jews after the 1882 assassination of Alexander. The Jews were already in ghettos in the Pale of Settlement, but the Tsarist state wanted to wreak vengeance on the "terrorists", and unleashed, IN AN INTERNAL FRONTIERIZATION of lands under the Tsar's control, private armies of Cossacks against the Jews...in mayhem that on Ron's theory never happened, but somehow caused the mass immigration of Eastern Europe's Jews to the USA in the late nineteenth century.

There is, in Ron's book, the false humility of the proud pseudo-scientist who has announced his "ground breaking" theory but then proceeds to confess that he isn't qualified to crack a history book or test his theory anywhere but his proper zone of research, which reminds me of what Adorno said about the self-moronization of this type of deliberately narrowed social research.

I am certain that variants of Ron's theory were aired in comfortable parlors of the 1930s: give the Nazis the opportunities to create ghettos and they will calm down.

This book illustrates Marx's theses on Feuerbach. From a sheerly scientific standpoint, social theory is so self-reflexive, so unavoidably a part of the phenomenon it describes, that it is profoundly UNSCIENTIFIC to pretend to be able to stand off from the world, whether at McGill or anywhere else, and so theorize as to avoid having that theory be used as an excuse or a pretext for mass murder.

What this means is that the first duty of social theory is Hippocratic, do no harm, first not by uttering a theory with such a stunning historical counter-example and secondly not by arming the bad guys with an excuse for creating one more ghetto.

I am alarmed by James Ron, not because he is from Israel or served in the Israeli army, for he seems to fully realize that Israel is illegitimate all the way down, for it defines full political personhood ethnically.

Perhaps there is something ineradicably brutalizing about military training and military service in a situation unjust all the way down, such that in a later career, the foundational brutalization emerges in such an extraordinarily stunning fashion.

"Oh, people getting killed...just give the murderers a nice little Guantanamo, a nice little Theriesenstadt, in which they can with de facto legitimacy stuff silenced and inconvenient victims so we can all feel good, and theorize, and get tenure".

THE POINT IS TO CHANGE IT.