On self-denunciation - Nissan Shor in Haaretz:

‘Nikolai Bukharin was a Russian revolutionary, a Marxist theorist and a Soviet Communist Party stalwart. He was the editor of Pravda and was elected to the Politburo, the party's highest body. Bukharin supported Josef Stalin in the first stage of his rise to power and was one of his most important allies in the early 1920s.
But Bukharin soon fell from grace. Stalin wanted to accelerate agricultural collectivization in the Soviet Union; Bukharin argued that it was better to slow down. Stalin saw this as a betrayal of trust. In 1937, Bukharin was arrested, accused of Trotskyism and expelled from the party. A year later, he was executed by firing squad after a show trial.’

(…)

‘"The old Bukharin is dead. … Give the new Bukharin, a second Bukharin, a chance to grow. ... The new Bukharin is already born; allow him to work," he wrote in a letter included in Igal Halfin's Hebrew-language book "Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial" (Harvard University Press).
I thought about Bukharin's pathetic, heartbreaking pleas as I read the public letter published by Avichai Partok, an Israeli DJ who has lived in Berlin for the past decade. In an Instagram post that received far too many likes, Partok got down on his knees and renounced everything that he had been in the not-so-distant past, the country where he grew up and spent most of his life and, of course, any remnant of Zionist ideology.
It is certainly possible that he does indeed abhor Israel, and of course that is his full right, but from the tone of the post it can be inferred that he probably did not do this of his own free will.’

(…)

‘There we have it, the old Partok is dead and the new Partok rises from the grave, pure and moral. Does anyone really buy this? I don't know Partok personally, but we have several mutual acquaintances. His text is full of half-truths. "I no longer perform there"? His name has been plastered on posters for dozens of parties in Tel Aviv and Haifa in recent years. A few lines later, he presents himself as "actively involved in the anti-occupation resistant movement" throughout his "entire adult life in Israel."’

(…)

‘Now, let's be clear. I have no argument with the principled statements. You'd have to be a moron not to acknowledge Israel's ongoing crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, and the sins of Zionism. Call it whatever if you're uncomfortable with the term "genocide." What does it matter when the evidence is so clear? But Partok is not seeking to make a political correction here. It's interests that play the lead role. That is why it reads as inauthentic, as an automatic recitation of all the "correct" slogans. This is a "confession" that seems to have been written by a ChatGPT for on-trend leftists.’

(…)

‘Both Partok and Perez haven't lived in Israel for nearly a decade. They are individuals whose coming-of-age was within Israeli club culture, who are aggressively apolitical, self-absorbed and immersed in their own pleasures and in those of their friends. This is not criticism. This is the reason they left Israel in the first place: in order to invest in "I" and not be part of a provincial state that doesn't allow them to grow and develop in their field. They are cultural immigrants, like many others before them. But even if they were to crawl on their bellies, it would no longer help them.’

(…)

‘For them and Israelis like them, there will be no redemption or atonement. Their fate is predetermined by virtue of their identity. The boycott movement reminds them about their military past, their citizenship, the place they came from, as if it were a permanent fact. They have no right to change or to rethink their positions. They will always be Israeli criminals first, and no amount of evidence ("I was a desk jockey," Partok cries), confessions or pleas will help.’

(…)

‘We all grew up in a certain milieu, with certain beliefs, and even when we doubt or challenge the ideology we were fed we cannot break free from history, from culture, from our families. There are no people who have been erased and rewritten. Even Stalinism didn't succeed in that.’

Read the article here.

The Bukharin-story is marvelous. And still very accurate.

‘The new Bukharin is already born; allow him to work.’ Yes, heartbreaking.

Cancel culture has been compared to Stalinism before, and of course it’s not. There are no firing squads, but the cancellation can be painful.

I see only one solution: the right to be erased and rewritten should be a human right.