The conflict in the middle east is a much different case from the one in Central Europe. The main difference is related to the one that the Indian Foreign Minister has referred to on several occasions: the mistaken belief that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems.

Not only does he have a point, but as a corollary, I would add that Europe’s solutions are not the world’s solutions.

The Real, the Imagined and the Imaginary

The states of Central Europe—and of Europe in general—all have an historic existence either as actual states with a history going back for over a thousand years, or as what Woodrow Wilson called the “peoples” of the region in his Fourteen Points. In both cases, their nationalism was real. By that I mean it was based on a number of concrete (measurable) factors, which the older German phrase blood and soil expressed much more concretely than the arguments of 19^th century academics with their emphasis on manifestations of so-called High Culture, mostly confined to words.

I say that because place, whch was really all what soil meant, was an important element. Historically most European states had lots of inhabitants with their own languages, cultural patterns, and so forth, but over time, they came to define their identity as national.

I believe the basic error intellectuals of various persuasions made was in not realizing that just as many Europeans were effectively bi-lingual, they could maintain multiple cultural identities.

Then there is what Benedict Anderson calls an imagined community, in his seminal study of the same name. His specialization was primarily in southeast Asia, so my observation is that he fell into a version of the same trap as earlier Europeans. That is, generalizing from the case in one geographic area to a universal principle.

However, he was definitely on to something, because a goodly part of the success of Marxism-Leninism lay in its creation of an imagined community. One that did not yet exist, but could be imagined.

By contrast, almost all of the countries in the Middle East, in their present configuration, are of extremely recent origin. Basically, they’re artificial constructs created by the victors at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. In fact—and again I’m simplifying—they’re pretty much like Czecho-Slovakia and Yugo-slavia. In case you missed this, neither state now exists.

The idea of a state called Palestine is simply another example. To appropriate Profesor Anderson’s phrase, it’s not an imagined community, it’s an imaginary community. Insofar as it exists, it does so as a part of a minority sect of Islam, the Shia, whose adherents exist in reasonable numbers in Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon and elsewhere, and who have, largely thanks to American blundering in the 1970s, assumed control over Iran.

In other words, it’s a religious movement whose stated aim is the establishment of a Shia theocracy over the region and the destruction of Israel.

But here’s a somewhat different way to look at it. I think Anderson’s claim about the power of imagined communities makes a great deal of sense, the success Leninism- Stalinism being an excellent example. And as evidence of its power—the power of an imagined community—there’s not much point in explaining that it won’t work, it can’t work, and it has never worked. Their adherents and followers simply reply that’s it never really been tried. The power of the imagined.

But here’s the thing. An imagined community has such a powerful hold on people because it only exists in the future; in the perpetial present it’s in the mind. But by that logic, an imaginary community exercises a much greater hold, precisely because it not only doesn’t exist, it can’t exist.

Negotiations, in the usual sense of the term, are therefore impossible. However, that by no means indicates there’s no solution. In fact the solution is not all that difficult.

The chief difficulty is the is the sympathies people who believe in imagined communities have for those who believe in imaginary ones. At bottom, there’s not much difference between the notions of the spiritual leaders of the Shia and those of the leaders of the survivors, or relics, of Socialism. The line between imagined and imaginary is a very fine one indeed.

Solutions

When I started writing about the Hamas invasion of Israel, I made the point that there was no way criminal gangs could prevail against the modern state. The state would respond by decapitation, thus revealing one of the two fundamental weaknesses of gangs, their dependence on leaders.

The other weakness was that by definition they lacked the means of production necessary to sustain themselves in a prolonged conflict, as that capability was inherently an exclusive property of the definition of the state.

As the war progressed, the various Shia gangs slowly began to experience the first part of that reality. For example, in October 2023, the IDF identified some 54 Hamas leaders Right now, there are only half a dozen left in Gaza, and another six or eight outside it. Most of the Hezbollah leadership is gone. To a lesser but not trivial degree, that’s true of the leadership in Iran and its allies in Syria.

Over the decades, all of the various gangs had accumulated an impressive arsenal, but they lack the means to replace those losses. More importantly, none of them have been able to defend themselves against Israel’s airpower.

The Houthi, isolated by geography and supplied (and paid) by Iran, felt themselves capable of continuing, but that was an illusion, as they’re gradually beginning to discover. Now that the United States has begun a consistent pattern of air strikes in Yemen.

Practically speaking, each ballistic missile they launch is one less missile they have, and the number of missiles remaining is finite. Moreover, each launch reveals a location, i.e., both a target and a storage depot, as is tranporting the missile to the launch site.

Curiously there’s an odd sort of logic here: adherents of an imaginary community relying on the imaginary success of missiles—and forgetting about the very real effectiveness of airpower.

To put all of the above together, just because the “European” solution of negotiation doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean the problem can’t be solved. Eliminate the leaders, destroy the remaining weapons still in their hands, and their aims, their desires, are irrelevant.

That’s not going to happen overnight, but the extinction process is already pretty far along

There are three obstacles to this solution, so I’ll sketch them out.

The First Obstacle: Confusion

What all three have in common really goes back to the earlier distinctions I made regarding imagined and imaginary, and not just to the “European” fiction that all problems can be solved by negotiation.

