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Masculism

by Lu Ann Pade

On the 23rd of May 2014, 22-year-old Elliot Roger killed six people in a shooting and stabbing rampage in Isla Vista, California, before ending his own life by directing his gun at himself and dying from a gunshot wound to the head. Roger, having lived his life as the son of an affluent filmmaker, foreshadowed his crime by distributing a 141-page document detailing his frustrations at his involuntary celibacy to the dozen people closest to him via email just hours before he embarked on his murder spree. He then uploaded a “retribution” video to YouTube in which he complained about never having been the object of female attention, never having even kissed a girl. Then the violence began. While working on this piece on masculinism, I was led to ask myself: how has masculinism metastasised into the dangerous, misogynistic and degrading ideology of people like Elliot Roger? How has this term come to embody these characteristics? This article does not aim to cover all of the implications of topics relating to incel culture and sexism. It seeks rather to take a look at some possible explanations for the emergence of masculinism as it exists in its current form.

Masculinism can be characterised as a reactionary and conservative counter-movement to feminism. It can be interpreted as a response to the “masculinity crisis” the followers of this doctrine consider society to be facing, particularly in the second half of the 20th century. At a time during which the two movements coincide, the claims of masculinists are multiple : feminism denies the masculinity of men (even worse, it tries to invert the pre-installed hierarchy and place women above men in the social hierarchy) and it is one of their missions to prevent this from happening. The masculinists want to promote “masculine” attributes, and they are in favour of a co-decision of abortion, as well as more favourable conditions in cases of divorce.

Identity, hierarchy, and recruits

Considering the roots of masculinism, we come to understand that even if the movement experienced an incredible growth during the past decade, it is not new and is thus the result of an ongoing identity crisis. Masculinists have decided, in the wake of their proclaimed crisis, to adopt a language based on the hierarchy between men and women so as to better cement the identity of each in today’s social media-dominated context. Red Pill , Blue Pill , Alpha , Sigma, are all terms that those familiar with the manosphere will know all too well. This language allows masculinists to differentiate between those who are part of the awoken and those who are not. The main adherents to this ideology thus end up being young men who seek to create a masculine identity among others with the same aims, in echo chambers dominated by self-reinforcing masculinist norms. In this way, masculinist circles have become less and less accessible to the general public, and as such less capable of being understood, questioned, and challenged.

Masculinity at risk

The rise of masculinism – as we have already discussed — is mainly due to the empowerment of women since the advent of the second wave of feminism. Masculinists’ reasoning is that, because feminism and feminists exist, there exists a need for a counter-movement, a response. Here lies the fragility inherent to this stream of thought: it exists only through the prism of feminism (the definition of masculinism in itself often refers to its anti-feminist oriented actions). However, paradoxically, because masculinism is neither independent nor the fruit of something fundamentally new or different (men were not deprived of their rights in favour of women, while feminists asked for rights to rule over their own bodies), it becomes increasingly difficult for masculinists to feel like they are a part of something new, revolutionary, important – elements which were crucial to the staying power of movements with a major importance in history.

Is femininity to feminism what masculinity is to masculinism?

The androcentric character of masculinism places the protection of masculinity, attributes, and behaviours biologically or socially constructed to characterise men, at the centre of their concerns. The strand of masculism that grew prominent in the 1970s and 80s posited that feminism (and, in general, all movements in favour of the emancipation of women) aimed to put masculinity at risk . It thus followed that, in order to protect men and their identity, the essential characteristics of masculinity needed to be protected and reinforced. This is why the primacy of masculinity in masculinism is not comparable to the placement of femininity in feminism. While feminism adopts a more individually-based construction of identity following the aims of the movement, masculinism’s aim is the construction of a new identity: the “better self” which is what a man supposedly becomes when he incorporates more masculine traits and behaviours, and adheres to the masculinist movement.

Masculinism, although widely contested since its initial waves, continues to spread and mutate with the help of multiple social media platforms where its spokespeople share “motivational for men” content aimed at empowering men to succeed in what they claim is a ”gynocentric world”. The elements developed in this article are not intended to depict feminism as the “right choice” (feminism has failed on many occasions to represent all its members, particularly in cases of intersectionality), but rather to explore and explain the most topical discourse around masculinism. These relatively varied reasons are increasingly being put forward and pointed to in order to raise awareness of the danger of certain movements and the behaviours associated with them.

Why we are racist

by Lino Battin

“I don’t know that anyone who has seen the images would not have strong feelings about what has happened, much less those who have relatives who have died and been killed, and I know people and have talked with people. So, I appreciate that, but I also do know that for many people who care about this issue, they also care about bringing down the price of groceries.” – Kamala Harris

When 235 years ago the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was proclaimed, it brought with it a promise of egalitarianism and universalism, “men are born and remain equal and free in rights”. To anyone even slightly interested in our history this should raise a big question. How could it be possible, that while professing its love for “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” France and its fellow European imperial powers enslaved, massacred, and exterminated the better part of our planet? Of course, it does not help that its authors were all fervent racists who thought of dark skin as a subhuman trait, but let us take a broader look at the historical context surrounding the advent of colonialism, transatlantic slavery, and racism.

