"I'm begging you, let me kill him" - Notes on the Horror of 10/7
Thomas Maul's Commentary on the End of Civilization as we know it
I once had a terrible flight with class 3 clear air turbulences on which I was convinced I was going to die and never see my family again. This conviction persisted continuously for about forty-five minutes. During these minutes, a switch had been moved. My brain had been re-wired. I don’t know how my co-passengers, especially the male ones who had been screaming with fear throughout the flight, while the women only wept silently, felt when they finally got home. To me, a “that was a pretty bumpy flight” was how I accounted for this experience at first. Later, I could not get on a plane again. I had severe insomnia and panic attacks weeks before my next flight and chose to take the train, or not go anywhere far at all for years.
It took almost two years, several misled “flight anxiety” trainings and professional coaching until, accidentally, a psychiatrist diagnosed me with PTSD. I immediately went into therapy. What would have happened if I had never been diagnosed?
Trauma is something that manifests itself in retrospect, and clearly isn’t always detected. It seems strange that collective trauma that one would think is much easier detected – through narration, direct exchange, news headlines – is often buried under heaps of other information and cannot be so easily discerned. When on October 7th, 2023, the news broke that Hamas and Palestinian “civilians” broke into Israeli families’ homes, and tortured, butchered, slaughtered, burned their 1500 Jewish victims, and kidnapped several hundreds, children and babies among them, everyone immediately prepared for Israeli retribution. The Israeli military operation, as it is ongoing, received more media attention than the attacks that let to them. In this line of events, the actual violence that, maybe not obvious to everyone yet, will have caused trauma in retrospect, was buried under the rubble of Gazan military infrastructure, or “hospitals” and “schools”, as it is known to the mass public.
My friend and author Thomas Maul has recently sent me a small article dedicated to understanding the civilizational rupture and the trauma that the 10/7 pogrom against Israeli civilians has caused, which I am happy to reproduce in English translation below. I will not add a link to the footage that he refers to. I made the mistake of clicking on a website that assembles some of the videos and photos that Hamas and their sympathizers made of the process of torturing and killing their victims. Believe me that you don’t want to see any of it. Images have a specific, uncanny power. In order to understand, however, and maybe, if we’re lucky and humble enough, to confront this trauma, pieces of a transcript of an ongoing killing will be reproduced below. The fact that the footage is available to the public without so much as a trigger warning while the Princeton library edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason contains a trigger warning on its cover is itself a symptom of the current civilizational rupture.
[The following is a translation of a text to be found at https://www.thomasmaul.de/2023/11/ich-flehe-dich-lass-mich-ihn-toten.html]
Among the most disturbing footage of the massacre on 7 October, which is also available to the general public, is the murder of a Thai worker by Palestinian "civilians". It is a 47-second film sequence from the mobile phone of one of the perpetrators. Even only the soundtrack tells of incomprehensible barbarity. The voices come from various men grouped around the victim lying on his back on the ground, bleeding and losing consciousness. Excerpts: "May history bear witness that this is the first person I have ever killed" - "Give me a knife, give me a knife" - "I swear I am the one who will kill him" - "I, I" - "I beg you, let me kill him" - "I swear I will cut off his head" - "I, I, I beg you, let me kill him" - "Allahu Akbar".
Now one of the men hits the victim with a spade. Another shouts: "Give it to me, give it to me". "Take a photo of it, he's a Jew, take a photo of it," says the next man, before he begins to strike the victim's neck with eight blows with the spade, accompanying each blow with cries of "Allahu Akbar". Then he throws the spade at the victim. "Let history be a witness!"
In fact, the sequence exemplifies a historically new dimension of anti-Semitic murder, moments in which the Islamist work of extermination differs from that of the National Socialists.
