We have all seen it, perhaps without knowing what we were witnessing, and maybe without those

engaged in the activity understanding it very much either. The phenomenon is captured in a quote from
Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism: “The antisemites who called themselves patriots
introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of
one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.” Instances from current events are so
myriad it is worth suspecting they are related, and asking why:

Jeremy Corbyn, the leftist British politician, stubbornly refused to condemn civic and humanitarian
abuses by then-Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in 2017 despite the acts being widely shared on
video, instead employing a tactic familiar from lax Western statements on terrorism against Israel,
denouncing “violence done by all sides.” The antisemitic wave of social media posts that Kanye West
started in the Fall of 2022 also saw NBA player Kyrie Irving share content including Holocaust denial and
the anti-Jewish theology of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement. After a brief suspension, he returned
to play in a game where hundreds of Black Hebrew Israelite cult members lined up outside the Barclays
arena in Brooklyn, New York, to menace Jewish passersby and distribute propaganda. Out of racial
solidarity, NBA great Isaiah Thomas approvingly tweeted, “Let it be known” at a picture of the scene.
Kyrie Irving actually won the fan-voted NBA Handle of the Year award this year, and in response the
outspoken NFL player Dez Bryant tweeted that “y’all owe this man an apology” at the imaginary
tormentors who were mysteriously numerous enough to persecute Irving but not enough to deny him a
popularity trophy. Several decades earlier in 1970, in a moment that is now legendary in the history of
American television, the Governor of the US State of Georgia, Lester Maddox, engaged in a debate on
the Dick Cavett Show with NFL star Jim Brown concerning racism and segregation in the American South,
wherein Maddox cleverly and angrily refused to admit that a single white resident of his state or his
region could conceivably be a racist toward black people, ultimately storming off the set of the show.
While Lester Maddox himself never witnessed the lynching of a black man by his fellow white
Southerners, the Palestinian-American US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was unashamedly silent when
asked repeatedly and on video by a reporter to condemn the Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7,
2023, even when the reporter pointedly, insistently mentioned the most graphic atrocities Hamas
committed. Examples of Muslims ignoring such pleas to condemn Hamas and other Islamist terrorists
have been so pervasive for so long that even in Muslim communities in Western countries, mainstream
spokespeople with connections to senior politicians openly celebrated the October 7 attacks, and Nazi
and Communist conspiracy theories are the norm. Western sympathizers with radical Islamists have
proven that they as well will project responsibility onto the targets of Muslim political violence, no
matter how atrocious the behavior that jihadist terrorists commit, for instance in the case of anarchists
and other leftists in America denying that Hamas committed rapes on October 7, 2023, or a Vox article
in 2015 that systematically excused the murder of more than 100 children in a suicide bombing in
Pakistan. After the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, Noam Chomsky, perhaps the most
authoritative foreign policy commentator of the American far left, fell into the familiar pattern of
plucking a previous supposed American sin (a small US military action against Osama bin Laden in Sudan
three years earlier) from its proper obscurity in considering motives for 9/11, positing it as an
explanation he knew his readership would find the right combination of esoteric and comfortable. Even
if the search for a past provocation finds no more obvious evidence, some Western leftists can
confoundingly cling to their doctrine of collective original sin, as when a nonwhite police officer harming
a black suspect is attributed to the “the complexity of institutional racism.”
From whence comes this false claim that the members of one’s own group (or the group with which one
sympathizes) not only did not do something wrong, but could not do something wrong? This tendency is
neither denial nor projection, but it is somehow both. For instance, antisemites simultaneously will not
admit that Hamas committed atrocities on October 7, 2023, and will use familiar tropes like
“occupation” to rationalize the attack. Some “9/11 truthers” can say that the attacks never happened or
were an “inside job” and at the same time that the West provoked them. There is also no attempt to
hide or privately correct the behavior of which a group have been accused—as in “sweeping it under the
rug”—by those who hold this odd belief that their side is ontologically sinless. Rather than shame or
ostracization, evil deeds bring pride, prestige, and even tremendous power to those who commit them,
among those of their fellows who have such a notion. Yahya Sinwar was elected the leader of Hamas in
Gaza after earning a reputation for cruelty even with fellow terrorists, and the American Black Lives
Matter activists repurposed as their martyr George Floyd, a man who held his gun to a woman’s
stomach while his accomplices robbed her house (perhaps not coincidentally, during an interview, Yahya
Sinwar upheld George Floyd as a victim of American racism). Across all of their glaring ethical
contradictions and their complete lack of inductive sense, one factor unites all of the claims previously
mentioned, which imply that one’s belonged group is morally perfect; the key is not in space, but in
time, more exactly not in any actual sense of absoluteness, but in one of finality: each of the arguments
above come from commentators whose nation, tribe, or other organized polity refuse to admit that they
lost an armed conflict. The implication of a perfect collective self is just an unconscious, and effective,
disguise for this deeper sense of defeat.

