April 9, 2025

The Permanent Sacrifice

Ritual and community
Every society is built on a distinction between what is inside and what is outside, between what is shared and what is excluded. This distinction does not arise from politics or morals, but from ritual.
As Émile Durkheim, the founder of sociology wrote in 1912, the sacred is not a side issue of religion, but the form in which community becomes possible. Not through the formation of consensus, but through ritual interruption. Ritual is the technique by which a society temporarily detaches itself from the order, only to reaffirm it again. This foundation is not juridical, but liminal. That moment of boundary, that point at which difference appears and is temporarily set aside, forms the heart of every collective structure. What appears in those moments – the exception, the violence, the sacrifice – is not a deviation from the social, but its confirmation. The social exists by the grace of what excludes it, and by the grace of its handling of that exclusion. The sacred is the name for that handling.The sacrifice as the boundary of community
The philosopher and writer Georges Bataille introduces a disruption here. The sacred is not pure, not orderly, not elevated, he writes in The Psychological Structure of Fascism (1933), and elsewhere in his thinking about 'dépense' - waste as the core of the sacred. The sacred is that which eludes usefulness and practicality. The sacrifice is central to this: a ritual act in which the unusable – the superfluous, the dangerous, the redundant – is brought back into the center of the community. To confront order with its own limits. Only in the interruption, in the temporary shock of violence, in transgression can the community find itself again.
But with modern state violence, the sacrifice has lost its temporary character. Sacrifice is no longer a rupture, but a continuous operation. Society is no longer a ritual field, but a permanent structure of exclusion, removal and destruction. Modern society no longer exists by the grace of interruption, but by the management of sacrifice.The sacred after the Holocaust
The core of the transformation of the sacred lies in the processing of the Holocaust. What emerged after 1945 was not only an ethical awareness of transgression, but also a restructuring of sacrifice. The Holocaust was recognized as absolute evil, but precisely for that reason it was made the foundation of a new moral order. Sacrifice was not renounced, but anchored – no longer as a ritual, but as a benchmark, as a moral boundary within which no further victimization was permitted – except when sacrifice could be justified by invoking this very foundation. The memory of destruction became the source of legitimacy, guilt was redistributed, and the difference between Inside and Outside was redefined. But this moral order has itself begun to transgress its own boundaries.The geopolitical order of sacrifice
Cruelty does not only lie in having to watch powerlessly while one's own politicians are complicit. Cruelty also consists of not being able to access the construction of violence. From what source do those draw who justify Gaza as a necro-political sacrifice?
Israel's amnesia about a century of Palestinian oppression is foundational. Since the founding of Israel in 1948, 3,500 Israelis have been killed by Palestinian violence. The more than 100,000 Palestinians, including tens of thousands of children, killed by Israel are forgotten. Valuable lives opposed by worthless slaughter-offerings (slacht-offer in Dutch). Since October 2023, 50,000 Palestinians have been killed, including 14,500 children. The Hamas attack of 2023 was cruel, but a pinprick compared to Israel's genocidal impulse. More than 700,000 Israeli settlers live illegally on Palestinian territory. What is labeled as terror in the West today was recognized in other times, even by persecuted Jews themselves, as resistance against occupation.
The US support for the Palestinian genocide and the destruction of Gaza can only be explained by the original American population's own genocide and subsequent slavery. The destruction of indigenous peoples in America is repeated in the way Israel treats Palestinians. The US recognizes itself in the Israeli strategy of 'emptying' without naming the trauma of physical genocide. This creates an unconscious solidarity in violence as colonial logic. Since its founding, the US has readily sacrificed 'others', as they later went on to spread this practice throughout the world. In Gaza, the US is now supplying weapons and information in what has long been a necro-political complex, part of what we call the Technique of Thanatos: a structure in which technology, politics and capital combine in systematic destruction. Today supported by nationalist Christians, always willing to form an 'unholy alliance'.
The vile role the EU is playing in Gaza can only be explained by the fact that it does not want to directly alienate the EU's largest economy, Germany. The Germans murdered more than six million Jews in the heart of Europe, and Germany is trying to make the Palestinians pay the price for this. ’Never again'' has turned out into ‘Again and again'. Yet Europe does not condemn Germany. The centuries-long colonial exploitation policies of the European countries themselves, and the slavery that was part of that, has never been compensated for and they have bought off with a sly “sorry”. Nothing compared to Germany, which will not find a way to atone for its guilt in the Holocaust. This silent agreement not to dredge up Germany's guilt to keep its own record clean explains the EU's silence on Gaza and its sacrifice of the Palestinian people.The fatal void
Durkheim's sacrality – community is created through ritual interruption – and Bataille's sacrality – the discovery of waste, violence and useless sacrifice as the origin of community – have today been transformed by Israel, in which the state order arises from destruction, into the permanent sacrifice of Gaza. In the perverse logic of the modern sacred, Israel must continue to sacrifice a people to maintain itself as a community.
There they all are now, gathered around the sacrificial site. From Deir Yassin to Sabra and Shatila, and today in Gaza: the stateless Palestinian is the ritual victim necessary to hold this world order together. The West is turning Gaza into a permanent sacrifice in a final attempt to save its Inner. But the sacrifice of Gaza will not prove big enough for that. The difference between Inner and Outer has already been eliminated. This is the cruelty that has descended upon the human mind. Trump, the decomposition of the West, dreams of Gaza-on-the-Rivièra.Gendringen, April 10, 2025Johannes Bongers is an artist-researcher at Boolean Works (since 1991). He works at the intersection of art, philosophy and politics. Founder of platforms such as technotlogy.com, sooos.org, and andsterdam.nl.

