It is not a coincidence that Zionists use much of the same rhetoric and the self-same arguments that Nazis and apologists for apartheid South Africa made.
"We gave them this nice Ghetto/Bantustan, why couldn't they be satisfied?"
Are you one of those moral, oh-so-compassionate Western liberals who are calling for a Jew-free Palestine, because Israel bombs hospitals? Do you have a dog in this fight? Do you have experience of West Asia? Do you even know Hebrew? Arabic?
"Most organised crime gangs avoid overt displays of violence as far as possible, in favour of creating a climate of fear which enables them to exercise control over large numbers of people."
This is, ironically, typical of most forms of repression, censorship, etc, in pretty much every regime. People have often pointed out that there is hardly any overt censorship in PRC: but people either know to avoid doing things that offend the "important people" or don't care enough to go out of their way to cross the boundaries (e.g. breaching the so-called Great Firewall is easy--pretty much any VPN is enough. But very few people care enough to bother.)
This, of course, brings us to the state of things in the Liberal West: things are as "manipulated" as in almost any well-functioning "authoritarian" regime. The alleged difference, that there is very little (obviously) overt intimidation, intrusion, censorship, or other openly problematic actions actually underscores how similar successfully functioning governments are--b/c there's hardly of that in PRC either, for example. Only in badly functioning regimes (authoritarian or otherwise) can you find overt and pretentious displays (and uses) of power. And, fwiw, overt use of power of coercion, at least as far as I can tell, has been on the rise in the West, allegedly in the name of "freedom and democracy" and all that.
People have often pointed out that there is hardly any overt censorship in PRC?
Au contraire, mon brave, PRC censorship is 100% overt.
Beijing publishes the rules and the censor's explanations if someone appeals against their decisions. It's an educational process, and very interesting because China's leading public intellectual, Wang Huning, oversees it. He's also #4 on the Steering Committee and Xi's traveling companion.
Western 'rules' are secretive and constantly changing, there is no appeal, and we don't know who's behind the curtain.
The point that I'm making is simply that most censorship, anywhere, is done "voluntarily," not forcibly imposed by the state authority. For most part, there aren't armies of government agents going around watching everything and erasing illicit speech by force: that's the cartoonish caricature used to describe what's going on in countries where legal censorship exists. People involved in media, publishing, etc. know what's acceptable or not and quietly set objectionable speech aside without being told to do so explicitly by the state on case by case basis.
As you note, that raises an interesting question where "freedom of expression" supposedly exists. It is clear that there is no such thing: the informal censorship, social norms (that changes constantly), etc. preclude what is acceptable speech and, even if the illicit speech are not "forcibly" shut down, there are marginalized one way or another. The catch is that the theoretical "freedom of expression" means that how this process takes place becomes opaque and arbitrary so that the theoretical "freedom" becomes more repressive than where the limits are acknowledged but are considered negotiable as part of public policy.
No society ever has true "freedom of speech". If you go outside certain perimeters you will be shunned and unsuccessful in life. The amount of tolerating for folks at the edge of each society's Overton window tells us a lot about that society's priorities.
In Russia, the priority appears to be stability and traditional values. For China, it's stability and the CPC. For both, there are substantial and rather heavy handed efforts to tamp down ethnic strife precisely because they have seen how the West instrumentalized such strife to destroy countries - Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Syria, and Libya are just the most prominent recent examples.
For the US, it's about preventing any outbreak of mass leftist politics and anti-imperialism/anti-capitalism. Whereas Russia and China have substantial popular support for their projects, since both have experienced mass instabilities in living memory, I would argue that the lack of popular support for the objects of US/Western censorship is why it is so obfscated, confused, and done through crypto/underhanded means.
This gets back to my increasing frustration with our host's discussions, which manages to be very insightful and subtle, yet completely unwilling to engage with the actuality of the US and the West tipping of scale in the last 500 years through their technology/wealth/ruthlessness.