The first imaginary construct consists of believing that categorizing someone as a “fanatic” precludes rationality, so it’s impossible to deal with them, or anyway to trust them. Thus, for example, arguing that Putin is a fanatical communist so it’s impossible to negotiate with him

Western intellectuals are prone to this idea, which is usually accompanied by a certain obliviousness, i.e., clinging to the belief in the imagined community fabulated by Marxism-Leninism.

But it also rests on entirely erroneous notions both about evil and personality. To be blunt, the reason the wicked are so successful is they’re intelligent and extremely rational in executing their aims.

Take serial killers, for example. Now I think (or hope) that we can all agree that a man who derives gratification from preying on complete strangers, torturing them, having sex with them (or their corpses), and even eating them in some cases, is either insane or evil.

But his success is proof that he’s quite capable of rationality, since the fact that the category exists means he’s successful at it. In fact, someone who manages to accumulate dozens of victims by definition is very clever. His insanity only refers to his needs (or desires, or aims).

So although I’m by no means disputing that men like Khamenei and Nasrallah and Putin are fanatics, that by no means is to imply they can’t make the same cost-benefit analysis as any intelligent person. You smply have to create a situation where they weigh the reality of the actual cost (their death) to the benefit (continuing their behavior). You simply have to make them see that’s the choice.

I’m not ignoring the difficulties of making them see that, but it’s simply a matter of willpower. It’s not some complex and insolvable problem.

The Fine Line Between Imagined and Imaginary

Today, a great many otherwise not unintelligent people, or what Robert L. Stevenson called the more cultivated among the ignorant, are firmly convinced that not only is the imagined community of Lenism-Stalinism a desirable goal but that it’s possible to achieve.

Moreover, inherent in those beliefs is a dualism: the just and beneficnet utopia of this particular imagined community as the oppressive and unjust state of the world.

So, logically enough, they’re blind to to the existence of imaginary communities. Those can’t possibly exist, because they mustn’t exist.

We can observe this same dualistic blindness in Stalin. In a conversation with the Montenegrin communist Milovan Djias, he observed that

Nation, you already know what it is: the product of capitalism with given characteristics. And people, these are the workingmen of a given nation, that is, workingmen of the same language, culture, customs.

And to a great extent Stalin’s simple definition of nation (and nationalism) still holds among intellectuals of all persuasions, who only use the term as a form of derogation.

I would point to that definition as suggesting that Stalin was much more astute than either Lenin or his followers.

But then the wily Ossetian probably assumed that given all the national groups he had basically wiped out, his definition was pretty sound. As we shall see, Stalin certainly did his best to elimnate anyone who espoused the older definition, particularly in Poland and Ukraine.

But pretty much regardless of whether your definition of Capitalism is like Stalin’s or not, imaginary communities aren’t, because they don’t possess the “workingmen” he and Lenin posited. I should add here, for the sake of precision, or clarification, that their definition explicitly excluded the peasantry—agricultural workers of various kinds. Like most nineteenth century intellectuals, their understanding of basic agriculture was about like one of out house cat’s. Where does your food come from? My food bowl.

Hmm, now that I’ve made that comparison, a cat’s understsanding of where food comes from is far superior to that of humans like Malthus or Engels, because once she’s outside, she not only knows what’s food, but how to procure it.

The Other Slippery Line>

In their desire to push the power of the imagined community, the adherents of Bolshevism, like their intellectual ancestors in the past, created an imaginary community: their version of the past, whose only resemblance to the one that actually existed was geography. The Bolsheviks not only created that largely fictitious entity, but demanded it become the truth, and insofar as possible, they destroyed all the evidence to the contrary.

So in the Soviet Union, whole categories of artists (novelists, paonters, photographers) were cast into the Memory Hole, since in a variety of ways what they wrote would allow the reader a glimpse of the, in this case real, Russia of 1800 or 1900.

Yet another reason why people who believed in the imagined community posited by Stalinism-Leninism (or its earlier antecedents) were so susceptible to the imaginary communities of the Middle East. They had either already created, or were in the process of doing to their own countries what the Bolsheviks had done to Russia.

If we accept that insisting on facts that can’t be demonstrated is not a sign of mental health, rather it is simply yet another manifestation of what Hegel and Goethe agreed was a mental illness, you have to wonder.

Just as there’a fine line between imagined and imaginary, there’s one here.

Israel’s Basic Error

To be blunt, the October invasion happened because a significant percentage of Israel’s population simply replicated this same curious blindness. No surprise, since the people who settled there were mostly from the areas where the same dualism either persisted or flourished.

Built in to that view was the tenth of Leon Daudet’s Twenty-two Stupidites of the Nineteenth Century:

It is the states that are fighting. The peoples are always ready to agree.

A perfect example of the failure to distinguish between the real and the imagined. Because it leads to a fatal confusion, or a denial of imaginary communities such as the Shia theocracy, whose continued existence was in itself a product of the failure in the larger community.

And that in turns leads to absurd belief that the commonality means that the European solution to conflict resolution is negotiations, which explains why there is still an active minority in Israel insisting that their government is at fault for not securing the release of the hostages.

In Conclusion

The above seems rather pessimistic, and you’re welcome to interpret it that way. But that’s to lose sight of what I said about the solution. When Alexander the Great was confronted with the Gordian Knot, which among other things, is an excellent metaphor for complex problems difficult of solution, he didn’t waste his time unraveling it. He drew his sword and cut it.

Not all complex problem require laborious and complicated solutions.