March 26, 2025

The Soldierly Man

The Soldierly Man and the Aestheticization of the PoliticalThe electoral disaster of 2024 in the United States has been widely attributed to the failure to reach young men. Governors Gavin Newsom and Tim Walz, prominent figures within the Democratic Party, recently asked publicly how the young man can still be reached. Their question reveals the assumption that the young man is a rational actor, accessible through policy, economic proposals, or the classic instruments of democratic representation. But young men who have flocked to MAGA, the manosphere, and the new Alt-Right have long since moved beyond the reach of such means.
They operate within an ecology of mind, where resentment, cruelty, and masculine desire have fused into a psychosocial network. Here, reason does not rule, but violence is experienced as the restoration of a violated order. Politics in the 21st century, in the U.S. but also in Europe, is no longer about taxes and healthcare, but about the male body. And that body, as Klaus Theweleit described in ‘Mannerphantasien’, has become armor: closed, hardened, cut off from inner life or vulnerability. This body is no longer the subject of politics—it has become politics. The right-wing media ecology, with figures like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, and their European counterparts, forms a cultural infrastructure in which the soldierly subject, as Theweleit described it, is updated, reinforced, and distributed. No longer via paramilitary diaries of Freikorps soldiers, but through podcasts, shorts, memes, and 'motivational content.'The Soldierly Man Returns
Theweleit, writing in the 1970s, analyzed how the soldierly men of the Freikorps—returning from Germany's defeat in World War I—defended their physical and psychic integrity against the threat of the feminine, the fluid, the uncontrollable. They refused to lay down their soldier identity. They did not return to civilian life but created a new, violent existence in which masculinity could only be affirmed through control and killing. We now see the same structure in young men identifying with MAGA, losing themselves in manosphere memes, waging war on 4chan with symbols, hating women, and seeing themselves as the last defenders of civilization. Not because they are committed to a political program, but because they yearn for a world in which man is once again the measure of all things. They feel betrayed by the history of emancipation, just as their Freikorps predecessors felt betrayed by the 1918 defeat. Today, too, that resentment is projected onto women, minorities, migration, and everything experienced as fluid, porous, and uncontrollable. Donald Trump is not a politician to them, but a messiah, a mythical figure who heals their wounded identity. His imagery carries unmistakable messianic traits: The Chosen One, "Only I Can Fix It." The proclamation of absolute power over life and death, truth and lies, fits seamlessly with the soldierly fantasy of total control. The dismantling of 'wokeness' – a politics of identity that has in turn incited a counter-politics of identity – is offered by Trump as a trophy and scalp to young men. It serves the interests of the patrimonial regime to keep the young man locked in this hopeless present – through mental and social technology and through environmental degradation, which stagnates his future. A lack of regulation and political inaction has become a cunning, perverse instrument of power.The Aestheticization of the Political
Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin chose suicide after the Nazis invaded his final refuge, France. He coined fascism as the aestheticization of politics. That is exactly what we are seeing again in MAGA and the Alt-Right. But this aesthetic is no longer confined to mass rallies, monuments, or parades. It has shifted to memes, violent video clips, and a digital stream of images in which enemies are demonized and heroes glorified. The war against women, against the foreigner, against the progressive has become an aesthetic war, in which the male armored body once again takes center stage. The aestheticization of the political is now an aesthetic of memes and slogans, in which violence is celebrated as catharsis. What appears as a joke ("it's just a meme") is deadly serious: the line between play and seriousness, between actuality and potentiality, has dissolved. The MAGA-man lives in a world where his digital identity and physical existence have merged into a performative fantasy of power. The homoerotic image of Putin on horseback, Musk’s Nazi salute, our own W.’s call for “fewer, fewer,” or the chainsaw are all paranoid expressions of soldierly violence. The sadism, the expressionless camp outfit, and the 1930s haircut of Minister Faber – "I am policy" – demonstrate that the aesthetic of the soldierly man is also, crosswise, produced by women.Fascist Desire and the Male Psyche