Racism as a posteriori justification for economic submission

No matter how much one pretends to look beyond complexion, or to “not see colour”, race still plays an inevitable role all around the world, seeping into all aspects of social life. Despite this, we rarely take a step back to consider the category of race, what it means and how it came to be.

Firstly, it is necessary to understand the basic notion that race is a social construct, fabricated by a specific group of human beings. This is not a value judgement, after all there exists a number of very valuable social constructs, rather it refutes the idea of race being something biological and immutable.

In this video, which I strongly recommend, the history of the invention of race and racism is laid out. Before the invention of racism, say somewhere in the 1500s, a European person would identify along religious, national, or regional lines, no one would have thought of themselves as white or any other racial term. The first racism, or proto racism came from the Muslim world, which through its sub-Saharan expansions encountered what we today call black people. At this point, slavery was not a new practice and had persisted for countless centuries, it was however predicated along religious lines, meaning that Muslims could only enslave non-Muslim people, Christians could only enslave non-Christian people, and so on. The north African Muslims thus took large amounts of non-Muslim black slaves, which they then exported throughout the Muslim world, from the Iberian Peninsula to the border of China. These sub-Saharan slaves were considered inferior even to other slaves, seen as a distinct group and worth less. It is of great importance to note that contrary to European, Christian racism, this was very much a niche perspective and not socially accepted. Muslim scholars and jurors throughout the Muslim world argued for the equality of all Muslims regardless of skin colour, and never were any race-specific laws passed.

Things happened differently in Europe. In the Iberian Peninsula, in areas free of Muslim rule, the Christian kings passed “blood purity laws”, targeting the Jewish and Muslim populations, discriminating against them legally, barring them from essentially every part of society. Once the Reconquista was completed and Christians ruled over the entire peninsula, the blood laws were also expanded across the entire region. The Iberian Muslims now living under Christian rule, along with the Iberian Jews were now facing systematic discrimination and were suspected, even after conversion, of trying to betray and destroy their Christian rulers. These laws also applied to converts’ descendants, setting an important precedent of hereditary oppression. These laws, horrible as they were, still were not racist and targeted religious identities. This would change with the colonisation of the Americas, and the subsequent imports of African slaves into the colonies.

The Spaniards started enslaving people as soon as they set foot on American soil. As mentioned before, according to Spanish law, only non-Christians could be enslaved, and according to Spanish jurisprudence, indigenous American people could not simply be enslaved as they had never come into contact with Christ and his people. Therefore, at least officially, the Europeans were obliged to give the indigenous people a chance to convert to Christianity. In practice however, this was not really applied: an example of a loophole to this doctrine was the reading of a Spanish document, detailing the necessary steps to conversion, to a group of Amerindians, who of course did not understand Spanish. This was then considered good enough to enslave them, but still not on racial grounds, rather on national and religious ones. When Spain started importing African Slaves into the American colonies, those “progressive” Spaniards calling for improved indigenous rights, had none of that compassion for the slaves. Yet there still was no legal basis for their enslavement, and as Spanish reformer Bartolomé de las Casas pointed out, Africans in the Americas were enslaved illegally. This was a problem for Spanish authorities, as they required the labour of the slaves in the colonies, and so they found refuge in the bible. Indeed, to justify the enslavement of black people regardless of their religion, the Curse of Ham was invoked. According to some Christian, Jewish, and Muslim interpretations, Ham was the father of the Africans. In the Old Testament, Noah cursed Ham’s descendants to be slaves, which were considered by the Spaniards to be all Africans. Consequently, the very powerful Spanish catholic authorities in the Americas successfully pressured the Suprema (the council of Spanish catholic kingdoms) to include the category of blackness in the blood-purity laws, thus making black people legally discriminated against because of their physical appearance rather than because of their religion.

Now that blackness was well defined in law, it spread to other colonies, essentially becoming the legal norm in Europe. Whiteness, however, was yet to be defined – that task was to be left to the British.

In the late 16th to early 17th centuries, when the United Kingdom started colonising the Americas and importing African slaves, it lacked a powerful religious institution like the Spanish church or the equivalent of “blood purity laws”, leaving individual colonies to make their own laws concerning race and slavery. Barbados for example drafted laws legalising the lifelong enslavement of “negroes and Indians”, further cementing slave-ness as a “non-European” trait. In the British Caribbean colonies, there were both slaves and indentured servants, of whom most were Europeans, who either concluded voluntary contracts, or were sent to the colonies as punishment (there were for example considerable amounts of Irish rebels). While both were treated brutally, the servants’ oppression was bound by a contract which came to an end, their children would not be born indentured labourers, and they enjoyed rights and protections which the slaves did not. Despite this difference in status, the two groups realised they had common interests in fighting the British ruling class, and thus on many occasions combined forces to fight the British together. This of course greatly worried the British, who saw the united front of European indentured servants and African slaves as a genuine threat to their fabricated racial hierarchy, and to their colonial system more broadly.

