(And Still…) The Hell of Gaza
“The critique of culture is confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today.” (Theodor W Adorno – 1949)
1
Words endlessly creak
like broken teeth or
stones spat from
these noisy mouths
filled with venom
instead of Sweetness
& Light.
i wept once. Then again.
And again.
And still nothing changes.
Words then flew like beautiful birds
out the window
and showered a starving people
with flowers and poetry and all things
you cannot eat
and rain fell for a few days here,
its water feeding the small flowers
flourishing in the sleepy field
while war still starved the people
but you cannot call this slaughter “war”
and now
to write poetry after Gaza – is barbarism?
2
And Hell arrived. And the Hell creatures.
But they were dressed in suits and ties
instead of scales or skin or horns.
They came and took over my dreams
until i thought i’d be better off dead
and buried
beneath the rubble myself
and then to write poetry
after Gaza – must surely be barbarism?
3
Here we are all drowning in an abundance of lies and food.
But see, this food we need cannot be eaten
with mouths stitched tight
like a siege surrendered
to starvation?
4
Now is the time of Hell.
The haunt of these well-dressed criminals.
Hell’s gates must always be guarded by these arrogant soldiers.
These barbarians of slaughter and salvation.
They do not know
where the horror hides nor how this world
they have built
will haunt them beyond their useless life.
Thus God spoke – but of Blessing – and still no one listened…
And now: to write poetry after Gaza
has to be barbarism…
…where words decompose
rotting
in the midday sun
like dead bodies in the street
or here in front of this spiteful screen
…or here where tears instead of rain falls,
the water feeding only the few small flowers
left in the field but still
“war” starves a people even if
you cannot call this slaughter “war”
…and here, where words who once lay
in my arms
always beautiful and broken and bleeding
are now both cold-blooded and callous.
They have stolen even these corpses
like a ventriloquist at a carnival
and no one seems to care?
And now, like wounds, our voices
must sicken on their stolen crutches
and soon try to limp away.
5
Are there no other worlds, you might ask?
Now that to write poetry – after Gaza
– is barbarism?
And will language ever escape
this cage
of Our-Never-Ending-Catastrophe-and-Chaos
called “Civilisation?
6
Once there were simple words
not useless nor savage
our own words rising insurgent
on the barricades
and in the laneways and tunnels
but soon to be buried beneath this speechless rubble.
Like politicians
words now grow fat and furious
on their platitudes, their deceit, their ability
to keep on talking even with their mouths closed
and always filled with tongues turning to stone
heedless and heartless.
For listen, no longer happy to burn books
today they will burn children
in their tents and tenements
and babies in their cots
and this, let me tell you,
is a time of Hell
and to write poetry while Gaza burns
must be barbarism or worse.
7
Each day you will wake
Mr. Itmar Ben Gvir
Mr. Bezalel Smotrich
you will wake
from your dreamless sleep to this nightmare.
And all and everywhere around us
all you will see are wingless and wounded angels
silenced and sinking in their grim solitude
like ships long sunk and seething soulless
with this, the last of your incoherence
this
“last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism”:
over and over and over
Nach Gaza ein Gedicht zu schreiben,
ist barbarisch
– your own endless-bottomless-immeasurable-fearful-inhumanity…
séamas carraher
10 – 31 June, 2025
https://seamascarraher.blogspot.com/
Image (Screenshot “Fair-Use’)
Itamar Ben Gvir & Bezalel Smotrich,
Israeli Knesset Ministers,
From Israel’s Dark Politics: The Far Right’s Road to Destruction | DISPATCH – Israel Documentary – June 13, 2025
Alternative (Short Video)
The Fascist History of Ben Gvir – [ Jewish Power]
The Rise of Bezalel Smotrich
“Bezalel Yoel Smotrich is an Israeli far-right politician and lawyer who has served as the Minister of Finance since 2022. The leader of the National Religious Party–Religious Zionism, he previously served as a Knesset member for Yamina. Smotrich is a settler in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, living in the settlement of Kedumim, which is deemed illegal under international law. His residence was also built illegally outside the settlement proper. Smotrich’s extremist politics and often racist and homophobic statements have led to several controversies. He is a supporter of expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, opposes Palestinian statehood, and denies the existence of the Palestinian people.”