Wilhelm Reich already noted in 1933, in his ‘Mass Psychology of Fascism’, that fascism is not driven by ignorance but by desire. People choose against their own interests because they long to submit. Reich described how sexuality was suppressed, how drives were not liberated but internalized as fear of chaos. Deleuze and Guattari radicalized this analysis in 1972: the desire for fascism is not pathological, they wrote in ‘Anti-Oedipus’ but socially produced. Fascism is not a deviation but a result of how desire is organized within the social machine. The soldierly man does not long for freedom but for order. He wants to submit to the machine that guarantees he no longer has to be human, only a function within a steel collective. He fears anything that might open him up: love, sexuality, softness. That is why he hates women, foreigners, and soft men. The enemy is always the one who threatens to break the boundaries of the body. Theweleit shows how Freikorps men projected their fear of the feminine as fear of fluidity, of flowing, of wetness. Their texts are drenched with images of mud, water, slime. Woman is associated with the swamp that might swallow them whole. The armored body of the soldier is the only defense against this threat. Today we see the same fear in the hysterical reactions to feminism, gender diversity, migration, and asylum policy. The man feels overrun; his boundaries are being crossed. The feminine is again feared as the force that will castrate him—not just sexually, but politically, economically, culturally, and existentially.Cruelty Reigns
Fascism has always been rooted in cruelty. But today's fascism turns cruelty into an aesthetic norm. The meme calling for rape, the vision of Gaza-as-Riviera, videos glorifying bullying and violence, the troll campaign driving someone to suicide – these are forms of practical cruelty no longer hidden, but celebrated. It’s unbearable to witness (brace yourself), but recently deceased well-known women are actively searched on porn sites. Nothing is too far for the soldierly mind to seek comfort.
Klaus Theweleit wrote that the soldierly man must always remain at war to affirm himself. War is his ground of being. He survives only by destroying others. This is the core of the new reactionary masculinity: it has no inner life, no transcendence. It exists solely in the violence it enacts. This widespread cruelty has also reached Dutch politics. The indifference and sickening disregard for profound injustice, the sadistic violence, the statelessness, and the murder of Palestinians – it is political pornography. This pornography functions like a cancer, from which a flower of atrocity can grow. The raids on U.S. university records for the names of pro-Palestinian demonstrators show how close the madness really is.Make Love, Not War
What can politicians do with this analysis? The soldierly man cannot be convinced by a jobs program or a tax cut. If they want to reach young men, they must fight a battle that goes far deeper than policy. They must rethink and reshape the ecology of mind. That begins with naming the fundamental division at the heart of the Western image of humanity: the split between valuable people and worthless bodies. The stateless Palestinians—without rights, protection, or recognized bodies – represent the extreme boundary of that division. As long as their lives and bodies do not count, every call for democratic equality remains perverse – especially when uttered by Democratic governors or the Dutch government. Frans Timmermans, freshly in his sneakers according to ‘NRC’, must therefore reconsider himself, his new party, and the political constellation in this new light, to begin building a just politics for young men and women.
The soldierly man must relearn what it means to be human. But he needs practical support to do so. The numbing and poisoning through mental and social technology should, for instance, begin only after the age of eighteen – just like voting or driving rights. That would give young people in their formative years the space to focus on their own bodies, emotional worlds, and communication. For years we have advocated redesigning classroom conversation in primary schools, centering the expressive, creative child and their diverse needs. To bring the expressive individual and collective safety in a meta-stability. But confronting a politics supported by the soldierly man also demands that the Left introduce its own aesthetic—an answer to the soldierly culture of the Right. An aesthetic of the street, radically diverse, not identity-driven, rooted in love, softness, and embodiment. “Make Love, Not War” is, in that sense, a potent political strategy: a restoration of the body, of touch, of mutual recognition—as an alternative to the fascist death machine.Johannes Bongers, Gendringen, March 26, 2025