To avoid cooperation between the two, colonial authorities introduced a law in Barbados in 1661 dividing labouring classes into Christians and Negroes, rather than indentured servants and slaves. Indentured servants saw their conditions improve massively, from hugely reduced punishments for disobedience, enormous increases in fines for killing servants, to rewarding servants with their freedom should they manage to catch a runaway slave. In short, the servants were integrated into an in group, while the slaves were clearly defined as the out group. This drove an enormous wedge in between the two groups. Following the introduction of this law in Barbados, other colonies such as Jamaica followed suit. The rising popularity of such laws posed a legal issue to the United Kingdom, as jurisprudence stated that baptism would enfranchise a slave, and that slavery was thus dependent on non-Christian status. To resolve this issue, more laws were passed, such as the 1681 Servant Act. This legislation replaced “Christian”, with “White” and thereby, for the first time in history, created the dichotomy between black or negro slaves, and white free men. Following this law, black slaves were denied suing for freedom on a religious basis and many colonies quickly followed suit in implementing such laws. The notion of racial whiteness spread across the Americas and shaped social relations as we know them today. For much more information and further reading I again recommend this video.

The status quo today

A few things have of course changed since the epoch of the Spanish inquisition and transatlantic slave trade. No longer is the world directly administered by a handful of European nations, yet the unequal relationship between the formerly colonising powers, i.e. the first world, and the formerly colonised countries i.e. the third world, is anything but a thing of the past. While the sun now indeed sets on the British empire, international inequalities have persisted and even worsened in recent decades. While neoliberal ideologues will claim this to be a bug rather than a feature of capitalism, I argue this to be false, and global inequality to be very much an intentional and necessary part of the capitalist system. There have been many theories of the unequal relationship between countries, from Lenin’s theory of imperialism to dependency theory and the theory of unequal exchange.

In this article I will be focussing principally on the theory of unequal exchange as formulated by Arghiri Emmanuel, since it addresses most aptly our current state of affairs in my opinion. While it would go beyond the scope of this text to explain in depth Emmanuel’s theories, I will provide a simplification. His basic idea is that one hour of labour in an underdeveloped nation is exchanged for less than an hour of labour in a developed nation, in other words, labour is being drained from the underdeveloped to the developed world. Due to neoliberal policies, capital is highly mobile around the world, whereas labour is relatively immobile, workers cannot simply move around to find wherever suits them best. Because of capital’s relatively high mobility, it will flow to places with higher rates of profit, until profit rates equalise in the competitive market. Wages however will not equalise, due to labour’s relative immobility. The cost of labour (or wages) is systematically lower in the third world, due to the structural adjustment programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund, or comprador regimes, crushing labour movements in service of their first world handlers. The third-world’s workers’ time is thus valued lower than that of the first world worker, whose wage is secure thanks to solid trade union structures and state support, making them almost a separate class, a “labour aristocracy” as Lenin would have said. If you are interested in the mathematics and the modelling of this theory, I recommend this video as a nice introduction.

I focus on this theory in particular because, in the last few years, very interesting empirical research has been conducted on the subject of value transfers, made possible thanks to large trade-databases and new digital tools. These studies’ findings are quite incredible – I will present them here. In 2018, Andrea Ricci found that value transfers from underdeveloped to developed countries rose from $704 billion (or 3.1% of world GDP) in 1990, to $3,924 billion (or 4.5% of world GDP) in 2019. In contrast, the respective amounts of total development assistance for those respective years were $59.3 billion and $165.8 billion (2018). During the 2010s, these value transfers contributed around 8% of GDP in first-world countries, while costing “value-donors”, namely south-east Asian and African countries, as much as 20% of their GDP. Another recent study focused on measuring flows of labour in the world economy. It finds that in 2021 alone, the global north appropriated 826 billion hours of labour, corresponding to €16.9 trillion in northern prices. Furthermore, it puts numbers on the labour relations between the global north and south: for work of equal skill, southern wages are 87-95% lower than in the north, meaning a software engineer based in India will make around 90% less than his German or American counterpart, doing the same work, sometimes even for the same company. Finally, while global south workers contribute 90% of the world’s labour, they receive only 21% of global income.

I bring up these facts because they are crucial to understanding how unsustainable and impossible to universalise our development model is, as it necessitates the appropriation of labour from the vast majority of humanity.

The continuing dehumanisation of the third world

We have now established that our current way of living is and has been for the last centuries, based on the appropriation of unimaginable amounts of wealth from the third world, or the global south. The hierarchisation of humanity into lower races was a necessary part of justifying this merciless bondage for economic extraction by the white race. Now we can look at how this phenomenon persists.

