Forget ‘never again’, it’s always already war

For a child growing up in mid-1980s Yugoslavia, the future was no elusive dream.11.I would like to thank Tanja Petrović, Nick Aikens, Rebecca Bligh and Hannah Gregory for their comments and suggestions on the text. Poised against the lingering traces of World War II and the looming threat of nuclear destruction, the idea of the future, paradoxically, entailed a peaceful and just world for all, based on the legacies and ongoing struggles of liberation and anti-colonial movements.

When I imagined the world in 2000, I also saw space travel and flying cars, clichés of tech-progressive imagery (at least, as I recall). Conversely, I never tired of listening to what it had been like in the old times: how it had felt seeing an orange for the first time and biting into it unpeeled, waving to a passing train, or seeing the static flicker of the black-and-white TV…

Most gripping of all were the wartime stories. My grandfather survived Gonars, one of the many (forgotten) fascist concentration camps, and my grandmother was denied her Slavic name in the fascist-occupied Primorska region along the present-day western border with Italy. My other grandmother lost her father in Ravensbrück … I listened with trepidation to stories about smuggling secret messages through fascist checkpoints, and was saddened by the fact that my other grandfather buried his violin in a forest when he joined the partisans, never to find it again.

These memories from ‘the war’, re-presencing fear, violence, and imminent death, were invariably interwoven with values of solidarity, respect for human and other life, and the acknowledgement that violence and war are not at all conducive to peaceful conflict resolution.

At the same time, resistance was always seen as the only right thing to do in the face of occupation and destruction. What is more, this attitude was imbued with ethics that transcended ‘mere’ liberation from the occupation, also entailing a socialist forging of a new and better world.

Looking back, Yugoslav socialism at least tried to conceptualize its own existence, in thought and practice, in wider humanist terms; it emphasized peaceful coexistence, itself perhaps one of the most positive international cultural and political projects to date and a central element of the ‘biggest peace movements in history’, among those seeking ‘post-war alternatives to domination and oppression … inventing new political languages of liberation’.22.‘After World War II there were alternatives to domination and oppression; anticolonial, emancipatory movements inventing new political languages of liberation. All these past alternatives seem to have failed us.’ Bojana Piškur, ‘Troubles with the East(s)’, L’Internationale Online, 22 January 2024, internationaleonline.org. See also Ranko Petković, Nesvrstana Jugoslavija i savremeni svet, Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1985; and Leo Mates, Koegzistencija, Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1974.

Never again

World War II ended when ‘peace broke out’.33.‘Peace breaking out’ is a reference to the Monty Python sketch ‘The Funniest Joke in the World’.
It is ‘funny’ how we tend to say that wars break out, as if they were some natural phenomena outside the sphere of decision-making by individuals or groups in charge. At the same time, Michael Mann notes, one has to contend with the condition that human actors are enmeshed in wider sociopolitical and historical structures that can mask the processes and decisions that lead to wars. See Michael Mann, ‘Explaining the Irrationality of War’, New Left Review, no. 145, 2024, pp. 5–25. Peace, on the other hand, has to be fought for, which in parts of the world that prize democracy, freedom, cooperation and human rights, isn’t, or shouldn’t be, funny at all.  Peace, however, was not (then or ever) evenly distributed. New conflicts were brewing, old ones were being reignited. Some wars are made famous in popular culture, effectively obscuring atrocities deemed less politically relevant, and so afforded less public attention. Even historical cases of genocide, such as that carried out by the Belgians in the Congo, the Armenian genocide, the more recent and relatively visible Rwandan genocide, or the one in Srebrenica, the first to have been committed in Europe after World War II. The suffering of the Kurds, the Rohingya, the Uyghurs and, yet again, of the Armenians, has been only peripherally reported by news media. Currently, coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Israeli genocide in Gaza and now escalating attacks on Lebanon, also due to their highly volatile political and military-industrial stakes, greatly exceeds that of other ongoing atrocities.

After World War II, a vow was (re)made never again to allow such atrocities and insanity to happen: a promise to posterity to forever prevent destruction and mass murder, to counteract (in a timely manner) the othering and hatred that led to the killing of civilian Jews, Roma, Slavs, communists, homosexuals and others who perished in the Holocaust, the epitome of industrialized suffering and destruction. Never again, the strongest of imperatives to learn from and not to repeat history, also powered, and was powered by, the drive for the material and symbolic reconstruction of what the British historian Keith Lowe calls the ‘savage continent’ – that is, Europe.44.Keith Lowe, Savage Continent, Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, London: Penguin Books, 2013.