March 10, 2025

The Liberation of Europe

Initial feelings of abandonment notwithstanding, Trump II is finally announcing the mental, social and political liberation of Europe. Since 1945, American mass social and knowledge technologies have been used for psychic and social control and subjugation in Europe. Today's ‘social’ technologies are the extension of the mass media offensive of television that spread globally from the United States after WWII, driven by advertising. However, the American liberation of Europe 80 years ago has turned into a new domination.Mass media fused with social technology - to increase social and economic inequality - was able to break the link between the human psyche, the social and the environment. There is no place in this mediated reality for the human being as an agent.The development of the US advertising model runs parallel to the growth of US hegemony, the buying of political support in US elections and spectacle as part of the American self-image. It allows Trump to privatise the state. Max Weber called this patrimonialism. Political coups are the first to dismantle the mass media. We saw it in South America, in Russia, Hungary, and now in the US. The leading NL politician chooses an American one-to-many channel to pollute minds and communities with ideological diarrhoea. For two decades, politics has revolved around this drek while he or his adjutants produce no legislation or policy changes.
The early advertising techniques, developed to influence human minds and aggregate consumer preferences, are now being used in more sophisticated ways for ideological and political purposes. Worldwide, users have voluntarily surrendered to US advertising platforms as if they were US citizens. The ‘community’ is a simulacrum, a copy of something that has no original. Its ‘involuntarily voluntary’ nature - its addiction - obscures how actually unseparated political power, capital and mass media are. National governments have failed to protect their citizens from this mental and social and imperialist colonisation - instead of stopping it at the border, they take advantage of it themselves. The development of the US advertising model runs parallel to the growth of US hegemony, the buying of political support in US elections and spectacle as part of the US self-image. It allows Trump to privatise the state. Max Weber called this patrimonialism.The past, present and future are now under one mass-media temporal regime. All world events - private, professional and political - have become part of a disciplining and capitalising timeline. And because all events are given a place in it in an unordered way and have to be processed mentally and socially by people - more and more in less and less time - individuals, collectives and cultures switch back to diversity, and homogenise: impoverishment and equalisation, which is what we are experiencing today. On that emptiness, totalitarianism and savagery proliferate. However, there is great confusion about diversity and homogenisation. They are systemic effects in living ecologies - mental, social and material - and largely determine how the world evolves. Diversity loss is the quantitative contraction of variation, while homogenisation represents a profound qualitative shift towards uniformity. Homogenisation destroys diversity, but the disappearance of diversity does not automatically lead to homogenisation. Together, they push ecosystems, societies and minds towards a state of predictable uniformity. As a result, the world becomes less and less livable and organisms descend in their expressions to ever lower levels of aggregation. Man can no longer ‘become’, has fewer and fewer potentialities available, and must now ‘be’ with everyone else: identity. Like the twenty brands of peanut butter in the supermarket, twenty parties in the House of Representatives, two hundred television channels, one #trendingtopic, or a wrong word. The desert as a prison.Today is also characterised by how affected mental and social ecologies reinforce each other. The narcissistic sociopath Trump, humiliated by his father and his own sons are not good enough - his daughter his sex object - and the white Musk raised in a dominantly black community, humiliated by father and incited by mother, battling depression, sleep deprivation and excessive drug use, together demolish the liberal order. Waiting in the background are the technofascists, the PayPal mafia with roots in Apartheid and Nazism. Sadist Wilders whose mind has been tormented by self-racism hates himself equal all who are alien to him. Excluding Israel, how twisted. Self-hatred, narcissistic hurt, the unrefreshed war criminals Netanyahu and Putin; the degradation of mental and social ecology is woven into this open establishment. Their traumas and neuroses resonate within a technological-psychosocial force field. They are not excesses but the product of a time when psychic economies, social media politics and capital amassed from the Earth operate in synchronised fashion. The corruption is incalculable.
The liberal order wallows in lifestyle; it has never had to fight a life in the nexus of psyche, community and environment. Now it is repertoirless how profoundly dead spirits can destroy the collective and the living environment.With the ‘Betrayal of Zelensky’ by Vance and Trump and Europe having to stand on its own feet for its security, the European shutdown of US technology and advertising channels can finally begin. But the liberation of Europe requires more, it is an attack on the logic of this reality. Europe is a living practice, let's look at the best practices in the countries. Germany and Italy combine legal protection and a rich epistemological landscape against the uniformity of the algorithm. Switzerland and Belgium demonstrate how federal structures and economic diversification can prevent a monoculture from seizing power. On the technological front, Europe needs to reclaim its autonomy and encourage diversity in infrastructure and innovation to move away from the extractive model of semio-capital - in which Estonia and France are already forerunners. Europe must also break away from the ecological uniformity imposed by agro-industrial capital and extractive economies. The Netherlands is the blackest example of this, in all its aspects.And art.The liberation of Europe also requires a radical reappraisal of art. Not the art of identity and symbolism, which is tolerated as long as it functions within existing frameworks, but art that attacks the structures themselves. Art that does not ‘is’ but becomes - that breaks away from established categories and in which thought and matter reinvent themselves. Art in which everyone is an artist of their own life and environment. Art is not decorative resistance, but an existential response to homogenisation.
Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, the prize he craves. He will get it, only not because he brings peace but because his greed, cruelty and destructiveness allow the rest of the world to turn away from him and death technique. This is the true Liberation of Europe.Johannes Bongers, Gendringen, March 10, 2025

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