References
“Barbarism” – Adorno Quote
“Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben.”
“The critique of culture is confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today.”
(Theodor W. Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” in: Prismen, Berlin 1955, 31)
“Its source is a passage, rarely quoted in full, from ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’, an essay written in 1949, published in 1951 in Soziologische Forschung in unserer Zeit…Reprinted in Prismen in 1955.”
(POETRY AFTER AUSCHWITZ – ADORNO’S DICTUM, KLAUS HOFMANN German Life and Letters 58:2 April 2005)
See also:
“The sentence is part of the conclusion to an essay, and reading it on its own may be as fruitless as attempting to understand the last act of Hamlet without having first seen the rest of the play.”
“The second sense refers to the fact that culture itself—and with it, philosophy—was incapable of preventing Auschwitz from happening … Moreover, not only has culture not prevented it, it, at times, even proactively contributed to Nazism and thereby became complicit in a much more radical sense.”
“Auschwitz irrefutably demonstrated the failure of culture. That it could happen in the midst of all the traditions of philosophy, art and the enlightening sciences, says more than merely that these, the Spirit, was not capable of seizing and changing human beings. […] Whoever pleads for the preservation of a radically culpable and shabby culture turns into its accomplice, while those who renounce culture altogether immediately promote the barbarism, which culture reveals itself to be.”
(In Barbarism: Notes on the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, by Anna-Verena Nosthoff | 15 Oct 2014
Critical legal thinking – October 2014
References (Text)
Sweetness & Light
“It gained widespread currency in the Victorian era, when English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold picked it up as the title of the first section of his 1869 book Culture and Anarchy”
Also: “English for dulce et utile (literally “sweet and useful”) from Horace’s Ars Poetica (18 B.C.E.) Wikipedia
“But they were dressed in suits and ties
instead of scales or skin or horns.”
We Give You Aid, You Buy U.S. Bombs
“…how U.S. defense contractors turned global conflict, from Afghanistan to Gaza, into a profit machine.”
Thus God spoke – but of Blessing – and still no one listened…
If the Zionist’s Bible is filled with God’s vengeance (a lot of it against the “Chosen People’s unskillful deeds – there are also other understandings:
Richard Rohr writes“…“The slow metamorphosis of our notions of God—from lion to lamb, from anger to tears, from lonely solitude to grateful community—is quietly taking place. Humanity is indeed growing up…
“Most of us never learned the lessons to be found in this kind of contemplation of the mysterious movement of living and dying, because we started by reading human texts that portrayed God as angry, wrathful, judgmental, and punitive. We pretty much anthropomorphized all our gods, imagining they were as small and righteous as we are!
The prophets started out the same way, but they changed and grew up. ”
(Richard Rohr “The Tears of Things” – 2025, Center for Action and Contemplation, Inc.)
“Hell’s gates must always be guarded by these arrogant soldiers”
“…There’s such a high level of confidence among these IDF soldiers that they can do whatever they want… to say to the whole world look at what we’re doing to Palestinians in Gaza… look at how we are brutalizing detainees… look at how we’re humiliating every single man woman and child as we destroy their homes… set fire to them…and make fun of it…and they are provoking and challenging the whole world…to say we can do this we can get away with it and no one in the world can stop us… no Israeli has found themselves sanctioned by the International Community… by countries that have these tools… which again has only reinforced the belief of Israeli soldiers that they are immune… that they are exempted from complying with International laws… from basic human rights laws…that they are above the law …” (Sarah Leah Whitsun)
“History has taught us that the dehumanization of subjects is essential to the infliction of violence… I think Israel has perfected this in discourse and in practice but this is not new… it dates back to the beginning of this state through which Palestinians were expelled degraded humiliated killed… and effectively forcibly disappeared…” (Basil Farraj)
Genocide in Gaza through the eyes of Israeli soldiers | The Listening Post
“These barbarians of slaughter and salvation”
B’resheet GENESIS – “Parashah 3: Lekh L’kha (Get yourself out) 12:1”
“Now ADONAI said to Avram, “Get yourself out of your country, away from your kinsmen and away from your father’s house, and go to the land that I will show you. 2 I will make of you a great nation, I will bless you, and I will make your name great; and you are to be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, but I will curse anyone who curses you; and by you all the families of the earth will be blessed.”