Sure, it's interesting and useful to explore the dynamics of friction and strife and local agency and stuck systems of thinking involved in these conflicts, but there's also a very important reason why left actions have been handicapped or destroyed time and again in the last 105 years, while rightwing genocidal freaks like Modi, Milei, Bosonaro, and Netanyahu are allowed to persist.
Gaza and Palestine/Israel is precisely this. The left is called naive and somehow failing to understand the nuances of the situation. But anyone who bothered to take a closer look, as I and millions (perhaps billions) have in the last 50 days, comes away realizing that its precisely as stark and simple as the likes of Caitlin Johnstone presents it.
Israel is a settler state at a time when the level of oppression and the racist ideology required to sustain it is no longer there in vast majority of the world, including in the population of the West.
Its elaborate tie in with the US MICIMATT and the Western guilt over the Holocaust (odd how WWII deaths never bought the Chinese or Russians any Western deference for their respective security concerns) bought it a couple more decades longer than cohorts such as like Rhodesia and aparteid South Africa, but it will end soon enough one way (relatively peacefully and sanely) or another (murder suicide via nuclear warheads).
Violence can be a very useful tool for weak governments, not only to dominate a minority "other" but also to control "us" -- the governed. Certainly, a state of war gives governing elites more latitude to engage in internal repression like censorship and other measures to consolidate domestic political control. This is happening in Israel today. It happened after 9-11 in the U.S. (e.g. with the Patriot Act). The fear of terrorism, stoked by the right wing, helps to keep our Patriot Act in place, giving immense powers to the surveillance state.
Israel is now such a diverse population (due to the return of its diaspora from around the world) that the need for domestic political control is greater today than ever. We saw Israel cracking up earlier this year over Netanyahu's proposed radical changes to laws. Regular eruptions of violence by Hamas help to unify the Jews (and the Palestinians as well) and keep everyone in line.
If true, neither Israel nor Hamas will see any real benefit from a stable long-term peace (this may not be true of the Palestinian authority in the West Bank). But while a rather sustained low-level of violence can be beneficial for all kinds of reasons as Aurelian points out (political and signaling), Israel's "over the top" actions in Gaza don't seem rational. Already (according to today's Washington Post) neighboring Arab peoples are seeking the end of diplomatic rapprochement with Israel. Anti-Israel sentiment in the U.S. (and in Europe too?) is also rapidly rising. How can this seeming genocide in Gaza help Israel in the long run?
A bigger question is the cost-benefit calculus of continuing the U.S.'s many proxy wars with weak partners and/or more powerful adversaries. I think it's clear that the U.S. is the big loser so far, in terms of erosion of U.S. power (both "soft" and "hard") in the eyes of the world. The only entry in the "plus" column is economic (increased energy exports to Europe and MIC spending) but in every other respect these proxy wars are a big loser at home and abroad.
The U.S. has become so used to pushing its weight around as the armed-to-the-teeth "indispensable" unipolar hegemon we've forgotten how to wield the tools of diplomacy. We need to learn that violence is part of a continuum of policies and signaling measures, as Aurelian so well explains!
"When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail"
The USA has invested a historically disproportionate % of GNP into hammers for about 70 years now. Coming up on three consecutive generations of "bigger hammer" centric people among those who rule The West™.
Regarding the Bosnian War, on the 18th of March 1992, the leaders of three consecutive nations: Serbs, Croats and Muslims (today Bosniaks) have signed the Lisbon Agreement brokered by Peter Carrington and Jose Cutillero, in order to prevent the outbreak of the war.
After the meeting with the US ambassador in former Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmermann, the Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegovic has withdrawn his signature from the agreement on the 28th of March 1992.
"The more things change, the more they stay the same"?
"Securing the realm". Any state or coalition potentially competitive in the future should be disrupted NOW. Neoliberal/neocon/PNAC doctrine/The RAND Corporation (link to RAND paper below).
"Yet this way of thinking is not exclusive to the Nazis: it is indeed the default way of thinking in societies where politics is based on racial, ethnic or religious identity."
