ABSTRACT
The last five lines of Yeats’ short apocalyptic poem resonate most poignantly today in concrete historical, that is material, ways significantly different than they did in the aftermath of WWI, The Great War, or the War to End All Wars, as well as the Russian Revolution, and the imminent civil war in Ireland. In a more crystalized form, a form juxtaposing the tension in a dialectic of extremes, those lines can and need be re-written: “multiform anarchies are loosed upon the world. Blood saturated tides have swelled, and everywhere the claims to innocence are long belied. The best have lost all conviction, while the worst are full of zealot sincerity.” Most troubling, perhaps, is that now it is extremely difficult to distinguish between best and worst among claims to hopeful innocence, ennui cynicism and fanaticism, forms of consciousness each of which expresses competing current forms of anarchy, theodicy, secular theology or, which is the same, a simultaneous reversion to both tribalism and barbarism. And as if in a nightmare déjà vu 70 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the barbarism unleashed by almost all forms of European tribalism is explicitly and publicly focused on Europe's “universally hated tribe, the Jews,” deploying perennially favorite stereotypes. Before proceeding I wish to emphasize the fact that when I first began this chapter, I had no intention of “returning” to the “Jewish Question,” or living “After Auschwitz.” Recent events, however, demand that I situate the collusion between “the Age of Bit Information” and “Sham Revolutions” in relation to the persistence and intensification of the conditions that made Auschwitz possible in the first place, which conditions, as Adorno reminded us, inter alia, in “Education After Auschwitz,” persisted not only in 1966 but continue now, albeit in materially concrete different forms, which forms require, quite literally, human sacrifice. 1
