Dear Adriano, I completely disagree

Dear Adriano, as you know that esteem and affection lie at the very heart of my unreserved support for everything you stand for as a friend and as a person – a man who employs reason uncompromisingly yet without arrogance – you will also be able to properly assess my radical disagreement with your two articles on shame, including the invocation of the poignant memory of Carlo Ginzburg. I am stunned by the idea that your reasoning and feelings could be associated with the ovations in Venice – a truly sad place, and not just metaphorically so – for the filmed denunciation, ‘Naza’, of Netanyahu’s ‘genocide’. And by the idea that you mistook the posh, snobbish, ridiculous display by that British Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, who sought to move the audience, emphasising to the point of exasperation that he did so as a proud Jew, regarding the decision to strike at Israel for its rejection of the two-state solution – Palestinian and Jewish – and for the war crimes committed by its army in the Gaza campaign after 7 October, given that for someone like him it is ‘illegal’ or ‘unlawful’ to fight for one’s own life. He also noted, in his capacity as a proud British Labour politician, that his country is taking the lead in the international campaign unleashed against what is often described as the most moral army in the world, without quotation marks (the conqueror of freedom and of Dresden is turning in his grave).

In my view, shame, dear Adriano, is a decent and understandable feeling, but only if it reflects an inner awareness of guilt; otherwise, it is a self-centred indignation that fits neatly into the disappointing catalogue of ethical heroism, not only that of heroes in pursuit of honour and glory, but also that of the draft-dodgers and cowards who applaud the socially accredited humanitarian filmography for twenty-five minutes instead of revisiting the images of kibbutzim in flames and of children and women strangled because they are Jewish and only because they are Jewish, to the Oscar-winning cry of ‘Allahu Akbar’. If shame is respect, modesty, ‘aidos’ in Robin Lane Fox’s historical and philological classification when he speaks of the Iliad, it is also magnanimous and does not depend on the judgement of others; it is never shame for others’ sake or imposed by others.

Guilt, on the other hand, is the sense confined within our conscience, impervious to general human relationships; it is the precise and bitter sense of our personal relationship with the world. And whilst shame disappears with us, guilt – as is well known, and not merely for Homeric or biblical reasons – follows us into the grave; it is not our ego but our shroud. 7 October was the day of guilt, irremediably so. And it was collective guilt, like that of the camps of the Second World War, that of the willing executioners and of all of us who witnessed it, the very memory of which had been commemorated by the Berlin monument condemned by the shameless neo-Nazi who wins elections. Otherwise, we would not be speaking of pogroms, the centuries-old symbol of collective guilt, as generations of Germans, brought up in the traditions of constitutional democracy and the responsible engagement with their history, well know. 

It should not be forgotten that not a single Palestinian has ever been killed simply for being Palestinian, and that the Palestinians who have been killed – first and foremost children, but not only them – are victims of the murderous brutality of other Palestinians who have used them as human shields. If a people seeks to annihilate another people, and calls it ‘resistance’, building their rejection of the two-state solution over decades of terrorist plots upon an underground network of horror, and if on 7 October they hand out sweets to children to celebrate, they deserve no punishment – as Nietzsche said, Jesus Christ bore that – but they do deserve blame, and guilt is atoned for or rectified even through war, which is a horror beyond good and evil but is not unlawful, as the hero who feigns shame and electoral ambition in Westminster believes.

Yesterday, the second instalment of your two-part series on shame appeared here. After reading your piece, my attention was drawn to the following quotation from Simone Weil, selected by Matteo Marchesini in a robust and impeccable critique of the true essence of wokism: “Total freedom within one’s own sphere is essential to intelligence, and wherever there is a stifling of intelligence, there is oppression of the individual by society, which tends to become totalitarian.” In my view, dear Adriano, this is precisely the situation we find ourselves in: brains herded together and anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic sloganeering even in a tailcoat, and anyone like you who is free and intelligent must reject this oppression by the ‘totalitarian social order’ which turns humanitarianism – even when the highest in its intentions and will – into a tool for the repression of guilt and the awareness of guilt within oneself, replacing it with the all-too-abundant and easy space of shame for others.