Nevertheless, never again has a longer history. As Omer Bartov notes, it was first used after the ‘war to end all wars’ (what nonsense) – that is, World War I, then in the sense of ‘we should do everything we can to prevent another war’,55.‘“Never Again!” Roundtable Organized by Eastern European Holocaust Studies and the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre’, Eastern European Holocaust Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2023, p. 54, doi.org. which went on to empower notions of pacifism and appeasement. At the same time in the German context, however, Bartov continues, never again was used with a different interpretative emphasis, wherein:

We did not really lose that war. We were stabbed in the back. We were betrayed, and therefore that war has to be fought again. And this time, it has to be won. In that sense, World War I is re-interpreted in Germany, which leads into a National Socialist discourse, into a war that was lost for the wrong reasons and a war that should be won.66.Ibid.

In the Jewish/Israeli context after World War II, never again did not mean ‘never again war’ per se, but rather,

‘Never Again the Holocaust’. It’s not even really ‘Never Again genocide or mass murder’, it’s ‘Never Again the Holocaust’… . [And if] that thing should never happen again, then we should do everything we can to prevent it. In fact, everything that we would do to prevent it is justified. This gives one sanction to do anything one can or wants to if one perceives a particular threat, an existential threat.77.Ibid., p. 55.

Finally, Bartov identifies another never again–type enjoinment, albeit one that doesn’t use those words precisely:

the communist one comes under the slogan of anti-fascism, that is that such systems of Nazism and fascism must always be prevented and that everything that we do to prevent it is justified … It’s a kind of ‘Never Again’ that gives one license to do whatever is needed to prevent that from happening.88.Ibid.

Note that even while this latter seems the most inclusive and open, as opposed to the more exclusivist ethno-nationalist interpretations, like all of the never agains Bartov mentions it is characterized not only by the urge to prevent future wars and genocides, but also by the speculative justification of violence in the very name of violence- and genocide-prevention.

Never again?

Declaratively, never again is past-oriented: a vow to remember the victims and prevent the forgetting of what happened. Thus understood, as Stef Carps and Michael Rothberg note, it may be seen as an impetus to remember and frame ‘traumatic histories across communal boundaries’ – as a tool, even, for the ‘transmission across society of empathy for the historical experience of others’, with ‘the potential, at least, to help people understand past injustices, to generate social solidarity and to produce alliances between various marginal groups’.99.Stef Craps and Michael Rothberg, ‘Introduction: Transcultural Negotiations of Holocaust Memory’, Criticism, vol. 53, no. 4, 2011, p. 518, digitalcommons.wayne.edu. Indeed, while the discursive and moral singularity attributed to the Holocaust (as identified by Michael Rothberg in his discussion of the criticisms of Holocaust-focused narratives) can sometimes obscure other atrocities or downplay traumatic events that may seem less violent, destructive or otherwise ‘not traumatic enough’, the collective memory of the Holocaust does offer a template to talk about and research other acts of violence in human history.1010.See Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford University Press, 2009; and Dirk Moses, ‘Genocide and the Terror of History’, Parallax, vol. 17, no. 4, 2011, pp. 90–109.

At the same time, the main claim of never again is future-facing: to help chart out a different world beyond conquest, subjugation, mass killings, destruction. As such, post–World War II, it symbolized the potential to integrate the historical trauma of a generation and, as an articulation of hope for a peaceful future, radically inflected post-war politics and (popular) culture. It also influenced the practices and ideologies of decolonial struggles and the forging of political alliances among colonized nations,1111.Jürgen Dinkel, The Non-Aligned Movement: Genesis, Organization and Politics (1927–1992) (trans. Alex Skinner), Boston: Brill, 2018. for example at the 1955 Asian-African conference in Bandung, Indonesia, the birthplace of the idiom ‘Bandung Spirit’. Darwis Khudori recalls:

I personally found that ‘Bandung Spirit’ represents a common wish for: 1) a peaceful coexistence between nations; 2) the liberation of the world from the hegemony of any superpower, from colonialism, from imperialism and from any kind of domination of one country by another; 3) the equality of races and nations; 4) the solidarity with the poor, the colonised, the exploited, and the weak and those being weakened by the world order of the day; and 5) a people-centred development.1212.Darwis Khudori, ‘Bandung conference 1955 and Bandung commemorative conferences 2005 and 2015: excerpts from the declarations of heads of state and governments’, Bandung Legacy and Global Future: New Insights and Emerging Forces, New Delhi: Aakar Books, 2018, pp. 291–98.

