Asymmetric Idiocy

CJ Hopkins

I miss the 1970s sometimes. Not just the music. And the sex. And the drugs. I miss the terrorists. The old-school terrorists. Or, OK, maybe not the terrorists, but the revolutionaries who cheered on the terrorists.

I miss the clarity, and the honesty, of that era.

Maybe you’re too young to remember, but, back in the day, you didn’t get all this hemming and hawing about murdering civilians. The terrorists, and the revolutionaries who supported them, were not ashamed of murdering civilians. The Revolution demanded that they murder civilians. Murdering civilians was one of the fundamental strategies of the Revolution.

The way this strategy works is simple. What you do is, you murder a bunch of civilians, in order to provoke your adversary into massively over-retaliating against you and committing all kinds of war crimes and atrocities, like the USA did in Iraq twenty years ago, like the IDF is now doing in Gaza. The goal of the strategy is to broaden the conflict, and draw your potential allies into it, or at least significantly weaken support for your enemy.

OK, sure, that means you have to murder some people … men, women, children, whole families, and then your enemy is going to go apeshit and kill tens or even hundreds of thousands of your people, but, if all goes to plan, your “allies” will join you, and attack your enemy, and drive him into the sea, or off the face of the earth, or wherever. So, in the end, all the murdering will have been totally worth it.

This is not a theory I just made up. It is one of the basics of asymmetric warfare. If you are not already familiar with that subject, this might be a good time to look into it.

I’m not a fan of murdering civilians. Not even for the Revolution. I do not think it is a very good strategy. Plus, well, the murdering. I’m against that, generally. Soldiers killing each other is one thing. They have been doing that since the dawn of history. And I have no problem with guerilla tactics. People fight wars with the means they have available. It’s just the murdering thing that I can’t get down with. Especially the murdering of the women and the kids, but it’s probably not politically correct to say that, what with the diversity, equity, and inclusion thing these days.

Anyway, as it appears I’m currently alienating a significant portion of my longstanding readers, half of whom believe I’m an “Islamofascist,” and the other half of whom believe I’m a “Zionist,” I figure I’ll go ahead and go for broke, and wax nostalgic about the 1970s, and say a few things I haven’t been saying, or, rather, I’ll say a few things I’ve been saying delicately not so delicately.

I’ve been saying those things delicately, because, as I made pretty clear in October, when this whole horror show started, my sympathies are with the Palestinian people. My sympathies are also with the loved ones of the Israeli civilians who were murdered by Hamas, but I am talking about the bigger picture now, the broader “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

In that bigger picture, the Palestinians are fucked. They’ve been getting fucked for quite some time now. That is what happens when empires conquer the land you live on and do what they want with it. The land in question has been getting conquered for approximately 4,500 years. The Babylonians conquered it. The Persians conquered it. Alexander the Great conquered it. The Romans conquered it. And so on. That’s all ancient history.

More recently, in 1920, the Ottoman Empire lost World War One, and the British Empire took the land over. You are probably familiar with the rest of the history. The British pulled out in 1948. Zionists established The State of Israel. War broke out. Israel won. War broke out again. Israel won again. And again. And so on. And … well, here we are.

As I was saying, the Palestinians are fucked. Look at a map of the territory. Does it look like Palestine is on the verge of being “free”?

The State of Israel is not going anywhere. It is an essential component of the global-capitalist empire. It’s the empire’s headquarters in the Middle East. It has nuclear weapons. It is backed by the US military. The “Islamic world” is not going to join Hamas and attack it, regardless of how many war crimes it perpetrates in Gaza. The ICJ is not going to put it on trial. The United Nations isn’t going to make it play nice. It isn’t going to disappear into the ether. It is a fact of life.

It isn’t fair. It has nothing to do with fairness and justice and rights and good and bad and whatever. It doesn’t even have much to do with Zionism. Zionism is just Israel’s ideology, like Islamism is Saudi Arabia’s ideology. What it has to do with is the global-capitalist empire, and resistance to the global-capitalist empire.

Which brings us back to asymmetric warfare, and Hamas’ October 7 “Al-Aqsa Flood” strategy, and the utter fucking pointlessness of it, and the utter fucking callousness of it.

Do you seriously believe that the leadership of Hamas did not know exactly how Israel would respond to the slaughter of hundreds of Israeli citizens, families, children, people at a rave? If you honestly believe that, I don’t know what to say.

The goal of the “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack was to provoke precisely the response it has provoked. There is nothing mysterious or complicated about this. It is Asymmetric Warfare 101, straight out of the Terrorism textbook.

For seven months I have been watching my “radical” colleagues trying to obscure this fact. It isn’t helpful. It doesn’t help anyone. It certainly doesn’t help the Palestinian people. There is more than enough about Israel to criticize. Lying, twisting the facts about Hamas, convincing people that the IDF “Hanniballed” everyone on October 7, is (a) unnecessary, (b) obfuscatory, and (c) destroys your credibility.

On top of which, it makes you look like pussies.

If you believe that murdering people to provoke your enemy into overreacting is a productive armed-resistance strategy, at least have the fucking courage to say so. Bring back the spirit of the 1970s! The old PLO! The RAF! The IRA! The SLA! Do it for the Revolution! Or the Globalized Intifada! Or whatever.

I’m just kidding, of course. It is an idiotic strategy. It hands your enemy a free “get out of war-crimes tribunal” card. Meanwhile, the people you are purporting to be fighting for are getting slaughtered by the tens of thousands. But whatever … as long as it boosts your cred among the other “legitimate armed resisters,” who cares how many families get wasted? After all, it’s not your fault! It’s the oppressors! The Zionists! The Americans! Or whoever.

Seriously, though, I am feeling a bit nostalgic for the 1970s, when at least you could have a real argument over tactics with your revolutionary comrades instead of hearing mindless gibberish like this…

Yes, you actually just read those words, “they never killed anyone with an intent to kill.” And Lena’s note is not at all an anomaly. I have been hearing this gibberish for seven months now.

So, thanks, all my radical anti-Zionist friends and colleagues who have been pumping out this narrative, and all the thought-terminating clichés, and conducting Anti-Zionist Inquisitions, and so on! Well done! I’m pretty sure all the folks like Lena who you have helped to transform into a mass of mindless Pavlovian robots will never, ever, be turned against us, like, you know, the next time the Powers That Be come up with an irresistible stimulus!

I mean, what are the odds of that ever happening?

CJ Hopkins

CJ Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent Factory Essays are published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.