In their meticulously documented and highly influential book “Slave Nation” (2006), Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen argue with quite considerable force that the United States was essentially founded on the promise of maintaining the legality of slavery in the face of the growing political climate in Britain where there had been a clear indication of abolishing the despicable practice as early as 1772 (although slave ownership would retain its legal status in Britain until 1833). In other words, the War of Independence against Britain was fought primarily to prevent a potential imposition of a ban on slavery, according to the authors. A reviewer noted that, “Thomas Jefferson relied on this understanding when carefully crafting the stirring words of the Declaration of Independence.” Of course, it was the same Jefferson who, in his 1820 letter to John Holmes on the same topic, expressed his worry that “as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go,” lamenting that “justice is in one scale and self-preservation in the other.”
The false dichotomy of justice and self-preservation was not unique to Jefferson’s worldview from 200 years ago, of course. In fact, it is pretty much alive today, as evidenced by the rather wide circulation of such absurd terms as “suicidal empathy.” Despite lacking substance and meaning, the term is frequently utilized to justify defending the indefensible, as long as doing so is perceived to ensure self-preservation. The obvious question is then this: What exactly is preserved when it is done at the cost of defending the indefensible? What would be left of the self when preserved this way?
One of the more perverse “guardians of Western civilization,” Gad Saad, coined this bizarre term and has been throwing it around whenever he finds it necessary to criticize those who remain sentient enough to show at least minimal concern for the pain of others, particularly that of Palestinians. Saad’s passionate hatred of Muslims (and not really of Islam in the abstract) seems to be the driving factor behind his obsession with the term. This ought not to surprise us, though, for the notion of “suicidal empathy” has been formulated in explicitly xenophobic terms, where the “xenos” (i.e., the other) is often portrayed as some ordinary Muslim person – the apparent nemesis of Saad’s “Western civilization.”
Another savior of that mythical ideal of “Western civilization,” Elon Musk, has amplified the use of this strange term lately, describing the imagined common tendency toward “suicidal empathy” as “a civilizational risk.” For him, this “wrong” form of empathy has been “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” When he made this point, he was presumably referring to the same kind of weakness that the Israeli Prime Minister had mentioned in a bizarre statement from a few years ago: “The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end, peace is made with the strong.”
Of course, we realize that none of this is to be taken seriously. The introduction of such absurd terms as “suicidal empathy” serves the sole purpose of establishing the “intellectual” foundation of barbarism – quite the opposite of any kind of “tion,” indeed. The false dichotomy of justice and self-preservation is just that – a false dichotomy. In the immediate aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement that virtually ended the decades-long conflict in Northern Ireland, for instance, a highly esteemed figure among Northern Irish Protestants, Ian Paisley, had described the agreed-upon “justice” as “a prelude to genocide.” For him, too, the prevailing justice would put self-preservation in danger. Yet nobody in their right mind can claim today that there has been a genocide in Northern Ireland at least since the 1990s. (The same was true of the colonists who feared that, if Black people had gotten the right to vote and could consequently form a “Black government,” their lives would be in mortal danger.)
Despite lacking in substance and meaning as discussed, the notion of “suicidal empathy” appears to have proven an invaluable tool of propaganda, offering psychopaths a quasi-rational basis for fear to replace the otherwise inevitable feeling of guilt. What else could provide a shield strong enough to protect them from acknowledging that they have been committing grave sins on a daily basis for a very long time? When the former U.S. President Joe Biden described the motives of Hamas as “ancient desires to wipe the Jewish people off the face of the earth,” he was appealing to the same strategy: murder or get murdered.
It is worth noting, however, that Jefferson’s “wolves” were the slaves, not the natives of the land. The false dichotomy would not even arise in the latter case. They had already been annihilated; if they were lucky enough to survive, they would surely do well not to complain too much. They had been diminished in number and power so dramatically that it was practically impossible for them to reclaim what was once theirs. And it was virtually impossible to imagine that they would seize the land as theirs and remind everyone else that they had not been brought there from somewhere else. Certainly, the colonists would never allow this to happen, i.e., that they would not put “justice” in one of the scales, even only for “self-preservation” to triumph over it in the end. And such is the situation in Palestine today.