By Irina Velitskaya
Saturday, March 29, 2025
Of all the untranslatable words in the Russian language,
my favorite is пошлость— poshlost—representing
a concept that is ubiquitous, albeit unacknowledged, in the modern Western
world. It’s untranslatable because it can’t be summed up in a single word and
stands instead for a great many interrelated concepts. But if, in an effort to
understand it, one were to dissect poshlost, one would find inside it,
wriggling like little worms, the words “smarmy,” “smug,” “superficial,” and
“shabby.”
And yet, squirmy as this image is, that’s only half of
what’s inside poshlost, because entangled with the first set of meanings
is a second set: “self-importance,” “imaginary virtue,” “oblivious narcissism,”
“belligerent weepiness,” and “preening self-regard.”
“It is not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely
important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive,”
as Vladimir Nabokov put it. It’s the mistaken belief, Nabokov continued, “that
the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow
ennobles the purchaser.” A literary critic who wrote on Nabokov’s work
described the word as “petty evil or self-satisfied vulgarity.”
And what is the “acme of human happiness” for these
self-satisfied vulgarians? In the contemporary Western context, and
particularly among university students and the intelligentsia, it is the
feeling that you are better, more virtuous, and more deeply human than most of
the mean-spirited, seething, insensible masses around you.
Which brings us, of course, to the most repellent example
of poshlost in the modern world: the thin veneer of ersatz
humanitarianism and pathos that Western intellectuals splotch across the
nakedly hateful reality of Islamist supremacist rhetoric and violence.
On pro-Palestinian social media, these meretricious
symbols of self-absorbed virtue take the form of AI-generated images of crying
babies seated amid the rubble of war zones (despite the fact that there is an
ugly abundance of actual crying babies in the world, and not just in Gaza, but
in Kurdish regions bombarded by Turkey, in Nigerian Christian villages, in
Sudan, in Yemen, in Congo, and, yes, in Israel), little Palestinian girls on
pink roller skates gazing innocently upward at an approaching Israeli jet, and
brave little Palestinian boys whipping modest-sized rocks from slingshots at
IDF tanks.
There are also—especially on the social-media bios of
white, Western supporters of Palestine—syrupy emoji assemblages that feature
the Palestinian flag, accompanied by one or more of the following: a bright red
heart, a white dove of peace, a rainbow, a unicorn, an LGBTQ+ flag, and, of
course, a watermelon, often accompanied by a fundraising link for the families
of Gaza (though said funds will likely never get further than a Hamas bank
account in a place like Qatar, but hey, it’s the thought that counts!).
More often than not, there is a declaration that the
digital creator is a “humanitarian” who thinks “we all should just be kind to
each other” and “believe in love for all living things,” is “so full of love I
can barely speak,” and plaintively asks, “Why do I care so much?”
Often, there is a “land acknowledgment” in the bio—a
reference to, for example, “Syilx Okanagan stolen land.” This is a confession
that the poster lives on land conquered from its indigenous inhabitants; it’s
deployed as a means of expiating guilt while preempting charges of hypocrisy.
Needless to say, the poster has no intention of actually moving from the
conquered land, thereby reinforcing the very hypocrisy he wishes to avoid.
People post these acknowledgments of theft only because they are secure in the
knowledge that the indigenous people on whose land they live will not rape
them, burn them alive, or behead them. In their minds, the payment for this
privilege is merely a nickel inserted into an imaginary vending machine that
dispenses virtue.
Their posts (like the banners they wave at
demonstrations) include phrases such as “You don’t have to be Palestinian or
Muslim. You just have to have a heart,” “Standing with Palestine proves you
have a soul,” and similar maudlin acknowledgments that the posters think very
highly of themselves, or at least would like to.
The poshlost comes in the form of poetry, too. One
Palestinian poet writes:
With clean hands,
he gently sifts
the flour,
and adds a handful
of yeast.
He pours the warm
water
for the yeast
particles to live,
then rolls and
kneads and rolls
and kneads the
dough.
He lets the soft
mass rest.
With firm but
gentle hands,
he rounds it into
balls,
flattens them into
shape,
and handles each
one
delicately into
the oven.
Soon, perhaps in
half an hour,
the bread rolls
are born fresh,
healthy and
browned.
