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'The Exceptions Have Become the Rule.' Naomi Klein on Trump, Gaza and the End of the 'Liberal Order' [1]

['Omid Memarian', 'Marc Martorell Junyent', 'Eric Goldstein', 'Root', '--M-A-Box-Bp', '--M-A-Box-Bp-L', '.M-A-Box', 'Margin-Top', 'Important Margin-Right', 'Important Margin-Bottom']

Date: 2025-01-17 21:38:39+00:00

That was my next question, actually, in your criticisms of Big Tech, you have warned about the dangers of "technosolutionism." You have mentioned a few tech billionaires, increasingly seeking to consolidate power and influence over government policies, often advocating for deregulation under the guise of innovation or efficiency. How do you see this dynamic playing out in the context of where super wealthy individuals and companies are deeply integrated into our governance, economy, security and even conflicts?

I think what it's been is a delay tactic. It's lost us decades when it comes to the climate crisis. This idea that we're about to come up with some miracle energy source, or a next-generation nuclear power, or something that's about to happen, which is why we don't have to roll out the technologies that we already have, which are not so fancy and not so impressive: wind turbines, solar panels. We actually know how to do this, consuming less, more efficiency. But we haven't done those things. The climate transition that we know we have needed to make, and that scientists have warned us about and indigenous people warned us about for much longer, has been ignored in favor of both technosolutionism and so-called market solutions. Leave it to the big companies. They're going to bring in voluntary "responsible investing." They're going to make their net-zero pledges, and so on.

This has been all a strategy of delay about just getting one more profitable quarter out of the same system. And it's worked. It's worked because it has given an illusion. I'm sorry, I don't have a lot of good news today.

I think it's given an illusion to people who were really mobilized around the climate crisis, who were going on student climate strikes and marching and so on, to say, okay, governments are doing something. I'm not clear exactly what, but something about net zero. Something about working with the oil companies. It sort of sounds like they're doing something. And it's just gotten more and more absurd. Like each COP, each U.N. climate summit, is in a more oil-soaked regime than the next, and there are more fossil fuel executives running the negotiations every year. All this has been about a strategy of delay until you get to the point where it's like, oops, too late. Yeah, I guess things are going to burn. But that's why we need long-termism. We need to just save some people.

This is where I think Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia, 15 months ago said that the Global South sees its future in Gaza, that this is where the consumption of the rich is leading. In Gaza, this mass death is being normalized before the eyes of the world. That's what it means to have a livestreamed genocide, if it doesn't trigger what it should have triggered. South Africa's International Court of Justice case is tremendously important, but the ICJ has not acted in the way that it should have. All the mechanisms we have that should have sprung into action in the face of this genocide have not, and have failed. I don't think the U.N. secretary general has yet used the word genocide. I think even if he had, I'm not sure it would have made that much of a difference.

The point is the infrastructure that we have to respond to a genocide before our eyes has not responded. What people take from that is that we become the kinds of people who rationalize mass death. And then the bar is just constantly moved. There is the fortressing of borders, understanding the role of Israeli technology in testing and exporting a kind of an Iron Dome for any country that wants to fortress itself from the effects of this planetary boiling. In boiling here, I'm talking about warming, but I'm also talking about inequality. I'm also talking about wars and people needing to move to survive.

This is what we need to understand, and perhaps haven't focused on enough since October 7. What October 7 meant to wealthy countries around the world was a failure of the Iron Dome model, which they all subscribe to for their own countries. The Iron Dome is a global project. It isn't only for Israel. Israel is the laboratory for the Iron Dome. Notice I'm saying Israel, not Palestine. I don't call Palestine a laboratory, but I think Israel is a laboratory for a certain kind of fortressed inequality and apartheid that is actually a global project.

I wanted to touch on what's happening in Los Angeles, the unprecedented catastrophic fires, and then connect it to your writing about climate change. In late November, reflecting on the U.S. election results, you said we have to draw out connections between allowing the planet to cook and allowing Palestine to burn. You have called Palestine "a laboratory for an eco-fascist future." What are the connections you see between the Los Angeles fires, climate change, Palestine and Trump, who opposes policies to fight climate change? How can we more effectively make these connections and address these challenges?

Even though there are still people who do deny climate change, I think it's a thin denial. Everybody knows. Oh, they're looking for some conspiracy to blame about why LA burned that isn't about the fact that it's very hot and dry. But we know. We're entering a phase which is more openly supremacist, because we know, because our elites know. In a phase like that, where the long-predicted impacts are coming to pass, we either reimagine how we live and face our responsibility in rich countries in having created this crisis, in having not listened to scientists, having not listened to the Global South, not acted when we could have acted.