A racialised person today is no longer bound to be enslaved due to their phenotype, or due to their ancestors being slaves. Racism, however, is as alive today as it was over the last centuries, sometimes more subtly, but nevertheless carrying with itself its characteristic brutality. The “civilised world” enables and funds campaigns of ethnic cleansing and extermination in Palestine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, West Papua, and more. Not only that, but even inside of the core these scourges persist. In my native Austria, 76 percent of black people face racial discrimination, and indeed racist abuse is increasing across the European Union. It is important to recognise that these two facts are connected, this hatred is after all manufactured by the same actors committing and or benefitting from the aforementioned atrocities. Racism is not persistent in our societies because of some immutable trait of ours, but because it is taught anew to every generation, by those who sit on top of the social hierarchy: the owners of newspapers, TV-channels, politicians, religious leaders, etc. To quote from anthropologist Carole Nagengast: “This justifies first symbolic and then too often physical violence against [subordinates]. And that requires the implicit agreement and cooperation of ordinary nice people who have been inoculated with evil, who learn to take myths at face value, and who do not question the projects of the state in defence of a social order that requires hierarchy. Only when general consensus has been created can ordinary people (read the dominant group) actively participate in human rights abuses, explicitly support them, or turn their faces and pretend not to know even when confronted with incontrovertible evidence of them.”

Besides this system of indoctrination, there is the unfortunate fact that first world citizens, be they capitalists or not, benefit from the plunder of the global South. The much-famed Scandinavian welfare states, the British National Health Service, or Switzerland’s lauded public infrastructure would never have been possible without this unequal exchange between north and south. We must ask the unfortunate question of whether the radical change necessary to stop unequal exchange can come from the first world, or if the convenience of cheap goods as put forward by Kamala Harris, and relative safety and stability is enough to appease the people of the first world and let them watch as the majority of humanity is underdeveloped, pillaged, and killed.

Conclusion

The gist of this article is thus: regardless of political orientation (albeit with very few exceptions), relevant first world political forces still do not consider third world people worthy of consideration. Rather they are seen as things to be pitied at best, an unfortunate but inevitable fact of life and a wild “jungle” to be controlled, as the EU’s top diplomat Josep Borell puts it. They are hardly recognised as individuals, but are rather seen as faceless and mindless collectives, somehow intrinsically different to us. This is not because of evil individual leaders or populism, but because it is necessary for us to dehumanise those we destroy and exploit. The unfortunate truth is that it would hurt the bottom line of pretty much every big company if first world consumers felt genuine empathy at the plight of the majority of humanity. Therefore, capital does all it can, through politics, art, religion, etc. to keep us indifferent at best and hateful at worst. Its success is palpable and is exemplified by how mainstream forms of racism such as islamophobia are.

We must centre the third world in our analysis and consider the world from its perspective; it does after all represent the vast majority of us humans. We must reckon with such uncomfortable questions as whether international class solidarity can exist as long as some peoples benefit from the exploitation of others. And, most importantly, we, the first world, must realise that we are not the priority in world affairs.

Belgrade’s Balancing Act

by Fyodor Dmitrenko

Andrej Isakovic/AFP via Getty Images, Politico.eu

On my recent visit to Serbia in July of 2024, on the way from the airport to the centre of Belgrade alongside the stark Genex tower, I witnessed an interesting display. The highway to the centre was lined with small Serbian tricolour flags but also a stranger sight – that of a line of equally numerous blue flags with yellow stars.

While seeing EU flags in Paris or Bucharest wouldn’t be that strange, their presence in Belgrade mere blocks from the location of the Yugoslav Ministry of Defence Building damaged in the NATO bombings of 1999 seemed bizarre, especially considering many Serbs still feel lukewarm at best towards EU member states like Germany, France, and Italy who participated in the air campaign against them – a sentiment illustrated clearly by the fact that EU accession is still seen more negatively in Serbia than in their Western Balkan neighbours according to IRI, with 44% of poll respondents stating they would vote in favour of joining, compared to 89% in Kosovo and 92% in Albania more than 2 decades after the event. So, what was going on?

Unbeknownst to me, the flags had been put up for an interesting ‘trade summit’ on July 19^th between German chancellor Olaf Scholz and Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić which led to the re-opening of the Jadar valley lithium mine project in Western Serbia by British-Australian mining and refining firm Rio Tinto. According to Reuters, this project could fulfill up to 90% of Europe’s current lithium needs, a material used in the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries and thus critical to the Union’s aim of achieving net zero emissions by 2050. This also falls in line with other major EU objectives such as the current endeavour at securing more secure raw material procurement from partners – due to mistrust of Chinese suppliers and volatile supply chains owed to waning European influence in African nations like Niger – and playing catch-up to China and the US in high tech industries such as the manufacturing of electric vehicles.

I found the reopening of the mine project especially interesting given that less than 2 years ago, Serbia had shut down the project after mass protests over environmental concerns. The complete U-turn in policy has unsurprisingly raised eyebrows yet also revealed an increasing trend in Serbian politics – a desire to mend ties with the EU.

Despite the aforementioned mistrust towards the EU from the Serbian population (one further supported by a similar 2024 poll by Balkan Barometer), Vučić seems increasingly interested in developing ties, in large part due to the economic payoffs that these could yield.

The most prominent manifestations of this interest are Serbia’s repeated attempts to join the Union itself, with its first formal request being submitted on the 22^ndof December 2009. The EU granted Serbia official candidate status in 2012 following recommendations from both the European Commission and Council to do so. A further step towards closer integration has come in the form of the recently ratified Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) establishing a framework to bring the country into closer political and economic relations with the bloc.

