Identity In Wartime And The Mirage Of Normalcy

I was born and raised by an Ashkenazi Jewish mother. She entered this world in Berlin, Germany, at the advent of the Nazi era, subsequent child of Der Kindertransport, and by a father who, in infancy, was abandoned, at the outset of the Great Depression on the doorsteps of a Baptist orphanage in rural Missouri, and was adopted by a married couple of mixed denomination, a Jewish mother, one Mildred Silver, a Lower Eastside exile to New Orleans and a gentile father, my namesake, Philip Rockstroh, also, an exile to New Orleans via Staten Island.

Given the reality that my father’s family history was unknown, there has been an x-factor regarding my genetic heritage. My father, evincing a life-long orphan’s rage, insisted he did not possess the slightest desire to discover the birth parents who abandoned him…such were his wishes that my family respected until his death.

As for myself, I enjoyed living in the mystery of the situation, playing with the possibilities of what were the origins of half of my genes.

In my wayward, Jack Kerouac bedazzled youth, I was given to travel the world, all the while, my psychical antenna scanning the landscapes of distant shores in search of signs of atavistic recognitions and affinities with novel landscapes.

Self-Portrait, Pablo Picasso

In Israel, the Mediterranean climate felt copacetic but I felt scant little affinity with the culture. The Zionist credo felt off — and off-putting to me. It wasn’t simply the rampant bigotry and casual cruelty of the Israeli citizenry — that their mindset reminded me of the Jim Crow nostalgics of my native Alabama — a deeper element of the soul was in play .

Yet farther down the Mediterranean, in my travels to Greece, in particular in the southern regions in and around the Peloponnese Islands and the sea-kissed town of Pylos, I experienced the phenomenon of homecoming to a location previously not visited.

Only once before had I experienced the same inchoate feeling of return. It occurred on a visit to London – a city I felt was cold and off-putting, — until I wandered the streets of the Whitechapel district of East London…yes, the haunts of Jack The Ripper and the precincts of the Cockney accent and dialect.

Years passed, I obtained joint US/German citizenship. While traveling Germany, predictably, given my Ashkenazi Jewish bloodline, I experienced an affinity with the landscape of The Rhineland (and also southward in southern Italy where, I was later to learn, a strong aspect of the maternal Ashkenazi gene pool has its origin).

Then came, the eerie, perhaps, numinous outcome of a recent DNA test: My ancestry report:

Ashkenazi Jews in Central & Southeastern Europe: 50%

Southern Greece: 23%

Southeastern England & Northwestern Europe: 11%

Southern Wales: 5%

Leinster, Ireland: 4%

Munster, Ireland: 3%

Strangely enough, the anfractuous trajectories of The Great Depression delivered my paternal (no blood relation) grandmother, Mildred Silver, to Birmingham, Alabama, after my namesake, Philip, a professional gambler, with a fallback degree in civil engineering, fell to a debilitating stroke thus causing Mildred to seek the aid of her sisters who had migrated from the Lower Eastside to the coal and steel, pre-war booming city, ensconced in the foothills of the Appalachians, Birmingham.

Here’s another kicker, the Anglo-Saxon – okay, cracker – half of my father’s biological family were of the Appalachian class. Later research revealed, an ancestor had left Whitechapel, England, destined for Virginia, then later crossed into the Ohio River Valley then into the Midwestern Plains. I am, by blood, half European Jewish, part Greek, part Appalachian stock. A Greek Hillbilly Jewboy.

As much as I can piece events together, somewhere in the Midwest, and in some manner, at the cusp of The Great Depression, a star-crossed, cross-cultural coupling occurred between a Greek immigrant — my paternal grandfather, maybe a traveling salesman – and my grandmother, perhaps, a Midwestern farm girl. It sounds like the opening line of a ribald joke…”did you hear the one about the Greek traveling salesman and the hick farm girl…?”

Here is yet another kicker: I can, by means of the Zionist Law of Return, gain citizenship in Israel – but if I showed up in Whitechapel or Pylos or Southern Italy – or even the Rhineland – I would be considered a lunatic if I claimed entitlement to real estate and property. If I arrived, bearing weaponry — as did the Zionist settler-colonialists invaders of Palestine – I would be jailed as a dangerous criminal.

