I used to think Cosmonaut was an interesting publication and that its affiliated Marxist Unity Group was promising as well.  That’s why I published two major articles on the Cosmo web site (here and here) and why I offered my services this summer to MUG.  But I’ve had a change of heart.  I now think they’re idiots.

The following timeline makes clear why:

Oct. 15: Cosmonaut publishes an “editorial statement” on the Oct. 7 attack that lends new meaning to the word “puerile.”  Among other things, it congratulates Hamas for its “daring show of resistance” and complains that “a propaganda deluge has inundated the mainstream US media sphere with pornographic descriptions of horrendous acts allegedly carried out by Hamas.”  (Allegedly?)  

Dec. 15:  I send a letter in response describing the statements as “a mess – un-Marxist, un-Leninist, and more than a bit juvenile….”  My letter makes the obvious point that while socialists understand that violence is sometimes necessary, we don’t automatically support it in every instance especially when the political consequences are so plainly counterproductive.  “Yet what did the Oct. 7 terror operation accomplish by slaughtering hundreds of innocent civilians other than arousing the opprobrium of the world?” the letter asks.  “What did Hamas hope to achieve other than bringing down the wrath of the Israeli military on the Palestinian people?”  The letter quotes Lenin on the importance drawing a clear distinction between socialist methods and those of Third World nationalists, much less Islamists like Hamas.  A hornet’s nest is promptly stirred.

Dec. 15:  Someone named Cliff Connolly tweets a few hours later that my letter is “truly disgusting.”

Dec. 16: Someone named “Nicolás V” (Czar Nicholas II’s great grandson?) fires off a letter to Cosmonaut suggesting I suffer from an “infantile disorder” (the title of a famous Lenin essay) because I fail to recognize that the Oct. 7 operation inflicted “a decisive blow” on the IDF that exposed it as a “paper tiger” for all the world to see.  (A paper tiger capable of raining down thousands of tons of explosives per week is quite novel.)  Nicolás continues: “An exciting aside: PUMA, a long-standing target of the BDS movement, has officially dropped the sponsorship of the Israeli soccer team.”  Yes, a dropped corporate sponsorship is certainly worth some 25,000 civilian deaths, don’t you think?  Nicolás also accuses me of advancing “a poorly defined orientalist caricature of Hamas” – orientalist being an extremely nasty put-down in certain radical quarters.

Dec. 17: Cosmonaut runs a letter by someone named Rob Ashlar that’s even worse.  It starts by calling me a “Third Reich propaganda minister” and then tosses in “white supremacist scum” and “social fascist” (an old Stalinist favorite) for good measure.  Ashlar defends jihad as not “wholly negative” because, “[f]or over twenty years, the protagonists of anti-imperialist struggles in the Muslim world – most notably, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine – have been self-professed mujahidin.”  (Does this include ISIS and Al Qaeda?  They’re self-professed holy warriors too.)  Ashlar describes Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine as anti-imperialist (I disagree even though I don’t support Kiev) and says of Oct. 7: “For a short time, the descendants of the Nakhba retook the land from which their grandparents had been expelled.  In a delightful twist of fate, many of them reenacted scenes visited upon their ancestors, but now turned against their tormentors.”  Delightful?  Is this how Cosmonaut describes the slaughter of hundreds of innocents?

Dec. 18: Yet another letter, this time by Christopher Carp, accuses me of misusing Lenin.  “…[F]or any committed Marxist thinker, Lazare’s reliance on such isolated, decontextualized quotes reveals a deep intellectual weakness.”  He thinks the quote is irrelevant, in other words, but fails to explain why (no doubt because he can’t).

Dec. 18: Someone calling herself “River –> sea” says my letter is “personally offensive” and posts a 21-tweet response explaining why.  Among her arguments: “Hamas has successfully provoked Israel into laying bare the full ferocity of the Israeli colonial project to the whole world.”  True. But the full ferocity of Zionism has long been apparent, so we did we need tens of thousands of more deaths to establish what we already knew?  “River” concludes: “I will not condemn Hamas just as I would not have condemned the FLN during the Algerian War, despite its social conservatism.”  Theoretically speaking, is there anything that Hamas might do that would make her reconsider – like, I don’t know, exploding an H-bomb in downtown Tel Aviv perhaps?  

Dec. 19: Finally, Peter Ross, a writer for the World Socialist Web Site and a member of the Socialist Equality Party, pens a somewhat more thoughtful letter accusing me of “social chauvinism” and being “more interested in defending the ideal of internationalism than in defending the Palestinians in a life or death struggle.”  After being called a Nazi, racist, etc., this is definitely a relief.  But it’s still nonsense since the whole point of my letter was not to ignore the violence being rained down the Palestinian population, but to protest it.

With Ross as a partial exception, it all adds up to an amazing flood of stupidity since … since … Antony Blinken’s last press conference.  The logic is infantile: Israel bad, Hamas therefore good, so don’t talk to us about massacres, atrocities, and the like because we don’t want to hear it.  The only disagreement is between those who are determined to ignore what happened on Oct. 7 (“River”) and those who celebrate it (Ashlar).  Otherwise, they side with Hamas to the degree that there’s no sunlight between them at all.

However you want to describe such arguments, by any stretch of the imagination are they Marxist.  To be sure, Marx pointed out the hypocrisy of the British press in complaining by atrocities by Sepoy mutineers in India in 1857, as Ross points out.  But Marx didn’t hesitate to condemn the atrocities themselves (“appalling, hideous, ineffable”). And he certainly didn’t hesitate to criticize the Sepoys as well, British colonial troops who were mainly upper-caste Hindus.  “Clad, fed, petted, fatted, and pampered” are some of the adjectives he tossed their way.

Marx was not one to be reined in.  Nonetheless, there is a key difference between the Sepoys and Hamas.  The former were soldiers while the latter is a political party, with a charter written in 1988 and then amended – but not repealed – in 2017.  So there is a program for us to analyze, plus positions, ideologies, and, in this case, a long record of anti-Semitism as well.

There’s no reason for us not to do so.  In fact, there’s every reason we should scrutinize such material if only to shed light on Oct. 7 and all that has occurred since.  But hysterics like Ashlar and “River” don’t want us to think or analyze.  They merely want us to spew out pro-Hamas propaganda. 

In any event, I’m going to write another letter to Cosmonaut and post it in the next day or two.  Poisonous rhetoric like this should not go unchallenged.