The main drivers for this shift in policy appear to be the economic incentives offered by both membership of and outside forms of economic cooperation with the EU. For example, the EU has invested heavily in Serbia as part of official multilateral aid initiatives like the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance II (IPA II) – a financial policy tool used to support countries aspiring to join the union, with 1.5 billion Euros in grants being made available to the country between 2012 and 2022 according to the Delegation of the EU to Serbia, and significant private sector support for Serbia’s economy with the EU being Serbia’s largest trade partner with $4bn (13.2%) worth of its exports going to Germany alone in 2022 according to OECD data. Furthermore, without Serbia’s being a member of the Union, travel for Serbian nationals in the EU was made visa free from December 2009, with Serbia returning the favour shortly thereafter, making cross border exchanges significantly easier and thereby supporting labour migration and creating a system of remittances that have supported EU soft power in Serbia.

Another example of more symbolic political engagement with the EU has been Serbia’s toeing of the EU foreign policy line vis-à-vis the Russian war in Ukraine, a feat notable given Serbia’s initial support of the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. Serbia furthermore voted to suspend Russian membership of the UN human rights council in April 2022, a move which shows a general trend of Serbia’s distancing itself from Russia in favour of closer ties with the EU.

And yet cosying up to the EU doesn’t mean Serbia has abandoned ties with its traditional partners – if anything it has intensified them. This is especially true for relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The root of the recent relationship stems from the 1990s when China supported SFR Yugoslavia which would later become Serbia against the NATO bombing campaign because, as Peking University and University of California San Diego graduate Dr. Suizheng Zhao points out, it saw the NATO-backed secession of Kosovo as a dangerous precedent that could inspire armed separatism in the provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang as well. The stance of China was further intensified by the destruction of the PRC embassy in Belgrade which killed 3 Chinese nationals, and injured a further 20 others.

Since then the two have cemented their relationship through political efforts including the affirmation of a strategic partnership in 2009, which was subsequently upgraded to a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’ in 2016. This relationship and its origins were showcased recently by Chairman Xi’s visit to Belgrade in May of 2024 to commemorate the anniversary of the aforementioned NATO bombings that he said China will “never forget.”

More importantly however, China has invested heavily into economic cooperation in an official capacity with over US$10.3 billion in bilateral aid being provided between 2009 and 2021 within the China-CEEC (Central and Eastern European Countries) program alone – a whopping 70% of all spending within that initiative, and Serbia being the first country to sign a free Trade Agreement with China in October 2023, with 90% of products traded between the two parties being exempted from tariffs, 60% of which would be exempted as soon as the agreement came into effect on July 1^st 2024.

In a more unofficial, private sector capacity, Chinese firms have also invested an estimated 5.6 billion euros into the country’s economy in the last decade according to an article by Forbes Serbia published in May 2024. The latter point is especially important given that according to the same report over 1,500 companies currently operating in Serbia are majority owned by Chinese stakeholders, with Chinese entrepreneurs being involved in numerous operations including mining (‘Zijin mining’ in Bor), heavy industry (‘Hesteel’ steel making plant in Smederevo) and automotive parts (Minth factories in Šabac and Loznica).

This is all excludes the significant foreign direct investment in Serbian infrastructure including but not limited to sections of the A2 Miloš Veliki Highway linking Belgrade with the south of the country built by publicly owned Chinese construction giants like Shandong Hi-Speed Group and China Communications Construction Company (CCCC). Cumulatively these investments (both public and private) make China the single largest investor in Serbia according to China briefing, rendering it unsurprising that the two are such cordial partners.

Interestingly, however, Serbia has not yet cut ties with its longtime ally Russia despite statements supporting Ukraine in 2023. While bilateral relations are less manifest in recent years than those with China and the EU (at least in economic terms), the two nations still share relatively cordial relations.

Perhaps the most significant reason for this enduring bond stems from a long history of shared interests and support, with the Russian empire being a firm supporter of Slavic and Orthodox nationalist movements in the Balkans against the Ottoman empire as early as the formation of Serbia and other Balkan nations under the 1878 treaty of Berlin.

This support would be expanded in 1914 with Russia entering WW1 in defence of Serbia against Austrian aggression, a fact that Serbs have not forgotten with Czar Nicolas being revered in Serbia as a canonised saint. Monuments distilling the centrality of Russo-Serbian relations in Serbia’s national imagination are plentiful, especially in Belgrade, in which there lie the Church of Saint Sava and a bronze statue of the Czar unveiled in November 2014, less than 100 m away from Novi Dvor, the seat of the Serbian President) in the centre of Belgrade.

While there was a partial break in relations between the two during the cold war due to SFR Yugoslavia wishing to exert greater independence from its larger communist ally following major disagreements between Tito and Stalin in 1948, relations would improve following de-Stalinisation yet remain tepid as Yugoslavia pursued a policy of non-alignment in the cold war, staying out of Soviet organisations like the Warsaw Pact and maintaining relations with Soviet rivals like the USA.