The newborn breads
breathe,
yet dust chokes
the air,
searing gases
penetrate
their thin,
fragile crusts.
On the day of
their birth, a missile,
a bakery, a
scattering
of zaatar, flesh,
and blood.
As a poem, this is utterly immune to criticism (other
than being unmetrical), for who could possibly have the heartlessness, the
sheer inhumanity, to criticize warm, soft bread made with “firm but gentle
hands”? The poet doesn’t speak for all Palestinians, or for the entirety of the
Palestinian experience, but nonetheless, in the work of Palestinian poets, one
finds this repeated formula: The beauty of Palestine—of ancient olive trees, of
clear blue skies, of innocent children, of men who are gentle and loving—is
abruptly, and for no reason that is ever explicated, shattered by Israeli
bombs.
A white, Western social-media star who has transcended
embarrassment writes the following:
I love Palestine
like
The olive grove
loves the farmer, like
The poppy loves
the sun, like
The watermelon
loves a rainstorm, like
Any living things
loves
That which teaches
it to grow.
There is never a hint, at least not in any poem by or
about Palestinians that I have ever encountered, that Palestinian hands can
ever be anything other than “gentle” or “loving.” Nowhere to be found in these
verses are hands that fire rockets into Israeli communities, or stab
Holocaust-survivor grandmothers in the back, or fire semiautomatic weapons at
the heads of kibbutz dwellers. Nowhere are the hands that lynched and
disemboweled two Israelis during the second intifada and thrust their internal
organs into the air for the enjoyment of gleeful crowds.
Such images, I suppose, would not make for very nice
poems.
Often, the words and symbols betray a mawkish,
platitudinous faux innocence and an insistence on treating Palestinians as
nothing more than cuddly plush toys. But outside of attempts at literature,
images of beauty are deployed in a deliberately sneering and triumphalist
manner, as in a poster spotted at Columbia University depicting one of the hang
gliders used in the October 7 attacks, with the legend “SO ON THAT DAY, THE
PEOPLE OF GAZA DRIFTED INTO THE SKY LIKE A HOST OF COLORFUL DRAGONFLIES.”
Even more cynical are the widely distributed photographs
of solemn, sweet-faced Palestinian teenage boys who “wanted only to study and
go abroad” but were “murdered” by the “IOF” (a smear meaning Israel Occupation
Forces). Only occasionally can these photographs be seen in conjunction with
other photos of these same youths, ones in which they are pictured hoisting an
assault rifle while wrapped in an ammo belt and wearing a headband identifying
them as members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
Among the most repellently sentimental of the purveyors
of poshlost are the young Jewish Americans who have formed cuddlesome
relationships with Palestinian “activists,” like one notorious seeker after
clicks and likes who writes, “I have never felt more seen and gently held in my
Judaism than I do in the movement for liberated Palestine.”
Once again, we encounter the gentle hands of the
jihadist.
Perhaps the most egregious example of Palestinian poshlost
is the absurdly ahistorical claim that Jesus was not Jewish but implausibly of
an ethnicity that didn’t even exist until 1964. Consider this excerpt from a
poem by a Palestinian American:
Jesus is
Palestinian.
Jesus is God (or
so they tell me),
Therefore God is
Palestinian.
God is
Palestinian,
And so the Mother
of God lives in Gaza,
And there are so
many of her,
And there are so
many of her son, splayed
Like a cross on
the floor of Al-Shifa Hospital.
None of these people are stupid. They know that the “free
Palestine” movement (which neither seeks freedom nor can point to the existence
of an actual historic Palestine) is at its core a hyper-violent, Iran-funded
maximalist campaign and part of a long-term project to establish a global
Islamist caliphate in which the only place for Jews, Christians, and other
minorities would be underfoot or underground. And they must know, somewhere
deep inside, that they are being used by the jihadists, who thank them for
their work in prolonging the war they wanted, while laughing behind their backs
at their absurd costumes and banal pretensions.
But then, insincerity is the essence of poshlost.
It is a prettified, candy-coated simulacrum of reality that romanticizes evil
and infantilizes those who do evil. For at the very heart of poshlost,
and therefore of sentimentalism, is a refusal to engage honestly with the
visceral reality of the world, to see things outside of a carefully cultivated
garden of illusions, to understand cause and effect, and to be willing to
engage with the consequences of one’s actions and the actions of others.
