Quid rides, Uri Avnery?

di João Carlos Graça

Indeed, “de te fabula narratur”: one may appropriately say that the “aspetto da clown”, the joker aspect of Uri Avnery's writing is as to many aspects meant to distract or divert our attention from the deeply criminal character of his enterprise.

Let me please quote: "Ovviamente le decadi di terrore abominevole inflittegli da questo despota mezzo pazzo hanno cancellato nel popolo libico ogni residuo di pietà che avrebbe potuto provare. (Quelli che lo hanno sostenuto fanaticamente fino all'ultimo, i membri della sua tribù, pare siano stati una esigua minoranza.)  Il suo aspetto da clown e le sue avventure all'estero hanno sviato l'attenzione dell'opinione pubblica mondiale dalle caratteristiche criminali del suo governo".

Also: "non è necessario essere un barbaro arabo o un super-terrorista musulmano per fare ciò che è stato fatto a Muammar Gheddafi e suo figlio Mutassim. I civilizzati italiani per esempio..." And finally, the victory of the "rebels" is basically self-made, they’re true partisans: "un esercito popolare organizzato alla meglio: la Libia si è liberata da sola".

Of course, it is not necessary any particular subtlety to identify here a late "vendetta" of a relentless filo-Mussolinian, but to be more precise a cool variety of that, more specifically a sort of candidate to Mussolini's Mark Anthony... Rossana Rossanda had apparently already insulted the memory of Spanish Civil War with talks about organizing some “International Brigades” supporting “the rebels”. But Avnery goes definitely further, because he has not so obviously gone insane, indeed he keeps a kind of cool lucidity of the sort. 

Avnery also has as a negative “specie di attaccamento ereditario” to “bad” parts of the Globe, which of course he denies by attributing the precisely opposite inclinations to his adversaries: “alcuni ex-comunisti”, whatever that means…

Be as it may, the McCarthyst notion seems indeed adequate to Avnery’s mood. The same way that a Jew in ancient régime Iberia could indeed cease to be a Jew, but would never be able to step out of the “ex-Jew” zone, of the “former Jew” qualification, and so would never manage to be taken as a true Christian, always and irremediably a “converso”, and so the issue tended to get “under his/her skin”, to become an “attaccamento ereditario”, so to with senator Joe there was really nothing one could do once “having been” a communist: the issue inevitably passed from Communism to, so to speak, “Communishness”.

Once arrived here, only a gratuitous, merciful gesture from the judge is really able to save the accused. There is nothing he can do to obtain “certitudo salutis”, and bottom line it’s really not his merit or demerit; not by actions, but by grace only will he ever be saved, or spared. Hence the recurrent need to distinguish between those destined to salvation, and those doomed beyond appeal, which always redirects not to an exact law, or algorithm, but to an arbitrary, somewhat Schmittian (simultaneously destructive and creative, creatively destructive) act of choice, and of distinction. In the end, something very analogous occurs with Avnery: “some”, “alcuni”… which indeed tends in most circumstances to be much more effective as a means of policing than a complete, indiscriminate erasure.       

Amidst all this, of course, the facts that, for instance, elected presidents are en passant demoted to “dictators”, or that public firms are taken exactly as the same thing as private firms really tend to become somehow irrelevant, dissolved in the middle of such barbarities… The true nature of the jungle, “la vera natura della giungla” that lies in the very center of what we call “the West”, Israel of course included, may probably be captured, in a frozen but definitely very interesting sub species, in Avnery’s article.

So much for Il Manifesto. So much for “what is left of the left”…