Similarly, the Non-Aligned Movement, kick-started in Belgrade in 1961, incorporated the idea of peaceful coexistence as one of its central tenets, effectively extending, or aiming to extend, the spirit and appeal of never again across peoples, nations and continents beyond the West.

Where, today, is never again? And where, in a world steeped in killing, destruction, exploitation and extraction, has it been for the past eighty years? Where is it as many of those in power actively contribute to the dismantling of any functioning approximation, however flawed, of an international order – of humanitarian law and other global institutions that were created to prevent the (re)barbarization of the world?

As the last survivors, witnesses and perpetrators of World War II pass away, as states and ideologies collapse, new ones arise and, consequently, geopolitical relations shift, the values, dreams and expectations that were derived from the ruins have increasingly become the stuff of pro-forma political statements. Take, for example, this Holocaust Remembrance Day statement by the German Ambassador to Egypt, made roughly eight months before 7 October 2023:

It is our duty as a nation and as humans, to keep the memory alive and make sure that history does not repeat itself. Never forget, and never again. This became a supreme priority of our education, and of our Foreign Policy. Today this means fighting against any kind of discrimination, racism, antisemitism, anti-Islamism, and hate, which is again on the rise in our societies. This begins at the grass-root level of our societies, in education in schools, and in local and religious communities.1313.U.S. Mission Egypt, ‘Never Forget. Never Again. Germany and the United States Mark Holocaust Remembrance Day’, U.S. Embassy in Egypt, 31 January 2023, usembassy.gov. 

To and for whom, then, does today’s never again apply? Why has it become a discursive trope applied only in hindsight, after atrocities have been committed? What conditions have brought about its near-demise or degradation, or rather exposed it as a façade?

Never again, for whom?

New instances of aggression and war can no longer be understood in the historical and mnemonic frame of the twentieth century. Nor, for better or worse, can past wars and destruction be understood in the frame of a market capitalism that, arising ‘victorious’ after the ‘defeat’ of socialism as an emancipatory project, has since evolved into a cynical legitimation of state-sponsored violence as a fight for ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. However noble these values may be, their application in contemporary conflicts is marred by ‘cancelling’, censorship, hypocrisy, ‘alternative truths’ and outright lies, among other misuses of language (or images, for that matter). As noted by Ursula K. Le Guin: ‘To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or to make money goes wrong: it lies.’1414.Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘A Few Words to a Young Writer’, n.d., ursulakleguin.com.

Worse than anodyne, never again increasingly comes across as a grotesque political lie. Its performative emptiness, emancipatory devaluation and selective application typifies the for-profit use of high-flying terms such as ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, or ‘human rights’, in ways that rest on binaries of absolute ‘good or evil’, ‘right or wrong’. Such terms, so used, only contribute to the bloody, exclusionary, arbitrary, selective, religio-mythical ‘realities’ that serve to reinforce or even constitute divisions between those lives that are worth living and the rest.

Such is the case in the ongoing genocide in Gaza perpetrated by the State of Israel,1515.I’m leaving out discussion of Russia’s war against Ukraine because the ‘international community’ (broadly understood as a combination of international institutions, the UN and geopolitically specialized associations such as NATO) did at least something to sanction the aggressor state (if only post-festum and always in line with western interests, having failed on all counts to at least try to prevent the war altogether). In the case of the Gaza genocide, this same ‘community’ did absolutely nothing meaningful – besides, that is, the further emptying-out of never again under the pressure of reproach that ‘any critique of Israeli politics is anti-Semitism’, which further revealed the crumbling of said community.  whose slaughter and racial optics demonstrate the selective and exclusionary character of the Israeli state’s never again, almost from its outset: Three years after the end of World War II, following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1947,1616.The establishment of Israel was an apology of sorts by European nations to the Jews they failed to protect during the Nazi reign and its genocidal upscaling of centuries of European anti-Judaism. At the same time, I would argue, the formation of Israel also contributed to the concealment of these European states’ own share of historical responsibility, and that of large parts of their populations, for centuries of anti-Semitism. the 1948 Nakba resulted in the destruction of Palestine and the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians. Per the UN’s webpage ‘About the Nakba’:

As early as December 1948, the UN General Assembly called for refugee return, property restitution and compensation (resolution 194 (II)). However, 75 years later, despite countless UN resolutions, the rights of the Palestinians continue to be denied. According to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) more than 5 million Palestine refugees are scattered throughout the Middle East. Today, Palestinians continue to be dispossessed and displaced by Israeli settlements, evictions, land confiscation and home demolitions.1717.‘About the Nakba’, The Question of Palestine, UN, un.org.