***
But what of the other part of Nabokov’s definition, the
notion that purveyors of poshlost foolishly believe that “happiness is
purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser”? What are the
“pro-Palestine” demonstrators actually purchasing, other than the flags of
terrorist organizations and keffiyehs that are made in China and possibly
manufactured by Uyghur Muslim forced labor?
The short answer is peer approval, credibility, and a
temporary sense of moral righteousness, purchased only at the cost of their
prior principles. For these are people who, presumably, once upon a time, were
morally opposed to rape, mass murder, and the taking of hostages.
That most of the campus protesters are to be found at the
most expensive universities, and thus either come from wealthy families or are
the recipients of highly prized scholarships, is not incidental to this
hypocrisy; poshlost is a crime of privilege. It is a political statement
that serves to please the issuer of the statement while not, in any way,
advancing the interests of the cause it purports to represent. It is
virtue-signaling in which the purpose is to impress oneself rather than change
the opinions of others. It is selective sentimentality, frequently accompanied
by astonishing callousness. It is an idle amusement, as it’s easy to cry
crocodile tears about a conflict one knows nothing about when there is no job
at stake, and no bills piling up, and there is the assurance that, if arrested,
bail will be immediately available.
Thus, the term poshlost is even more apropos than
Nabokov could have imagined and deserves acceptance as a new English-language
portmanteau word: These posh and comfortable protesters, play-acting like
children in their keffiyehs and waving flags whose meanings are unknown to them,
are well and truly morally lost.
Many of these purveyors of poshlost are not merely
falsely sentimental or insincere; they are deliberately manipulative in their
lust for likes and clicks. They use their selectively empathetic personas in
service of nakedly mercantilistic ends. One professional therapist writes: “Now
that we are blocking all celebrities, influencers and businesses that do not
support Palestine by speaking out and fighting to end the genocide in Gaza,
might I suggest we start following those that do? Like, perhaps my small
hypnotherapy practice.”
The novelist Milan Kundera, who well knew the horrors of
totalitarian rule, has nicely skewered false sentimentality: “Two tears flow in
quick succession. The first tear says: how nice to see children running on the
grass! The second tear says: how nice to be moved, together with all mankind,
by children running on the grass.” Put another way, “sentimentality is that
peculiarly human vice which consists in directing your emotions toward your own
emotions, so as to be the subject of a story told by yourself,” as the English
philosopher Roger Scruton noted in his autobiography.
The sentimentalists are playing a double game: They are
dispensing, and attracting, warm feelings and approbation for themselves and
their kind, while at the same time providing cover for totalitarians and
terrorists. Though some are well-meaning, and genuinely naive, the innocents
among them have long ago been outpaced by the calculating cynics. The latter
dress up evil in a manner no different from that of the directors of the
Nazi-run Theresienstadt labor camp, where the Nazis planted pretty gardens and painted
barracks in lively colors to dupe inspectors from the International Red Cross.
(Not that the International Red Cross, then or now, has ever needed any
assistance in overlooking Jewish suffering.)
To be clear, there are many different categories and
types of lies about the conflict. The insincere sentimentalism about the
Palestinians may not be the worst type, but it is the most insidious because it
wraps itself in a phony cloak of decency and compassion that appeals to
people’s innate moral narcissism. It infiltrates the psyches of the very people
who think of themselves as the most kind, the most sincere, and ostensibly the
most peace-loving.
They are, in fact, exactly the opposite of these things.
One folksinger on Instagram, who acknowledges living on
Tongva land, sings a song referencing “from the river to the sea.” In a musical
litany of complaints about capitalism, Covid, hurricanes, “policing gender
roles,” climate change, and Israel’s supposed “pinkwashing,” the singer
declares, “Lord, at least we have our souls.” This person, like so many of the poshlost
army, has posted nothing about the October 7 massacre or the years of rocket
attacks against Israeli communities. Which makes Scruton’s point that “a moral
argument must be consistent if it is to be sincere.”
If you plant metaphorical gardens that obscure your view
of actual murders and sing poshlost folk tunes designed to paint over
and glamorize the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, you have become
morally bankrupt. Despite your guitar, your guilt, and your peer-approved
opinions, you have long ago lost your soul.
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