Despite this, the modern Russo-Serbian relationship would be restored and cemented due to the collective hardship endured by the simultaneous collapse of both states in the 1990s, and the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia which Russian President Boris Yeltsin called “open aggression,” according to an article by the BBC. This contributed to the development of strong bilateral relations – a trend that Vučić has worked hard to maintain despite his increasing EU alignment.

However the current relationship between Serbia and Russia rests not only on historical, but also economic and military considerations. Russia still comprises an approximate 3.95% of Serbian exports and 7.18% of imports in 2022, with crude petroleum being Serbia’s primary import from Russia, aiding in the diversification of Serbian energy sources and thus reducing its reliance on coal and hydropower. Moreover, the Serbian Armed forces use primarily former Yugoslav and Soviet military equipment and still purchase numerous weapon systems from Russian manufacturers due to their perceived reliability and similarity to weapons already in service. In this vein, Russia has also gifted Serbia several vehicles including 30 modernised T72 tank variants, 30 upgraded BRDM-2 reconnaissance vehicles and 6 MIG 29 fighter jets to facilitate military cooperation, further underscoring Russia’s vested interest in maintaining strong bilateral relations with Serbia through their combined military ties.

Given all of this information, why the idiosyncrasy? More specifically, why is Serbia trying to have a foot in all camps, a strategy which seems at odds with its strategic interests? The simplest explanation to this seems to be that Vučić is increasingly trying to leverage Serbia’s historical connections and geographical position at the centre of the Western Balkans to make Serbia a ‘middle power’ – a sort of geopolitical conduit and client state between the EU, Russian, and Chinese blocs while asserting Serbia’s independence and deriving certain benefits, such as diversified sources of investment.

Whether this will continue to work in the future is debatable, given the increasing polarisation of the world order into geostrategic blocs like those of the EU and China and its allies, each with their own (possibly competing) supranational structures. One day Serbia may be forced to choose a side, but for now it seems set to continue the balancing act, walking a tightrope between the national interests of Russia, China, and the EU. After all, why should a nation limit itself to one partner, when it can have its cake and eat it too?

Zionism is antisemitism

“It has been said by many Christians that Christianity died at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobidor. I fear – God forbid – that my Judaism may be dying at Nablus, Dheisheh, Betein or El Khalil.” -Daniel Boyarin-

Antisemitism is the prejudice against or hatred of Jews. To this definition, the Southern Poverty Law Centre adds that antisemitism seeks to racialize the Jewish people, to ascribe certain characteristics to it as a whole. Zionism is a nationalist political ideology in favour of the creation of a Jewish state, Israel. It is now in support of that state’s continued existence.

An important aspect of Zionism is that the United Nations and many other organisations consider Israel to be engaged in settler colonialism, the practice of “carving out” a new homeland in a previously inhabited land, thereby creating what genocide scholar Patrick Wolfe calls: “a logic of elimination”. What he means by this is the need to develop a moral and practical justification for the removal of the native population, paving the way for “ethnic cleansing, genocide, and other tools of ethnocide.” Criticism of Israel and Zionism in general is thus not antisemitic whatsoever, disavowing the actions of a state does not take aim at an entire religious group, and it would certainly be antisemitic to conflate the two.

The origins of Zionism

The vision of a Jewish state in Palestine predates the 20^th and even the 19^th century. Indeed, in 1799, during his Egyptian campaign, Napoleon Bonaparte proposed Palestine as an independent Jewish state. While this project never came into fruition as Napoleon was defeated and returned to France, it was the first time Palestine was proposed to be a Jewish homeland. After this, around a century passed before the first Zionist Congress was held. As part of it, the first Zionist organisation was founded, with the objective of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. In 1917, as an Ottoman defeat in World War I seemed inevitable, and the Middle East had been secretly partitioned between France and the United Kingdom, then British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued the now infamous “Balfour Declaration”, promising British support to the Zionist endeavour. Lloyd George, British Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922 was also a strong supporter of the Zionist cause, and a friend to both Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, and Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel. Another fervent Zionist was Winston Churchill, in whose view, Zionism provided Jews “a national idea of a commanding character”.

An apparent paradox, both Arthur Balfour and Churchill were staunch antisemites. In 1905 when he was Prime Minister, Balfour called for the rejection of Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in the Russian Empire, claiming Jewish immigration to bring “undoubted evils”. Churchill’s antisemitism was even more pronounced, as he claimed Jews to engage in a “worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation” in 1920. Furthermore, it was Churchill, not the Nazis who started the antisemitic conspiracy theory of “Judeo-Bolshevism”, claiming communism to be a global Jewish plot to take over the world. Lloyd George was not so explicitly antisemitic, nevertheless he was the first of many who saw Jews as an instrument to be used to further Western interests, more on this later.