The imposition of this way of thinking is also a way of maintaining or acquiring control, which is being used, I think, in the United States, and in the long term is itself destabilizing; the users of such much always be afraid of it being used against them, and if their word is not good, why would anyone enter into an agreement with them? Rather like an agreement incapable United States, which has destroyed its credibility as it acts violently and greedily, while always speaking lies.
Yet, war in the western style of total war is also extremely destructive, more so than most early conflicts, adding religion into it makes something already terrible, much worse. When one considers that a war is almost always a chaotic thing that frequently gets out of the control of the instigators.
People mock liberalism, which to be honest, the modern version is a sick joke of the Western Elites, but it was created for a reason. The Wars of Religion had devastated much of Europe with the absolute rule of kings and religious governance. The American Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights come from the Enlightenment and Classical Liberalism. A way of having disagreement and conflict without all the bloodshed. Conflict by debate and the ballot box instead of the gun.
I guess that what I am ineptly saying is that the modern Western world developed its institutions because violent conflict, particularly violent Western style conflict, is too destructive to survive, or at least, the survival of the West during any conflict is threatened. People who want to tear all down, or the foolish leaders who think that violence and ethnic cleansing is the way to go, ignore why things exist as they do.
People seem to forget that the Enlightenment didn't come around until the Treaty of Westphalia, which itself didn't come around until after the horrors of the Thirty Years War.
So, having forgotten they are embarking on a replay ...
Well, yes, but I am thinking that classical liberalism was ***deliberately*** chucked down the memory hole. There has been the drifting and forgetting that usually happens, but I think that the previous forty years roughly has seen the process enhanced and directed. We would still have the same problems, including that of forgetting, but they would not be nearly as severe.
The ideas of the Rule of Law which included equal rights and protections from both the government and the mob and the essential equality of all men (and women), plus vigorous, even brutal, but non-violent, debate under freedom of speech and belief are all inconvenient to a growing number. This include illiberal neoliberals, pseudo leftists, neoconservatives, and reactionaries, which include both those funded by the likes of the Koch Brothers and the Woke Identitarians.
Most Americans from the very conservative to the very left could be considered liberal even if they would not named themselves that. If you asked about the separate ideas of the Enlightenment and Classical Liberalism (Heck, taxing the rich and national healthcare as well) they would probably say that they believed in all of them. And yet, a growing percentage of the PMC (Professional Managerial Class) seem to not accept it especially freedom of speech. The people in the top ten percent want to remain in the top ten percent and they believe that anyone in the bottom eighty percent probably deserves to remain with their fellow losers and whatever crumbs that the elites deign to give them. Then there are the scary Christian Nationalists and other American factions who want to remake the nation in their own preferred imagination.
So, yes, many forgot or are unwise. Others as well, I could call stupid, but some hit the gas, cut the brake lines, and took over the steering wheel because they think it benefits them, and here we are.
I think you might be correct. While there might not be a "Solution" to the Gaza crisis, there is definitely a "solution" espoused overtly or covertly by many "intellectuals", usually expressed as "there is nothing we can do". Quite convenient. OTOH, when the wheel turns, as it inevitably does, and the positions are reversed, such might rue their inaction.
This is definitely between the lines, to be noticed. And laborous wrestling to distinguish this from what "nazi" was supposed to be doing. A very sophisticated effort to a single short-term goal: get away with annexing Gaza and lever Israel economically and militarily to the right of "autonomy".
The early Zionists made a bad choice of territory to put their sweat. The arm-pits are sweaty today. They should have plunked their efforts else-where. Choices and options were at hand.
It's actually in a very strategic area to take advantage of the Eurasian pivot. As for olives, the Ashkenazi have not needed olives for the hundreds of years living in eastern Europe. But tapering of Western imperialist support and lack of opportunities for arms trafficking and human trafficking probably dooms it as a future Zionist project.
Could you be a bit more specific? Or provide a link, at least? Certainly, I should someday read all the works of Solzhenitsyn, but I'm a bit busy to right now?
