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.

Photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images

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