Gräuelfreude: The Joy of Cruelty
Moral Reflections on the Witnesses of Gaza
The demonic joy
A ferocity instinctive in the Israeli, Zionist and philozionist public, has echoed as the soundtrack of the moving nightmare of the Slaughter of Gaza. The laughter, the joy, the clapping of frenzied hands, the whistling and the wild gesticulations of the celebration of death and destruction and its sinister cacophony of jubilation are a animated by compulsion beyond the ones that animate the pathetic giggles of the proverbial Schadenfreude.
The laughter of hell has haunted me over the past 15 months and has given me no rest. Endemic in German public discourse, the American moral contrarianism and among Zionist thugs on the internet and in the streets, it can only be described as a demonic joy in the suffering of Palestinians. For this cruelty and its enjoyment, for the celebratory echoes that it has produced, Gaza demands the creation of a new word: Gräuelfreude—the delight in atrocities.
This cruelty is not merely the justification of Palestinian death and suffering as a necessary evil as the spartan idiots of the realpolitik camp would like to suggest. These are the good people who online or on your television screens shield their conscience and that of their audience with the grotesque slogan “Of course nobody wants to see dead children but…”
Nor is it the claim that the suffering is fabricated, which is the main charge of Pallywood libel. Pallywood is an attempt to deflected and deny the charge of evil committed. Children were not killed, they claim., The small bodies wrapped in white shrouds in the floors of Gaza morgues were only puppets meant to excite the moral indignation of us, useful idiots.
These justifications of the suffering of others are ghastly enough but one must accept that these two forms—despicable as they may be—still express a moral concern and attempt, albeit immorally, to deny of justify the crime because they recognise its monstrosity. However, the demonic spirit whose laughter gorges on the death of those children, the one that fills my worst nightmares about human nature, has no moral consideration. Gräuelfreude is the joy of evil.
Hell is empty
The mocking laughter of the incubus emits these gruesome moans of pleasure as my eyes try to absorb in terror the images of scorched cities, starving children scrambling for scattered flour, toddlers sobbing before the bodies of their dead siblings, young girls wailing beside the lifeless corpses of their mothers, fathers carrying their dead children in their arms, journalists lying motionless under the broken gazes of grieving colleagues, reports of female doctors raped to death, eyewitness accounts of toddlers being executed. The unfathomable catalog of barbarity, cruelty, and inhumanity that is now Gaza is their triumph. But this joy is not merely the triumph of depravity over the dignity of the human.
To the celebrations of displacement, praise for destruction, applause for murder one can add the online declarations of pride and tribal honour by IDF soldiers over the killings and demolitions now documented by the Hind Rajab Foundation for legal proceedings and for posterity. The legal record will probably remember as our horror will not be erased. But of the matters yet unsettled there is one that to me might be more pressing than the question of the legal record, of the mourning of the dead, of justice. In fact, all these matters depend on how we answer this one question.
The question that must be asked and answered is who are we after Gaza? There are only two possible answers: We will be the enablers and promoters of evil, or we will be its enemies. At this hour, I can say with certainty that there is nothing in between and, furthermore, that all matters concerning redress and justice, mourning, grief and consolation are all dependent on all of us witnesses reminding those who pursue justice, those for whom no human suffering is foreign. Justice depends on continue to be haunted by the ghoulish laughter of those who relished the sights, sounds and scents of hell.