“Cheerful sadism”
The first moment is "cheerful sadism". The phrase was coined by Lord Weidenfeld. The British journalist, publisher, and diplomat of Austrian-Jewish origin, who died on 20 January 2016 at the age of 96, had fled from the Nazis to England in the 1930s. In one of his last interviews - for the German Die Welt am Sonntag in December 2015 ("In the lowest circle of hell") - he said:
"The Nazis organised the extermination of their enemies, first and foremost the Jews, as an industrial measure. It was a disgusting, cold murder without much emotion. The Bolsheviks killed millions anonymously in organised famines, murderous resettlements, and executions. Horrific enough. But now these jihadists come along as cheerful sadists and also declare war on the liberal way of life. What are they doing? They behead and castrate their victims, ravish women at will, crucify people and systematically mutilate them - all with obscene sexual pleasure. For me, this is morally the lowest level of humanity."
What George Weidenfeld said at the time about ISIS also applies to 10/7. The obscene sexual pleasure, which of course did not play no role at all in the Holocaust, but was not central either, is an essential moment of jihadist horror: the perpetrator enjoys the physical proximity to the victim in the bloodbath, in the literal slaughter.
The Display of Barbarism
The second moment is the display of barbarism. The murderers document their barbaric actions in photos or video footage and disseminate them via social media. In doing so, they not only cause fear and horror, they not only torment the relatives of the victims, they also brag about their deeds and advertise their cause in order to recruit new followers and accomplices. Douglas Murray recently drew attention to this moment in a much-discussed interview.[1] This is another way in which the Islamists differ from the historical Nazis, who in fact tried to hide the genocide of the Jews from their own people and the world. Perhaps not so much because the Nazis - as Murray said - were ashamed of their deeds, while the Hamas terrorists and civilians involved act shamelessly. It is more likely that the Nazis knew, due to their Christian and/or civil socialisation, that they were transgressing a boundary, that they were transgressing every conscience. This is what is meant when it is said that the Nazis have both escaped and have their roots in civilisation. Since the "Orient", on the other hand, was largely spared such Christian-bourgeois civilisation (in the sense of Norbert Elias), the "disinhibited" barbarism of the jihadists can be described as a regression, if at all, a regression from a lower level of socialisation.
Archaism and Modernity
The Nazis replaced the traditional pogrom - at least in its tendency - with a bureaucratisation, industrialisation and delegation of extermination, which they camouflaged in terms of language and location, for which they only marginally employed sadists – to the exclusion of the population, who knew little about it and were expressly not supposed to take part in the murder. In the perverse self-image of the National Socialist elite, the extermination of the Jews was also a kind of burden that one took upon oneself for the good of humanity. It was something that one had to struggle with and overcome – indeed, the heroic aspect consisted precisely in the steadfastness with which one endured the horror that one had set in motion. (This becomes clear in Himmler's Posen speeches, in the pride of having "remained decent" in what one had to do).
The ideology of overcoming oneself ("great jihad") applies less to the murder of others, which one enjoys and does not endure, than to the desire for one's own death directly in the act of the suicide attack or indirectly in the deliberately provoked Israeli reaction.
"Propaganda of the deed" and collaboration
The combination of archaism and modernity works differently for the Islamists than for the historical Nazis. Hamas combines the classic pogrom involving "civilians" – escalated to the pure bestiality – with state-of-the-art technology: cyber infrastructure to overcome border fences, smartphones, bodycams and social media for the monstrous version of their "propaganda of the deed".
The similarities and differences between the historical Nazis and Hamas do not necessarily lead to the conclusion that Lord Weidenfeld has drawn in the Welt interview that the jihadists are "worse" than the Nazis.
Something else should be decisive for the friends of civilisation: if the apologetic of the – no less false – historical appeasement with the historical Nazis, that one “simply could not have imagined the extent of the horror”, at least still testifies to something like naïve faith in civilisation, today's appeasement with Islamism seems to be an expression of civilisation fatigue. What's more, since Hamas and its supporters (as well as ISIS) publicly celebrate the anti-Semitic bloodlust, every appeasement, and every obstruction of the Israeli military operation becomes an act of collaboration through complicity.