[From David H. Stern. Complete Jewish Bible: An English Version of the Tanakh (Old Testament) and B’rit Hadashah (New Testament)
quoted on Irish Radio, 20 June, 2025
&
Rabbi Dovid Feldman (from a Speech in front of the White House, June 18, 2025
“…in the Book of Psalms…King David says regarding those wicked wicked nations… “they desire wars”… this is the wicked movement of Zionism… this is the criminal state of Israel who desires wars… why do they need the wars… they want to confuse the people they want to distract the people from what is happening now in Gaza… this genocide this mass murder this starvation of little children… in addition to that they desire war because they want to implant fear into the minds of the people that we have enemies, we have to fight the enemies… this is exactly what is happening already… for decades they are creating the enemies and then claiming that they are here for the self defense of the Jewish people… the state of Israel is in no way a self-defense this is defensive (sic) from day one this is criminal from day one …
“…unfortunately all these crimes are being done supposedly in the name of all Jews and the Jewish religion is being misused to justify all these crimes… this is an embarrassment to our people and a desecration to our religion… our people are being misused as if all Jews support these crimes and this is done deliberately in order to blame whoever criticizes it as anti-Semitic and this is misleading and dangerous… speaking up against these crimes criticizing the state of Israel is in no way anti-Semitic… anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism… to begin with Judaism and Zionism is not the same… Judaism is a religion… a religion only… no politics to it… versus Zionism, a purely political movement… this is not anti-Semitic…”
“This State of Israel is wrong… this is wrong according to International Law and this is wrong according to Jewish Law… killing stealing oppressing an entire people are crimes or violations of Judaism… the concept of building a sovereign… homeland for Jews by physical means, this philosophy of Zionism goes in total contrast to the very basics of Judaism which teaches that Jewish people are required to live as loyal citizens in whichever country we reside… we are supposed to be peaceful neighbors wherever we find ourselves… this movement of Zionism runs in total contrast to basics of Judaism… this is wrong this has to stop… we are demanding a free Palestine a totally free Palestine…”
See Also: Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Vienna 2025 Impressions
“The impressive history of Jewish resistance to Zionism is as long as Zionism…”
“now they burn children
in their tents and tenements
and babies in their cots…”
Israeli MP doubles down on ‘Burn Gaza’ statement
“Nissim Vaturi, Israeli Likud party lawmaker and deputy Knesset speaker, reiterated a tweet of him saying ‘Israel was being too humane against Hamas and needed to burn Gaza to the ground,’ and added “It’s better to burn, bring down buildings than for our soldiers to be harmed,” during an interview with ultra-Orthodox radio station Kol BaRama on Wednesday.
“Vaturi also claimed that “there are no innocents in northern Gaza,” a day before the International Court of Justice in The Hague Hearing in South Africa’s genocide case against the state of Israel.”
“Like politicians
words now grow fat and furious
on their platitudes, their deceit, their ability
to keep on talking even with their mouths closed”
“How do these [Arab] governments have any control over their own sovereignty when they allow [US] bases in their state to be used to perpetuate this genocide…
“In fact the Israeli military could not operate without the oil which pumps to it from two Muslim nations… The pipeline which runs from Azabaijan and through Turkey to Israel provides 40% of Israel’s oil… this could have been cut off at any time during the genocide – but it was not…”
“If Israel has been able to integrate itself with the security services of states around the world what does that mean for the functions of those institutions? How free are those politicians themselves?” (Lowkey)
Arab Leaders CAUGHT Helping Israel Attack Iran AND Gaza
Double Down News on Arab Leaders Collusion with The Genocide – June 17, 2025
“For listen, no longer happy to burn books
today they will burn children
in their tents and tenements”
Israeli strike on hospital tent camp in Gaza kills 4, ignites fire that burns dozens
Associated Press – October 2024
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