A Streamer Tries to do Politics

Asmongold in his natural habitat (source: Polygon.com).

Part of the Media Critique topic

Awhile back, the popular Twitch streamer Asmongold weighed in on the genocide in Palestine. In a rather chilling rant, he described the Palestinians as an inherently violent people who had an inferior culture. He concluded that they deserved to be wiped out by the settler-colonial state of Israel and that no one should mourn Palestine's destruction. This unhinged tirade earned Asmongold a short ban from Twitch and drew a lot of negative media attention. The streamer was subsequently pressured to walk back his statements and offer an apology.

What stood out to me about this episode was the mass attention it garnered. Although many other media personalities and Western politicians have expressed similar views on Palestine, none have received quite the visceral reaction experienced by Asmongold. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the irony of a crude man who infamously lived in squalor labeling the people of another culture as "uncivilized". Nonetheless, the true cause of the outrage has more to do with the lack of tact when discussing a sensitive topic. In the past, Asmongold had limited his reactionary views to complaining about "wokeness" in movies and video games. When it came to the conflict in Palestine, he tried his hand at political commentary. It did not end well.

The ideology of Zionism is broadly accepted in the West, yet much effort is put onto covering up the neofascist nature of Zionism in order to make it palpable to the public. The project of a settler-colonial state requires constant expansion and mass genocide. Israel must accomplish this task while still maintaining the veneer of a democratic society. In a similar vein, Nazi Germany tried to aggressively expand and exterminate indigenous populations while still appearing as a respectable state. Outside of Europe, the use of Nazi death camps was downplayed for the sake of diplomacy. When the Nazis turned to the gas chambers as a way to dispose of their undesirables, a large impetus behind this change was the negative social reactions of the German people. The gas chamber method limited the number of Nazi soldiers involved and kept the killings out of sight of the average German citizen.

Likewise, Zionist politicians must appease their citizenry through media manipulation in order to frame Israel as a benevolent actor in the conflict. Headlines are rewritten by news organizations to distort reality and information is deliberately misrepresented to cast blame on the suffering Palestinian people. Even controversial YouTubers like Vaush and Destiny put considerable effort into concealing their fascistic beliefs behind a thin veil of fake progressivism. Consistently, they point to the supposed liberal-democratic values of Israel and contrast them with the conservative Islamism of Hamas, even though the real difference between the two groups is that of an illegal apartheid regime versus a national liberation movement.

The Western politicians do their part to uphold the lies of Zionism. In my "Red and Blue Fascism" essay, I point out how Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both held the same position on Palestine, yet their rhetoric differed slightly. Trump was more bellicose in his statement, saying that Israel should "finish the job", while Harris gave a more reserved statement about how Israel "had the right to defend itself" by whatever means necessary. When in office, Trump downgraded his position by promoting Biden's original plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza by pushing the population out of their homeland. This was then presented as a humanitarian mission that would put the Palestinians in better homes elsewhere.

If Trump's rhetoric was a few degrees to the right of Harris, then Asmongold's disgusting rant was simply a few degrees to the right of Trump. Asmongold had neither the political coaching of politicians like Harris nor the (rather minimal) businesses acumen of Trump. Taking this into account, it becomes clear that Asmongold's real sin was expressing aloud the true values of the Western World. After decades of carefully-constructed lies surrounding the Israel-Palestine issue, Asmongold barged onto the scene like a bull in a china shop. He damaged the credibility of the Zionist ideology, and was punished as a result. Since then, Asmongold has wisely returned to the more familiar realm of complaining about feminism and PoC in video games.

For those of you who care about the Palestine issue, I would invite you to follow up on some actually good journalism. The Electric Intifada is a great source of daily updates on the situation in Palestine. The YouTube channel Bez D. Marx has a great series of videos on the history of Zionism and Palestinian resistance. Israeli historian Ilan Pape has some great works if you are looking for scholarly literature to read.

https://www.youtube.com/@TheElectronicIntifada

https://www.youtube.com/@BesDMarx

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/96546.Ilan_Papp_

For those of you who, like Asmongold, continue to cling to the reactionary line on Israel-Palestine, I recommend that you leave politics to the professional liars in Washington DC.