It was always based on a belief that we would be relatively safe, that we would not be the ones in the Global North who would bear most of the risk. Within the Global North, there is its own hierarchy that the rich will be able to get private firefighters, move to higher ground, build a bunker.

I think that it is in moments of extreme crisis that fascism surges. Fascism in the 1930s emerges in this moment of multiple ruptures. It's the carnage of the First World War. It's the shock of the 1929 market crash. It's the punishing sanctions that were imposed [on Germany] after the war. You have these overlays of multiple crisis, and then you have these strongmen figures who say: At least I can make you feel better than that other guy. The crises that we're talking about, long foretold, mean that the need for a supremacist ideology is greater. It's either supremacy or equality, a kind of equality we've never had. That means we pay our climate debts. It means that we say: If your country's uninhabitable, yes, you can come to ours. Because we understand that you did not create this crisis. It is a real redistribution of wealth.

That is so heretical to the people who are making decisions, not just in the Trump administration, in the Biden administration. I think we have to understand that this kind of coarsening of our culture—this willingness to use absolute violence to get behind it—is because they do know that if the fortresses don't hold, then something radical has to change. I think these are all different parts of the same story, if you will.

I don't think we can ever understand fascism outside of that it's always been the flip side of modernity. It roars to the surface when it's needed to protect the system itself. What makes us different than our predecessors in the interwar period in Europe is the ecological piece of it. The fascists in that era could offer people a piece of land. There was still an idea of expansionism. Whereas now, things are so contracted I think that feeling of brokenness is much greater. There isn't a horizon really, which is why I think we're seeing more and more of this millenarian religious belief—that it's about the next life.

Many democracies around the world have been facing backlashes toward liberal policies. How do see the future of liberalism globally? How do you think the four years of the Trump administration will have a global impact on liberalism?

I think it's over. This so-called liberal order, much of it emerged after the Second World War to prevent genocide, and the defanging of that liberal order has been decades in the making. The defunding of the U.N. and making it less and less a democratic space, with more and more veto power for the United States—I think that that kind of fake liberal order was dying, and it showed that it was a hollow shell. Trump will just ignore it, or finish the job. The ideology that Trump believes in is power. For people like Trump and Musk, the point of being richer and having more weapons than anybody else is to use it, to exercise it. The difference between them and Biden, or the previous so-called liberal order, was this idea that there will be some restraint in how we use it. We want the threat of using it to be how we enforce our power.

But for Trump, the whole point of having money, the whole point of being famous, the whole point of having power is to abuse that power. If you have to play by the same rules as everybody else, what is the point? When he said, you can grab women by the genitals, "they let you do it," that is all you need to know about Trump.

The whole point of being Trump is to abuse your power. This idea of stockpiling it for another day, that is not how he understands power. He understands power as something to use and abuse. The nakedness of that could potentially force an articulation of another way of relating to power and force.

I think all of this calls into question the hypocrisies after the Second World War. You have the universal human rights architecture that emerges in 1948—the Geneva Conventions, the International Court of Justice, the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights—saying we all have equal rights, this will never happen again, barring of apartheid, all of that. And then you also have the nuclear bomb, and you have the state of Israel. Force as deterrent, not universalism as deterrent, that's the bomb. And Israel is the exception to the rule. In place of reparations for genocide, there's going to be apartheid, an ethnostate, a hierarchy, and the continuation of colonialism.

What we've seen in this period so clearly is, if you believe in universalism, you have to commit to it. There can't be exceptions. You can't be like, "But we're also going to keep a nuclear bomb in our back pocket, and in this one place, there's going to be an ethnostate." Because what has happened is that the exceptions have overtaken universalism completely. These ideas can't coexist.

You don't get a hedge on universalism. You actually have to build it and invest in it. In practical terms, we should have a U.N. that is democratic. The Security Council shouldn't be able to be at the mercy of one veto. We've seen what we would have to change if we were to have this thing that calls itself liberalism, which never existed. This is what I'm struggling with. I don't believe it ever existed. I think they always hedged. Now the exceptions have become the rule, and we're seeing what it means to live in a world where the people with all the weapons go, "Hmm, maybe I'll invade you."

Your newest book investigates the growth of disinformation and conspiracy theories and conspiracy culture. You cite Trump and Musk as leading promoters of disinformation and conspiracies. How and why did our information ecology become so polluted? What needs to be done to reduce the impacts of this misinformation?

What I say in Doppelganger is that we need an information commons. The internet and social media have become our town square, but they are privatized town squares. Of course, the social media companies wanted to say, "We're the town square and don't worry, we'll fact check, we'll moderate, we'll take care of it." But that was just phase one. Now the mask is off and they're saying, "Well, actually you're a captive market and we'll do whatever we want." The outrageousness of there being three guys who control the information ecology, which should never have happened, is revealed for all the world to see as we watch Musk turn X or Twitter into a machine for electing Donald Trump, but also maybe the far right in Germany. He likes them. He doesn't like the Germans regulating him. So he's like, "Huh? Maybe we'll just bring fascism back to Germany. Let's see how that goes."