Yet the Nakba continues to receive little recognition or notice in western media or official political discourse.1818.‘The Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multicultural society. However, the conflict between Arabs and Jews intensified in the 1930s with the increase of Jewish immigration, driven by persecution in Europe, and with the Zionist movement aiming to establish a Jewish state in Palestine’. Ibid.  As Michael Mann observes, one thing that ‘makes this situation unique’ is the fact of its ‘involving the imposition of a settler-colonial state upon indigenous people by another people, fleeing a genocide’. Mann goes on:

Liberal assumptions might suggest that the terrifying experience of the Shoah would make Israeli Jews more sensitive to others’ suffering. To the contrary, many seem to believe that to survive as a people, they must use to the full whatever coercive power they have. Since Israeli Jews have the military and political power to seize Arab lands, most believe they have the right to do so in the name of ethnic survival.1919.Mann, ‘Explaining the Irrationality of War’, p. 12.

For never again to work post–World War II, it was deemed critical to redefine the system of transnational relations, international laws, and treaties and, once redefined, to include the newly decolonized nations within them. The United Nations, as the only approximately capable entity, was tasked with providing forms of global governance. This task was, and is, difficult to uphold. As a manifestation of the prolonged legacy of western imperial subordination, international law was, and is, innately biased: it has no actual leverage to coerce signatory parties to comply, particularly when a decision or action might be in conflict with the interests of those with political and military power. Nevertheless, in a technologically, economically and politically connected world, planetary institutions seem crucial to facilitate trans- and international contracts, cooperation and solidarity across territories yet within legal boundaries. Here, an exchange of letters between Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers is worth revisiting.2020.I first encountered this exchange in Hans Kellner, ‘“Never Again” is Now’, History and Theory, vol. 33, no. 2, 1994, pp. 127–44. Referring to the trials against Nazi officials, Arendt wrote:

The Nazi crimes, it seems to me, explode the limits of the law; and that is precisely what constitutes their monstrousness. For these crimes, no punishment is severe enough. It may well be essential to hang Göring, but it is totally inadequate. That is, the guilt, in contrast to criminal guilt, oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems … . And just as inhuman as their guilt is the innocence of the victims. Human beings simply can’t be as innocent as they all were in the face of the gas chambers (the most repulsive usurer was as innocent as the newborn child because no crime deserves such a punishment). We are simply not equipped to deal, on a human, political level, with a guilt that is beyond crime and an innocence that is beyond goodness or virtue. This is the abyss that opened up before us as early as 1933 (much earlier, actually, with the onset of imperialistic politics) and into which we have finally stumbled.2121.Hannah Arendt, ‘43 Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers August 17, 1946’, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969 (ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber), London: Harcourt Brace Company, 1992, p. 54.

The arbitrary attribution of e.g. political, racialized, gendered otherness as a discursive (becoming, all too often, a biophysical) precursor of genocide is a mechanism of dehumanization to structure the ground for actions that, post-festum, are often called ‘evil’. More specifically, Arendt used the term ‘radical evil’ for that which:

has to do with the following phenomenon: making human beings as human beings superfluous (not using them as means to an end, which leaves their essence as humans untouched and impinges only on their human dignity; rather, making them superfluous as human beings). This happens as soon as all unpredictability – which, in human beings, is the equivalent of spontaneity – is eliminated.2222.Arendt, ‘109 Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, March 4, 1951’, in Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969, p. 166.

Such framing amplifies the other’s status as an enemy, readily transformable into a screen onto which fear and hatred are projected; this drives the formation of a mass psychosis in which things get physical. Punitive action, removal of degenerates, remigration (recently popularized by the extreme right) as ‘deratization’ – pest control, literally, getting rid of (human) rats – become acceptable methods of protection and security.