The Barbarians, Max Ernst, 1937

The mirage of normalcy:

Because our days are marked by a discernible degree of normalcy, we tend to believe one day will resemble the next because, as a general rule, they do. Until they don’t.

Normal for Israelis involved proceeding through their days and sleeping unscathed through the night, as their military forces were perpetrating genocide, the Zionist settler class was ethnically cleansing the West bank, and Palestinians endured life with the boot of an ethno-state on their collective neck.

You could say Israelis dwelled within a bubble of smug and snug in the belief of their supremacy and safety beneath their domes of defense shields. Then from the sky came wailing barrages of Iranian missiles. Their defense dome was being frayed, torn, and shredded. Iran had planned for a long war; far longer than Israel’s defenses could hold out.

What happens to the citizens of a nation’s psyches, conditioned from birth, to evince casual cruelty and regard reality beyond their insular world with reflexive belligerence when said belligerence is, suddenly, met with a devastating counter campaign of deadly force?

It has been reported, before the present war, mental illness rates were surging in Israel and the economically privileged Ashkenazi elite were streaming from the Zionist state. There were cracks beginning to appear in the Zionist wall of invincibility. Hence, the mental crackups and angst of those who could afford to flee the nation.

What comes next after the shattering of illusion? There is a choice: suicide or repentance. The founder of the Post-Jungian School Of Archetypal Psychology, the late James Hillman posited, the act of suicide was a tragic literalization of the psyche’s attempt to rid itself of a false self, ridden by an ego so heavily fortified against change that either depression or mania or both set in. Yet the ego-imprisoned sufferer need not kill himself – he is in of need of killing the falseness he has mistaken for the totality of his psyche.

Hence Israel, repentance is the way forward. If not, the hasbara you dollop out is poisoning you. Your militarism is a murder spree that could very well end by suicide by supersonic missile.

Which bring s us to Pete Hegseth who admonishes, we should be “on bended knee” praying to the Prince Of Peace to rain down death from thundering — I mean, eternally loving — I mean, wrathful and vengeance-prone Heaven upon the heathen hordes in the Levant — albeit, Christian Zionists preach, not upon the Jews…for now.

(The King Of The Jews has a special Hell for those Old Book, smarty schmegegge who refuse to don their savior-worthy knee pads for the Messiah, last millennium edition.)

Yet the question must be asked: Is Hegseth on his knees because he slid off a barstool? Is he going to lead a crusade into Iran riding a pink elephant?

Have I limned too whimsical an image – because it appears the besotted, psychotic putz is off the wagon and aboard the Armageddon Express.The crackbrained war wino does not need to be consulting the Book Of Revelations but perusing the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Finally, it would be more propitious for the entire world if he found a new Higher Power. Hegseth’s present concept of one seems to be a celestial spree killer. The knowledge could drive even a teetotaler to hit the hard stuff.

The deranged US political class allocates more than a trillion dollars for war-making, all as the Pentagon’s psychopathic killers declare outright, evincing the lack of shame inherent to psychopaths, the US no longer possesses a Defense Department but a War Department…a money-pit bureaucracy headed by a ranting, blood-besotted Secretary Of Psychopathy, one Pete Hegseth.

Below the hierarchy of mass murders, the ranks of the US military’s economic conscripts are trained to kill and die for Israel’s ambitions and to avoid the public from becoming privy to Epstein related revelations.

Regarding the glorification of all things US Military, Americans are the most successfully propagandized citizenry on earth, albeit the Israelis.

Tragically, the vast majority of Israelis have proven themselves to be beyond reason and redemption. On the homefront of the US empire, the question is, will this latest war of aggression, sold on lies, as has been the case with all US wars in the post-Second World War era, finally and at long last, cause Americans to realize military empires do not fight in self-defense— they wage wars of aggression to enrich the already bloated coffers of the empire’s economic elite.

A hopeful sign:

The USS Gerald Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, has departed the Red Sea war zone, and is headed to dock in Souda Bay, Crete, after crew members set fire to the warship’s laundry room in order to avoid deployment to Netanyahu’s/Trump’s war of aggression.

The sailors manning the USS Gerald Ford have proven themselves heroes in the scenario, as are all who refuse to fight immoral wars.

The post Identity In Wartime And The Mirage Of Normalcy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Phil Rockstroh.

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