The cowardice of these so-called liberals and centrists in the face of the constant and total privatization not just of our town square, but our very selves, because these guys are mining us as their business model—where we go, what we buy, what we say. We are the mine sites. That's what it means to live in an information data-mining economy.

I don't think it's redeemable. We are in this moment where all the liberal niceties of so-called woke capitalism are gone. They're dropping the show. It's over. This idea that the banks were going to fix climate change and the social media companies were going to create a nice safe place for us to talk to each other? No. This is the work of the public. This is the work of governance. This is the work of the citizenry, the polis. We have to do this. What the neoliberal era generated were a generation of politicians who didn't want to govern. Look at somebody like Justin Trudeau who has stepped down in Canada. He never wanted to take responsibility for any of these things. He outsources everything to the private sector. And we're seeing the consequences of that now.

You have been outspoken for many years in your support of Palestinian rights and critical of Israel's policies toward Palestinians. How did you arrive at those views?

I see myself as part of a left tradition within Judaism that is part of the left socialist tradition. My grandparents on my father's side were very left-wing. My grandfather was an artist who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. My father was a war resister during Vietnam, and my family moved to Canada because my father refused to go to Vietnam. So I grew up with politics in my house all the time.

I don't want to present it as like some utopia, but here is a left tradition that is like the Buddhist tradition that always believed in the idea of hereness, that we fight for justice where we are. We don't place our hopes in an ethnostate somewhere else. I didn't grow up in a staunchly anti-Zionist house, but neither did I grow up in an extremely Zionist house. I actually just got a lot of mixed messages about Israel, to be honest, so that when I went there, I could see for myself.

But I feel very lucky to have grown up within a social justice tradition and an economic justice tradition and a Jewish tradition that was not very attached to Zionism. I saw it in my school—I went to Jewish day school—so I saw that other kind of Judaism, but I always felt alienated from it. It didn't align with what I was learning in my home, which was much more universalist about "never again" and genocide. That it's about never letting it happen again to anyone. Then I would go to school and it would seem to be mostly just about not letting it happen to the Jews. I always struggled with that.

But I feel there's such a privilege of not losing my family because of my politics. I'm very aligned with my parents about Israel. We talk about it. We don't fight about it. It's one of the only things we don't argue about, actually. I know people who have taken much greater risks in terms of their own families, and have lost a lot more than me. It's a big deal to lose your family over your political beliefs, and I feel very lucky that I didn't have to.

I know a lot of young Jewish activists through Jewish Voice for Peace, which I've been involved in for a long time, who have lost their whole community—which is why a lot of what I'm focused on in my Jewish organizing, with my Jewish hat on, is really showing that we can hold the young people who need community, who want Jewish ritual. Even if they've been excommunicated, we're saying, You know what? Your rabbi doesn't have the right to do that. Your parents don't have the right to do that. You're still Jewish. We can have a Seder. We can have Shabbat. We can engage with these texts and make them meaningful to us.

That's been a change for me because I think that my engagement with progressive Judaism, left Judaism, was almost exclusively around solidarity with Palestine, and it still is. But I think that we also need to build a different kind of Judaism that can hold this generation that knows this is a genocide and have raised their voices and have been part of the encampments and want something different. They want to disentangle their spirituality, their faith, from the state.

By the way, I don't think it's just Jews who need to disentangle their spirituality and their faith from states. That's something we can share. I think Christians should do it, in the face of all of these Christian Zionists who are weaponizing their faith. I really do believe that states and faith should be separate. It's very corrupting when they are united, not just corrupting to states but to faith.

I gave a speech that went kind of viral where I said we need an exodus from Zionism. But I actually think that that's true for many faiths, including ones that are not monotheistic. There's a way in which Indigenous communities in Canada have been colonized by the Canadian state, which has imposed governance structure on them that doesn't respect their ways of knowing, that doesn't respect their hereditary leadership and so on. This work of disentangling faith from the state is something that can bring us together.

Are there areas where you see hope and opportunities for those who believe in values like human rights and democracy? Are you hopeful at all?

The moments where I feel a sense of the possible is when I'm with my comrades in Jewish Voice for Peace and with Palestinian friends who want to get out of the kind of genocide loop humanity is in. We've never really gotten at the core ideology. I don't think we've really understood what the Nazis were originally. We in Europe and in North America treated them as a rupture, instead of as a continuation of the ideologies of settler colonialism.

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[1] Url: https://dawnmena.org/the-exceptions-have-become-the-rule-naomi-klein-on-trump-gaza-and-the-end-of-the-liberal-order/

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