This apparent contradiction begs the question of why these fundamentally antisemitic politicians would support a Jewish state in Palestine. For Balfour, the Zionist project was a convenient answer to the “Jewish Question”, the debate in the ostensibly liberal countries of Europe dealing with the status of Jews as a minority within society. Youssef Munayyer phrases it nicely: “instead of insisting that societies accept all citizens as equals, regardless of racial or religious background, the Zionist movement offered a different answer: separation.” For Churchill, the “international Jew” was plotting to overthrow the West in line with his “Judeo-Bolshevist” conspiracy theory, and Israel would, as beforementioned, provide a national idea, which would in his opinion stop him from trying to overthrow civilisation. Lloyd George took a more pragmatic approach, avoiding the blatant antisemitism of Balfour and Churchill. In his 1939 memoir, he talks about the “war value of the Jews of the dispersal”, referring to the German mobilisation of Jews in Poland against the Russian empire during World War I. George goes on to explain that it was this “war value of the Jews” which led him to develop an interest in Weizmann. His statement is reminiscent of Joe Biden, who proclaimed in 1986 that “were there not an Israel, the USA would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region”.

We thus observe three of the most instrumental people to the Zionist effort to be motivated not by a noble effort to provide a safe haven for Jews, but by a will to rid England of Jewish people, by a strange vision of the Jew as harbinger of destruction and chaos (and a consequent need to get rid of him), and by an impetus to use Jewish people, in this case as a colonial outpost in the Middle East. In its initial phase, Zionism was opposed by both liberal and orthodox Jewish organisations in Europe, who feared that “Jewish nationalism might endanger integration into non-Jewish society and give new momentum to anti-Semitism”. Karl Kraus, a renowned Austrian Jewish journalist and writer, said in 1898: “The militant Zionists in particular succeeded in convincing Christians who had previously had no taste for anti-semitism of the sanctity of the idea of separation”.

Israel, land of the (white) Jews

According to the Israeli Basic Law passed in 2018, “The State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious, and historical right to self-determination”. The United Nations say that self-determination must involve “the rights of all peoples to pursue freely their economic, social and cultural development without outside interference”. These statements are hard to reconcile with the current status quo in Israel. There exists not only apartheid between Arabs and non-Arabs, but also a de facto racial hierarchy within the non-Arab, Jewish population of Israel.

The most flagrant example of this are the “Beta Israel”, Ethiopian Jews who were airlifted to Israel from Ethiopia after the massive operations “Moses” and “Solomon”. Around 160’000 of them live in Israel, the biggest population in the world. Hanan Chehata writes about the hatred they face in their daily lives: they are massively discriminated against in nearly all aspects of life, such as housing, employment, education, the army, and even in the practice of their religion. According to a study, 53 percent of employers preferred not to employ “Falashas” (a derogatory term for Ethiopian Jews), and 70 percent of them tended not to promote them. Out of 4’500 Ethiopians who graduate with degrees, only around 15 percent find work in their field of study. Additionally, some areas have policies of not selling housing to non-white Jewish people. “Anyone can come, but not Ethiopians”, says the owner of a building in Ashkelon. There have also been multiple instances of the country’s chief Rabbis calling black people the N-word and monkeys (imagine the pope screaming the N-word from his Vatican balcony), Benjamin Netanyahu also referred to black African immigrants as “much worse” than “severe attacks by Sinai terrorists”. White Israelis have murdered black refugees and even babies, without facing imprisonment. Finally, in a fashion typical for colonialism all over the world (Puerto Rico, Greenland, etc.), Israel forcibly sterilised Ethiopian Jewish women, a policy generally aimed at keeping specific communities from growing.

This certainly is not the only instance of Israel harming Jewish people of colour. In the 1950s, up to 5,000 Yemenite Jewish babies disappeared from their hospital beds, their mothers were told they had died, or were not informed at all, according to the lowest estimates, one in eight Yemeni Jewish babies in Israel disappeared. Soon after it was alleged that the babies were kidnapped by the Israeli state and put up for adoption or just sold to childless European Jews. Israel always denied any involvement in this matter, until 2016, when cabinet minister Tzachi Hanegbi, the senior official in charge of reviewing archival material on the matter, admitted that Yemenite babies were indeed taken from their families. In 2021, a report from the Israeli health ministry detailed its involvement in the disappearance, admitting it had helped put the babies up for adoption. Since then, the ministry has tried to prevent the public release of its report. A Knesset Committee has also admitted that medical experiments have been performed on Yemenite children, some of whom died of their consequences. In some cases, their hearts were harvested and given to American doctors who were doing research on heart disease in Yemen.

Another example of many, is the way Iraqi Jews came to Israel. Around 110,000 Jews moved from Iraq to Israel shortly after its creation, motivated by antisemitic attacks in their home countries and a promise of a better life in the new Jewish state. According to prominent Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim, Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, carried out several attacks against Jews in Iraq, involving bombings among other things. Thus, Israel played a major part in destroying the millennia-old Jewish communities of middle eastern countries such as Iraq.

So, we can certainly say that Israel is not a country for all Jews, rather it is a place for white, European Jews. Who better to exemplify this than one of the most influent white European Jewish intellectuals of the last century, Hannah Arendt. A Jerusalem Post article details Arendt’s visit to Israel: “Describing Israel, Arendt noted that the country had at its top German judges of whom she approved as the “best of German Jewry.” Below them were prosecuting attorneys, one of whom, a Galician Jew, was “still European,” she noted. “Everything is organized by the Israeli police force which gives me the creeps. It speaks only Hebrew and looks Arabic. Some downright brutes among them. They obey any order. Outside the courthouse doors the oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country.” Israel as a colonial entity cannot and does not want to rid itself of white supremacy, people of colour will never be safe there, even if they are Jewish.