In some cases, the connection is clearer. Muslims who justify jihadist terror attacks are avoiding
admitting that the military conquest of non-Muslims that their religion prophecies stopped and has
since been reversed (beginning with the halting of the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683). The defeat of the
Confederacy in the American Civil War 1865 wasn’t accepted culturally in the American South, resulting
not only in slogans like “The South Will Rise Again,” but also in the ethical narcissism of Lester Maddox
and others who would not permit the very mention of racism by whites. In other cases, the connection
is vaguer: the Black Lives Matter movement grew by casting criminals as martyrs right when “The 1619
Project” asserted the revisionist narrative that the United States was founded on black slavery. Properly
understood, both developments are meant not to elevate the painful memory of the Transatlantic slave
trade and much ensuing racism against African-Americans, but to suppress it. Westerners like Noam
Chomsky—who blame any non-Western misdeed on a supposed prior Western provocation—can be
seen as expressing a forlorn, sublimated nostalgia for the Colonial era, when control over their
countries’ former Colonial subjects was assured. In the domestic politics of both West and East, might
the mysterious insistence that “real Communism has never been tried” reflect that the Cold War never
became “hot,” meaning that the United States and NATO didn’t disprove the Communist prediction of
worldwide Marxist “revolution” by vanquishing the Soviet Union (or the People’s Republic of China) in a
military conflict? What is modern environmentalism, with its airy term “The Environment” and its
unfalsifiable concept of “Climate Change (as opposed to Global Warming),” but an opaque
nonacceptance of the fact that, even after industrialization, man has failed to conquer nature? The
continuing refusal of Arab and Muslim nations to admit defeat in the various wars to Israel has evinced
such staying power that it affects Israel’s own military doctrines and even Israeli views of Judaism: in
particular, the Israeli government have justified hugely lopsided hostage exchanges (i.e. over 1,000
terrorists for one hostage) by culling the Jewish concepts of “life” and “preserving the Divine Breath
(Pikuach Nefesh)” from their suitable Medieval contexts—when the Jewish people did not have an
armed defense—and turning them into their ideal Platonic opposites, going so far as to create the
“Hannibal Protocol,” wherein the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are ordered to fire indiscriminately at and
kill any hostages who are still in the process of being taken by their captors so that the Israeli
government would not have to agree on any more unequal hostage deals.

The refusal to admit military defeat persists so ubiquitously because the idea of collective moral
flawlessness appeals not only to the vanquished, but to the victors and everyone else, too. Just as
radical Islamists, White Supremacists, and others simultaneously praise and deny immoral behavior by
members of their own groups, so too does mainstream Western thought proudly employ famous
concepts whose very practitioners may admit run contrary to evidence and even thought itself, and it is
worth wondering whether those high ideas can also be traced to thinkers whose societies would not
admit they lost, or did not win, a war. Could the Enlightenment concept of a “Tabula Rasa (blank slate),”
with its purposeful inconclusiveness, have originated from the dashed hopes of its era, when the Peace
of Westphalia in 1648 ended wars between Protestants and Catholics without either party being able to
declare victory for their ultimate truth? In more modern times, Hannah Arendt’s conception of the
“banality of evil” gave an inaccurate description of the leading Nazi Adolf Eichman based on
observations of his normal behavior outside of committing sadistic deeds, but what if it also reflects the
time when Arendt wrote of it, when Mutually-Assured Destruction by nuclear weapons at the hands of
the warring Superpowers in the United States and the Soviet Union robbed martial heroism of its valor
and, thus, evil, of its menace? At the beginning of ideas, Socrates, on trial in Athens for the frustratingly
contrarian “method” that is his namesake (on the grounds that it can make the weaker argument
appear correct in a debate), when asked what his punishment should be, gave an answer that is as
suggestive as it must have been provocative: he demanded the privileges received by Olympic athletes
and Athenian soldiers returning from the Peloponnesian War—a war in which he fought, and which his
nation lost.

William Faulkner, the author from the American South, wrote the following about the Battle of
Gettysburg, the decisive battle which turned the tide in the American Civil War toward victory for the
Union, “It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten
thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it,
there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in
position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already
loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably
and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the
balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still
time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than
Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we
have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen year-old boy
to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania,
Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable
victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a
quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn
back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world’s roaring
rim.” We all apparently imagine ourselves on the battlefield, waiting to resolve questions large and
small, new and old, private and public, by charging into a promised future time that resembles a past
place where, we hope, we once lived. Postmodern thinking about war, which eschews military victory
or denies defeat—most recently calls for a ceasefire in Gaza—have exposed the strange sense of
perfectionism that develops in some of our heads whenever history is not written by the winners.