On Board the Ship of Fools

 Fig. 1 Woodcut illustration by Albrecht Dürer for Sebastian Brandt's  

Das Narrenschiff (1494)  

 Fig. 2 Photo by Fabrizio Villa of Greta Thunberg with some of her crewmates 

 preparing to depart Italy for Gaza on a boat - the Madleen - organised by 

the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (June 2025)

 

 

Seeing "professional tantrum-thrower" [1] Greta Thunberg and her dysfunctional crew of activists aboard a sixty-foot sailboat heading across the rather lovely waters of the Mediterranean to Gaza in an attempt to break the Israeli blockade of this Palestinian enclave [2], I was reminded of Plato's ship of fools [3] ...  

  

For aboard the Madleen we encounter a group of entitled young people who, despite believing themselves to be politically clear-sighted and possessing an acute sense of hearing attuned to the cries of the oppressed, are actually cloth-eared and blind to reality; people whose knowledge and experience is limited, but who are certain that they are always in the right and therefore justified in shouting down anyone who disagrees with what they say.   

Now, to entrust moral leadership to those who shout the loudest and make the most extreme claims is, I would suggest, profoundly mistaken. 

 

And whilst Greta and her chums may not be wearing traditional jester's costume - having swapped multicoloured motley for the distinctly patterned black and white keffiyeh [4] - they are fools all the same - or useful idiots, as some might say - and theirs is less a humanitaran mission and more a game of larping for Palestine [5] (i.e., a game of role play, virtue signalling, and self-promotion that shamelessly exploits the very real suffering of the people of Gaza). 

 

Having said that, however, the voyage of fools carries great symbolic weight in the Western imagination and perhaps Foucault is right to suggest that the figure of the madman, or joker, or even an autistic and bipolar activist is not merely a ridiculous and marginal one, but one who "stands centre stage as the guardian of truth" [6].      

 

Perhaps, therefore, we should at times write in praise of folly ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] A description provided by Julie Burchill in 'Greta Thunberg's pathetic Gaza voyage', The Spectator (4 June, 2025): click here. For those who would like to see Miss Thunberg speaking to the press prior to setting off on her voyage, click here.  

 

[2] The Madleen departed Catania, Sicily, on 1 June, 2025. The 1,250 mile journey is expected to take seven days. As well as the Swedish doom goblin, there are eleven other über-privileged activists on board and 64-year-old Irish actor Liam Cunningham. 

 

[3] See Book VI of Plato's Republic (c. 375 BC). 

      Without actually using the phrase 'ship of fools', Socrates speaks (allegorically) of a ship with a mutinous and foolhardy crew and readers are meant to take away the idea that sound governance always requires expert knowledge and strong leadership; that statecraft is essentially the same as seafaring. 

      The ship of fools analogy has been influential throughout history, appearing in various works of art and literature, often as a criticism of societal chaos and a lack of authority in difficult times. Sebastian Brandt's satirical work, Das Narrenschiff (1494), inspired by Plato's text, further extended the concept.

 

[4] Use of the keffiyeh as a symbol of Palestinian nationalism and resistance dates back to the 1936-39 Arab revolt in Palestine. Outside of the Middle East and North Africa, the keffiyeh has gained increasing popularity among activists and is widely considered to be a sign of solidarity with the Palestinians in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.  

 

[5] See the post of this title published on 8 may 2024: click here. 

 

[6] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (Tavistock Publications, 1967), p. 14. 

 

 

Larping for Palestine

This season, I'll be mostly wearing ...

Photo (detail) by Spencer Platt

 

 

Those on the woke-left are usually very sensitive about the idea of cultural appropriation - i.e., the borrowing (or theft) of elements belonging to a minority culture by members of a majority culture and the parading of these elements in a manner that is both inauthentic and disrespectful in that it disregards any context of meaning. 

 

It is, say those who speak out against it, another form of colonialism in which marginalised and oppressed peoples are robbed of their identity and intellectual property rights, or reduced to the humiliated status of exotic other [1]. 

 

However, many of these same people are happy to wear a keffiyeh in order to show their support of the Palestinians. For this, they say, is not cultural appropriation, it is rather an act of cultural celebration and political solidarity. 

 

I have to admit, I'm not entirely convinced by this ... 

 

For one suspects there's a certain hypocrisy at work here and the creation of a double standard based on the (questionable) belief that it's okay to don Arab headgear when one is on a protest march, but not when one is attending a fancy dress party. 

 

In other words, if one is (posing as) an angry militant, fighting for social justice and to preserve the dream of Revolution - or if one acts in the sincere belief that one's ideology is grounded in Truth - then, apparently, all your actions can be justified.

 

But for those of us who recall Tom Wolfe's essay on radical chic [2], what we are witnessing now on university campuses in the West is just another form of posturing and performance on behalf of privileged young people searching for a fashionable cause via which they can signal their virtue; be that BLM or freeing Gaza.

 

As Kat Rosenfield writes, it's almost a parody of the student activism of the 1960s; more live action role playing in front of the TV cameras than real protest [3]. 

 

But it's also, of course, the chance to feel powerful and to pretend your life has some purpose; the opportunity for comraderie and community. But when this bonding exercise involves the bullying and intimidation of Jewish students, then maybe its time to remove the keffiyehs and stop larping for Palestine.      

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Cultural appropriation is something I have discussed and written in defence of elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark. See, for example, the post published on 5 August 2016: click here.  

 

[2] See the post 'Radical Chic: On Puncturing the Fourth Wall of Excess and Spectacle with AOC' (15 Sept 2021), in which I refer to Wolfe's essay from 1970: click here.

 

[3] Kat Rosenfield, 'Columbia is a parody of radical activism: LARPing students care more about partying than Palestine', UnHeard, (26 April 2024): click here.

 

 

For a related post to this one, click here.