They may be antisemitic, but at least they are with us…

A third and equally relevant part of Zionist antisemitism is the movement’s alliance and cooperation with far right and antisemitic organisations ever since the movement’s inception. Even before Israel gained independence, it worked together with none other than Nazi Germany. The Haavara Agreement was a treaty between the Zionist movement in Palestine and the NSDAP, facilitating the migration of German Jews from Germany to Palestine. This was financed by the sale of the property of German Jews, the proceeds of which paid for essential (German-produced) goods. At this time, Nazi Germany was being boycotted by Jewish organisations, businesses, and other groups all over the world, posing a potential threat to the still fragile fascist state, yet the Zionists ignored this boycott and cooperated with it regardless, boosting the German economy.

In the present day, Israeli Zionists have again found strange bedfellows. Their partners and allies include leaders such as Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán, and Mateusz Morawiecki. Former Italian interior minister Salvini is very straightforward about his affinity for CasaPound, a neo-fascist political organisation, whose members he has openly worked with. Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, has publicly called Miklós Horthy, the country’s World War II leader, a “great statesman”. The Horthy government was a member of the Axis Powers and enacted antisemitic legislature leading to the deportation of around 440,000 Jews. Israel's Netanyahu criticised for wooing Hungary's far-right prime minister Orbán | The Independent | The Independent

Morawiecki, the Polish Prime Minister actively tried to illegalise the claim that Polish people and officials collaborated in the Holocaust, a form of Holocaust revisionism: “Those who say that Poland may be responsible for the crimes of World War II deserve jail terms”. These are only a few examples of the dubious relations Israel maintains with antisemites around the world, there are too many instances to list here. This reaching out has not come without consequences. The American far-right has picked up on the amicable tone set forth by Israel and capitalises on it. Prominent American neo-Nazi and self-proclaimed “White Nationalist” Richard Spencer has called himself a “White Zionist” and has given Israel as an example of an “ethnostate” he would like to see implemented in the USA. Stephen Bannon, the former White House chief strategist under Donald Trump, who ran the far-right media-outlet Breitbart News, known for its white supremacist and conspiratorial positions and who complained about Jews in his daughter’s school, and Sebastian Gorka, a media host on the far right network Newsmax and a former Trump White House official, who is a proud supporter of the Vitézi Rend, a fascist Hungarian organisation, both consider themselves proud Zionists.

Instead of using their considerable power to act against threats on Jewish lives all over the world, Israel actively endangers them, by working with and promoting, far-right, fascist, and ethnonationalist forces. It would seem that promoting nationalism and short-term political gain is more important to Israel than to protect Jewish lives around the world.

Conclusion

The notion that Israel is a safe haven for all Jews can safely be discarded after considering all the above. While it would be absurd to claim Israel to be antisemitic in the way Nazi Germany was antisemitic, it nevertheless cannot be denied that Zionism has deeply antisemitic roots, and only ever gained the indispensable support of European powers because they saw Zionism as a way to eject their Jewish populations. Furthermore, there is no doubt that systems exist within the country that exclude and discriminate against a large number of Jews, and the Israeli state openly and proudly works together with antisemites (who are not so unlike Nazi Germany) internationally. A more logical and historically consistent perspective would be that Israel is a settler colony following a long European tradition. As such it is necessarily obsessed with creating a settler in-group, most often a racial one. In Israel’s case that is not white people, as was the case in Canada, Australia, etc., but the Jewish people. Not all Jewish people though, as we have seen. Just as South Africa had the Population Registration Act, Israel has the Law of Return. In both cases, “racial experts” decided who got to be part of the in-group, i.e. who got to be White, or Jewish. In Israel it is the orthodox Rabbis (yes, the notoriously racist ones), who decide singlehandedly who gets to be Jewish and who does not. Thus, Jewishness is cynically used to police Israeli society, the aforementioned Ethiopian Jews for example are sometimes outright refused to be Jewish.

This issue is now more relevant as ever, as dissent to Israel’s genocide in Gaza is growing in the Jewish Diaspora all around the world, and Israeli media is calling for their exclusion from the Jewish community at large. A state committing the worst crimes possible cannot possibly claim to represent a large and heterogenous group of people without generalising them, ascribing certain characteristics to them as a whole and therefore racializing them. This, next to the obvious hatred brought against non-white Jews, is what makes Israel and Zionism antisemitic.

By Lino BATTIN

G2+1= pizza!

HD organizes conference with Dean Stéphanie Balme to discuss the role of Europe in Taiwan Strait Sovereignty issue

“In Le Havre, I feel like home”. With this kind remark, Stéphanie Balme began her speech to an Amphi crowded with students who listened attentively, a slice of pizza in their hands, as though “they were in a movie”, as the speaker said.