In his reply to Arendt regarding the question of guilt, Jaspers noted:

I’m not altogether comfortable with your view, because a guilt that goes beyond all criminal guilt inevitably takes on a streak of ‘greatness’—of satanic greatness—which is, for me, as inappropriate for the Nazis as all the talk about the ‘demonic’ element in Hitler and so forth. It seems to me that we have to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that’s what truly characterizes them.2323.Karl Jaspers, ‘46 Karl Jaspers to Hannah Arendt, Heidelberg, October 19, 1946’, in Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969, p. 62.

And since ‘we’ are ill-equipped to deal with actions that are ‘beyond crime and innocence’, ‘beyond goodness or virtue’ – actions that undermine lawfulness as a basis for preventing or sanctioning crimes against humanity – it should be clear to us all that it is necessary not only to devise a planetary system to deal, however precariously, with such acts of ‘radical evil’, but also to identify and prevent the escalation of conflict before it oversteps the boundaries of humanity and legality.

In the wider contemporary framing, as per Arendt, the othering logic of good vs. evil – whereby ‘their’ absolute guilt (vs. ‘our’ absolute goodness) is what drives ‘us’ to strive for ‘our’ ultimate victory and ‘their’ defeat – also helps to understand how and by whom the international system is presently being dismantled. Actions in breach of international treaties and organizations are often legitimated by a neo-nationalist, my-country-first affective logic, subject only to the power-based and otherwise arbitrary non/enforcement of ‘the law’. And it is from this, too, that the persistence and impunity of certain actors derives. For example, the US’s construction of a floating pier on the Gaza shore, now abandoned, effectively bypassed international humanitarian institutions whilst also assisting Israel in indefinitely preventing the arrival into Gaza of aid by land. Such unilateral actions, conducted via semi-transparent processes outside the scope of international institutions, undermine international efforts at conflict resolution, as well as the institutions themselves. They also routinely legitimize and normalize extraction and privatization in zones of conflict, securing terrain for (nationally favoured) corporations to operate with little social or political accountability.

In such circumstances, never again is not just an opportune political lie, a pervasive form or feature of political performativity, it is a failed ideal. Promoted as an all-human value despite its implicitly partial or exclusionary nature, it alludes to a better future even while it systematically fails to account for the mechanisms that drive atrocities, such as the techniques of detention and killing that culminated in, but did not end with, the Holocaust.

Now, in light of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, never again is also shown to be an utterly shattered promise of a better world.

Always already again

After the collapse of socialism, a ‘victorious’ liberal capitalism eradicated any politico-ideological alternatives, striving to deride into forgetfulness the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which, post-war, had presented a political and economic alternative to the bipolarity of the socialist-east and capitalist-west systems. As such, it also offered major contributions and support to decolonial and anti-imperial movements across the globe, in the name of autonomy and self-determination.2424.See Dinkel, The Non-Aligned Movement; and Tvrtko Jakovina, Treća strana hladnog rata, Zagreb: Fraktura, 2010.  As mentioned above, one of NAM’s central tenets was the idea of peaceful coexistence among its members, based on the awareness that, while a world without conflict is impossible, it is possible to use methods of conflict resolution other than violence and war. Yet, ‘after NAM’ and ‘after socialism’, the world has effectively shaken off both the shackles of lawful conduct and, with them, the futurophilic obligations of never again in full spectrum – that is, the undertaking to work towards a peaceful and just future for all. Instead, a space has opened for the ruthless continuation and acceleration of necropolitical and colonial practices, now evident, yet again, in the decimation of Palestinian lives, lands and lifeworlds – just where an opportunity to fully enact a (re)commitment to never again has, once again, been lost.

To grasp, instead, the full consequences of its liberal renunciation, it is necessary to consider the longer, reality-structuring sociopolitical, historical, technical and economic processes and phenomena that preceded it: On the one hand, the wider effects and affects of the processes of capitalism and industrialization that, for humans, recast the relationship between time and place, decoupling us from a nature relegated to the status of a set of extraction-ready resources; on the other, those of a liberalism that historically and consistently traded political for economic power, leaving the former to conservative, proto-fascist and fascist actors.2525.Tomaž Mastnak, ‘Postsocialism’, lecture at the School of Common Knowledge, Ljubljana, 28 May 2024. See also his Črna internacionala: Vojna, veliki biznis in vpeljava neoliberalizma, Ljubljana: Založba /*cf, 2019, and Bonapartizem, Prolegomena za študij fašizma, Ljubljana: Založba /*cf, 2021.

