The facts are raw, documented – and unbearable. On the morning of October 7, 2023, while some were just waking up, others were recording – and live-streaming – the glee they took in the massacre. One world watched. Another rejoiced. In New York, Douglas Murray absorbed the words and images, then immediately set off for Israel. From that journey – and the abyss it laid bare – the British journalist and intellectual drew a furious yet lucid essay, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West. But the book is not merely a cry of anger; it is also a meditation on what it means to defend the West when it no longer knows what it stands for – or whether it still deserves to be defended, let alone saved.
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Le Point - From your neoconservative beginnings to your current reflections on civilisation's decline, your thinking has shifted gradually from a strategic defence of the West to a cultural and symbolic one. Does 7 October 2023 represent a new phase in this intellectual evolution ?
Douglas Murray – Yes, I think so. I felt on October 7th the same way as Evelyn Waugh, in Unconditional Surrender, depicts one of his characters feeling at the moment of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact: "The enemy at last was plain in view; huge and hateful, all disguise cast off.” The moment I saw what Hamas was doing on the morning of the 7th, thousands of terrorists raping and slaughtering and kidnapping their way through the south of Israel, live-streaming it all for the world, glorying in death, expressing such ecstasy for death that is something of how I felt.
In your new book, the role of the image is central, and the iconography of horror is considered not as a consequence of violence, but as a driver of it. In your opinion, is this the hallmark of our era: aesthetic terrorism ?
No - that is (in the worst way) such a French way to look at something. The horror of Hamas is not principally about aesthetics or interpretation. It is about evil. Evil in its purest form – from a cult that literally worships death. The chall...
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