One of the more helpfully predictive, if controversial, categories developed by Friedrich Engles over his long life as a revolutionary theorist and fighter was that of what he called 'Völkerabfälle,' or 'non-historic peoples.' These fleeting and opportunistically gerrymandered pseudo-peoples were many in the Europe of Engels's day, and at least one such pseudo-people seems still to be active in the post-Ottoman Middle East of our day.
Who are these 'peoples'? Varying on a Hegelian theme first developed in Hegel's philosophies of mind and of history, Engels defined 'non-historic peoples' as rump remnants of earlier cultural-linguistic groups that had never come to constitute state or other sovereign formations, whose cousins had since either become or been absorbed by larger groupings with more bona fide national pretensions. Lacking in any prior form of collective agency or, therefore, collective consciousness of the sort needed to form a nation or live a history, Engels noted, these pseudo-peoples' later identities were apt to be ad hoc, opportunistic, and above all reactionary - formed in express opposition to historical progress.
Because historical progress, for its part, was inevitable, Engels argued, gerrymandered pseudo-peoples were doomed to disappear nearly as quickly and ignominiously as they had sprung into (pseudo-) existence. They would be simply absorbed by and submerged in, violently or otherwise, the maelstrom of world revolutionary development.
The latter development would, in Engels' words written in the journal that he and Marx coedited, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 'wipe out all these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names.' It would 'result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary [pseudo-] peoples.' History would bring the annihilation of 'all these small pig-headed nations even to their very names.' And 'that [will be] a step forward.'
It is easy to see why such words might have elicited angry reactions from ... reactionaries. The same motives that prompt the assumption of pseudo-identities also prompt passionate clingings to those identities. Moreover, because such people are, virtually by definition, history's 'losers,' they tend to elicit the sympathy and solicitude of many well-meaning though ignorant do-gooders, indeed all who side with near-term underdogs with no regard to longer-term truth or to justice.
Yet history largely, though of course not wholly, bore Engels out in Europe, and where it did not it was thanks to such powerful albeit inconsistent would-be do-gooders as Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton, who with American power rescued some groups who might without them gave disappeared - the Muslim Bosnians and Kosovaars, for example, whom the once Ottoman-oppressed Serbs regarded as remnants of long-since-ended imperial Ottoman occupation and hence sought to purge in the later 1990s.
I suspect now that, absent another exercise of American do-gooderism - this one ironically by the not-so-'good' Donald Trump - yet another Engelsian Völkerabfälle, 'the Palestinians' of the post-Ottoman Levant, will go the route Engels predicted. They will either (a) become a tiny cluster of tinier emirates as now proposed by some 'West Bank' Arab clans, (b) be absorbed into Jordan and Egypt from whence many if not most of their immediate forebears immigrated into British Mandate 'Palestine' (to which no pre-1920 Ottoman province corresponded), or (c) combine (a) and (b).
I say this because those now called 'Palestinians' by themselves and by many well-meaning but unlearned 'advocates' perfectly fit both Engels' definition and Engels' predictive characterization.
First as to Engels' definition: There was never a 'Palestinian people,' historically speaking, until the Egyptian Yasser Arafat was cultivated by Islamists and pan-Arabists dead-set against any Jewish sovereign presence in the once-Arab-Islam-conquered Jewish homeland to capitalize on the growing fashion of 'national liberation' movements in the 1960s. Before 1920, as mentioned before, there was no Ottoman province corresponding to any 'Palestine.' During the British Mandate period from 1920 to 1948, in turn, 'Palestinian' meant 'Jewish inhabitant of British Palestine.' Arab inhabitants of the Mandate territory called themselves, simply, ... Arabs.
This in turn helps explain why there was no agitation whatever for a 'Palestinian state' in 'the West Bank' or 'the Gaza Strip' from 1948, when Jordan and Egypt illegally seized and annexed them while illegally invading Israel, to 1967, when Israel won them in the Six Day War with a view to trading them for peace treaties (the ill-starred 'land for peace' aspiration). There was no such agitation because the inhabitants of those territories considered themselves Arab Muslims, not 'Palestinian nationals,' and Jordan and Egypt were Arab Muslim polities, not 'uppity Jew' polities.
This takes us from Engels' definition of non-historic peoples, by reference to their opportunistically gerrymandered character, to his predictive characterization of them by reference to their inherently reactionary character.
As I have written at length on previous occasions, anti-Zionists are essentially the Levantine version of the Jim Crow American Ku Klux Klan - from their shared ethno-subordinative ideologies to their 'insurgent' terrorist cloth hoods and face coverings.
What must be remembered here is that the Jewish inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire were subordinated in precisely the same ways as were African Americans under Jim Crow. Then modern armies (the Union in the US, the British in Turkey) conquered and 'occupied' the backward places and liberated the once-oppressed peoples.
Neither the poor whites in the US, nor their Ottoman imperial counterparts, the Arabs, took kindly to this elevation of disfavored ethnoreligious minorities. And so they reacted terroristically under the banners and symbols of 'the old time religion' while vowing 'the South,' or 'the Ummah,' will 'rise again.'
The former Ottoman Arabs of course ultimately were given some 20 plus states, just as southern whites in the US got back some 10 plus states. But this wasn't enough so long as formerly oppressed peoples still dared to demand any form of post-war self-determination. In the US, this meant voting rights and racially sensitive Congressional districting. In the Middle East, it meant Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish homeland.
Reactions against both of these were, of course, reactionary. (If you doubt this, see even the new 'constitution' of the 'Palestinian Authority' put out last month.)
Engels was right in declaring that there is no future for past-obsessed reaction. It has taken a very long time and is still not completed, but the so-called 'New South' in the US truly is 'a thing,' with non-whites generally enjoying as much, if not more, political autonomy below the old Mason-Dixon line as above it. Similarly, with the last sponsor of islamist reaction in the Middle East, Iran's mullah regime, and its gerrymandered 'Palestinianist' clients now being smashed thanks to overreach, both of those faces of reaction now seem to be on the way out.
We are seeing 'the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary [pseudo-] peoples.' And this is indeed, even while working, through Hegel's 'cunning of history,' via a throwback like Trump, what Engels would call 'a step forward.' And for all true historical-progressivists like me, this is quite gratifying ends-wise even while painful means-wise.
About the Writer:
Robert Hockett is the Edward Cornell Endowed Professor of Law at Cornell Law School in Ithaca, New York; Annual Visiting Professor of Law at the Sorbonne Faculty of Law in Paris, France; and Senior Counsel with Westwood Capital Group in New York City. His principal interests lie in the fields of organizational, financial, and monetary law and economics in both their positive and normative, as well as their national and transnational, dimensions. His guiding concern in these fields is with the legal and institutional prerequisites to a just, prosperous, and sustainable economic order. A Fellow of the Century Foundation and regular commissioned author for the New America Foundation, Hockett also does regular consulting work for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the International Monetary Fund, Americans for Financial Reform, the 'Occupy Money' Cooperative, and a number of federal and state legislators, regulators, and local governments. Prior to doing his doctoral work and entering academe, he worked for the International Monetary Fund and clerked for the Honorable Deanell Reece Tacha, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Cornell Faculty Profile: http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/faculty/bio_robert_hockett.cfm Century Foundation Profile: http://tcf.org/experts/detail/robert-c.-hockett Publications: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=602726
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