These processes, integral to modernity’s scientific discoveries and technological advances, in particular the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, were marked by what the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls ‘social acceleration’,2626.Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. leaving a significant imprint on the future development of science and technology, on material and symbolic landscapes, and on the way politics has been hollowed out. Thus, as Rosa states, social acceleration has deeply affected the conditions of modern industrial human relations with others and with the world:

The sociocultural formation of modernity thus turns out to be, in a way, doubly calibrated for the strategy of making the world controllable. We are structurally compelled (from without) and culturally driven (from within) to turn the world into a point of aggression. It appears to us as something to be known, exploited, attained, appropriated, mastered, and controlled. And often this is not just about bringing things—segments of world—within reach, but about making them faster, easier, cheaper, more efficient, less resistant, more reliably controllable.2727.Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (trans. James C. Wagner), Cambridge: Polity, 2020, p. 14.

The obsessive quest to control the world has propelled modern industrial humans into an evermore aggressive relationship to nature, legitimizing and normalizing the desire for, and the operational mode of, conquest:

Everything that appears to us must be known, mastered, conquered, made useful. Expressed abstractly, this sounds banal at first—but it isn’t. Lurking behind this idea is a creeping reorganization of our relationship to the world that stretches far back historically, culturally, economically and institutionally but in the twenty-first century has become newly radicalized, not least as a result of the technological possibilities unleashed by digitalization and by the demands for optimization and growth produced by financial market capitalism and unbridled competition.2828.Ibid., p. 6.

Effectively, what this means, in the context of the neoliberal takeover of mind and body, land and time – or, that is, their recasting as resources, Heideggerian Bestand – is that everything and everyone becomes a ‘radical enemy’. Contra NAM, this ideological and material optics posits victory, domination (or financial gain, for that matter) and destruction as the highest goals or values – with application not only to treaties and laws, but also to ‘the environment’ (i.e., the planet, understood as a set of natural resources). Ultimately, all life, in its unpredictability and spontaneity, could be subject to elimination under this rule.

A world approached via the motto ‘move fast and break things’2929.Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2017. has no use for never again, nor for peaceful coexistence; no room for thought, no time to listen and hear and ponder; no need to reflect and debate, no use for empathy, solidarity or care. There is, however, plenty of room for war and destruction. War, according to Darko Suvin, ‘is more than a metaphor for bourgeois human relationships, it is their allegoric essence’;3030.Darko Suvin, Gdje smo? Kuda idemo? Za političku epistemologiju spasa: eseji za orijentaciju i djelovanje u oskudnom vremenu, Zagreb: Hrvatsko filozofsko društvo, 2006, p. 121. or, as noted by Jean Jurès: ‘le capitalisme porte la guerre comme la nuée porte l’orage’;3131.Quoted in Suvin, Gdje smo?, p. 121. or, as Rosa Luxemburg concluded: ‘force (Gewalt, violence) is the only solution for capital: accumulation of capital accepts violence as permanent weapon, not just at its beginning but also today’.3232.Quoted in Suvin, Gdje smo?, p. 128. ‘Continued warfare under capitalism never stopped’, Suvin adds, before exemplifying his insistence that any discussion of modern warfare be cast in class terms: ‘sabres, bullets, and bombardment was always the final answer of the upper class – first feudal landlords, then centralised state armies – to any bottom-up justice-seeking uprising’.3333.Suvin, Gdje smo?, p. 123. It is of little consolation that, according to Isaac Asimov, ‘violence is the last refuge of the incompetent’.3434.See John Michael Greer, ‘The Last Refuge of the Incompetent’, resilience, 20 August 2015, resilience.org. 

This dynamic inflects the present and future prospect of peaceful coexistence. It uncovers the conditions that drove the industrialization of killing and, just as importantly, alludes to the conditions of neoliberal totalitarianism. The latter – escalating a bellicose technopolitics that actively prevents and disempowers the peaceful resolution of disputes in favour of profitably arming one or more of the disputants – declaratively embraces never again at the same time as it cynically disempowers it by continually promoting (increasingly neo-nationalistic) violence and war as ‘humanitarian’ tools for conflict resolution, and discouraging or censoring critique.

If, however, one is to fight against the Denkverbot that seems to arise from this situation,3535.See Srećko Horvat, Paul Stubbs and Dubravka Sekulić, ‘Against the “Denkverbot”: If you cancel Palestine, cancel us’, Al Jazeera, 1 November 2023, aljazeera.com. against the cynical imposition and naturalization of radically exclusive and mythologized relations between good and evil, ‘us’ and ‘them’, against subjugation and destruction, against the legitimization of war as an acceptable solution, one is – that is, ‘we’ are – required to attempt a substantial conceptual as well as actual reconfiguration of ‘our’ conditions and modes of human, nonhuman and environmental relationality, ‘our’ catastrophic overvaluation of financial ‘sustainability’ or ‘gain’.

Today, any answer to the question of the future relevance of never again must avoid a binary ‘yes or no’, ‘us or them’, ‘victory or defeat’. Not simply because the mantra has, so far, exclusively applied to the west, but because the very conditions and prospects of life amid the post-Enlightenment–technofeudalist–neoliberal–extractivist entanglement are premised on aggression and violence. Aggression, following Rosa, can be understood as a structural, political, economic and affective mode of operation: to be rendered controllable, we are increasingly compartmentalized, polarized, disoriented, neurasthenic subjects, apparently continuing to lose political and cultural agency in the face of seemingly insurmountable eco-political crises. Yet, in fact, we should be seeking to form radically different structures and practise radically different politics of solidarity, equity, care, kindness and gentleness as a substrate for decisive socio-ecological action.

In this, attention should be paid to the power of gentleness, which, as Anne Dufourmantelle describes it, ‘is an active passivity that may become an extraordinary force of symbolic resistance and, as such, become central to both ethics and politics’.3636.Anne Dufourmantelle, The Power of Gentleness, Meditations on the Risk of Living, New York: Fordham University Press, 2018, p. 5. Today, however, ‘gentleness is troubling. We desire it, but it is inadmissible. When they are not despised, the gentle are persecuted or sanctified. We abandon them because gentleness as power shows us the reality of our own weakness.’3737.Ibid. The same could be said of those striving for peace who have consistently been cast as cowards and traitors.3838.In March 1915, French writer and pacifist Romain Rolland wrote: ‘Whoever insists, in the midst of war, on defending peace among men knows that he risks his own peace, his reputation, his friends, for his belief. But of what value is a belief for which no risks are run?’ Romain Rolland, Above the Battle (trans. C.K. Ogden), Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1916, mirrorservice.org.

Finally, the question of whether the present extractivist neoliberal regime can accommodate any coherent, transformative and historically informed discussion of peaceful coexistence and never again reveals a twofold obstacle: First, that the apparent desire to understand the world as hostile (per Rosa, above) breeds generalized violence and aggression; and second, just as crucial, that as past traumas recede into the distance, future generations become immune to violent images and stories from the past.

For many people today, the never again war of nearly a century ago, its deportations, mass killings and destruction bear little emotional resonance. In the face of this, Darko Suvin asks: ‘How can we outline a new sensorium humanity needs for continued existence?’3939.Suvin, Gdje smo?, p. 116. For, indeed – and despite the taint, in living memory, of the term and concept of revisionism by, for example, Holocaust denial4040.See Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, ‘Memory Studies in a Moment of Danger: Fascism, Postfascism, and the Contemporary Political Imaginary’, Memory Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, 2018, doi.org. – Hans Kellner insists:

It is the nature of an active historical culture to revise. Each new contribution to the discourse … must acquire its own identity by foregrounding those features which deform and challenge the sense of the material. … To be brought to life, or at least to the simulacrum of life that makes possible academic or even popular publication, the material will have to be reshaped, and this, in turn, means revision. The alternative is ritual, and even ritual is always open to the demands of the present.4141.Kellner, ‘“Never Again” is Now’, p. 129.  

The ways in which historical knowledge is produced, reproduced, disseminated and popularized, not just through education but also in popular culture and media, must be continually reinvented, recalibrated and updated in such a manner that ‘the past’ can ‘speak anew’ to new generations. Like this, it might affect them – as in, move them and make them move – in novel ways,4242.Brian Massumi, The Politics of Affect, Cambridge: Polity, 2015. preventing mnemo-historical negationism and amnesia from feeding (off) political lies.4343.Negationism refers to ‘denying the existence of Nazi gas chambers and, more generally, the reality of the Holocaust’. See Henry Rousso, Lucy Golsan and Richard J. Golsan, ‘The Political and Cultural Roots of Negationism in France’, South Central Review, vol. 23, no. 1, 2006, p. 67.