Really interesting presentation. I'd like to think this will end differently, because "the world is watching," and many who see, do not wish to be complicit in this. I think we, who have a different objective, that which hopes for a more harmonious outcome, must do what we can to bring about new ways of thinking, because nuclear weapons do affect the equation's outcome. My small contribution to trying to end the current narrative, and the bombing that is set to resume is here:
When you've seen one temporarily wire fenced off (out of sight of "the important folks") Free Speech Expression Zone™, you've seen the future of peaceful dissent.
I dislike the other variety of dissent as postulated in our binary US centric belief system. But I am an anachronism.
thank you!!! Putting together the different pieces about the conflict in Ukraine, anyone would think that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is not a conflict between two different nations, it is a civil war, it is a conflict between two regions that have a lot in common, it is not the typical conflict between two foreign nations, this is obvious, but it seems like it's not so obvious to many people, when it really is.
Or you could view it as Russians do, and see it as a war between Russia and NATO, with Banderites reprising the role of the South Vietnamese government.
"We are a profoundly Aristotelian society: everything is either A or B, there is nothing in the middle." -- Thanks to Aquinas and his Jesuitical claque as well.
"Dualistic" is how it's put in classical philosophy and theology. As far as it goes, dualism works very well and is always useful. Taking it everywhere is epistemological malpractice meriting the severest opprobrium as moral violence.
The truth is the whole -- says Hegel, who later abuses that insight right violently, as does his student Marx and mentee Nietzsche. (Hegel's student Kierkegaard does not abuse that truth). The whole includes dualisms beyond counting, but inquiry transitions from that two-dimensional framework to three, then four, and finally to five dimensions -- Space Air Fire Sea Land -- very rapidly once one waits upon reality instead of rushes out to master it, which of course is impossible for us human lot.
IMO, given the passionate devotion of our blessed professoriate and officialdom -- also blog commenters, and not a few blog principals, such as Instapundit and Power Line crews -- to the moral violence of reductionist epistemological malpractice, I submit that honoring them with recognition as two-dimensional Aristotelians is too generous. I see them as aspiring to one-dimensional creature-hood: I, me, my, mine. Which is to say, diminished womanhood.
Remember the polymath Anglican Priest Edwin Abbott Abbot's two-dimensional "Flatland?" Women therein are line segments, Abbott's best-effort geometrical figure to symbolize a one-dimensional figure -- a point, the other possible symbol for one-dimensionality, having not even one dimension because there cannot be one dimension without at least one other, as Abbott demonstrates.
This discussion manages to ignore the West's hand in forcing the breakup of previously peacefully coexisting Yugoslavia through economic starvation, then support of the most extreme factions of each ethnicity, then distortions of what's happening on the ground to pin the blame on the Serbs, and finally by bombing the civilian populations in Serbia to set up NATO-ministans of Kosovo and Montenegro.
As for Katyn Forest, Grover Furr did a very thorough debunking using Polish forensic evidence. It's another "just so" Western (plus Khrushchevite/Gorbachevite revisionist) lie to demonize Soviet Communism. The crimes of communism cannot compare with the crimes of Western imperialism, even in the 20th century, nevermind the last 500 years.
Israel hasn't managed to destroy the Palestinian people after 80+ years of terrorism and its terrorist actions have been roundly condemned by everyone except American and its closest satrapies/sub-imperials. So I wouldn't be so quick to write the Gazans off. They seem to be in the same position as Hezbollah, more or less, in 2006. If US will to support Israel 110% on everything falters, Israel may disappear from the map (and no it doesn't have to be genocides of Jews but actual establishment of a single state that equally treats all its people, including poor Jews - Israel currently has one of the highest wealth disparity in the "developed" world).
Genocide is not complicated and the rest of the world that Aurelien identities as spectrum tolerant does not in fact tolerate it - as peoples who often experienced imperialism first hand, they recognize it as the evil that it is and condemn it. They still fear repercussions of going against the US to act on their feelings about Israel, but that inaction isn't due to indifference or grasp of subtlety, it's because USGov/Corps forcefully prevent dissent amongst the vast portions of humanity who don't approve of genocide.
Just because genocides happened before doesn't make it justified to happen in 1947-2023. Or 1492-1945.
Two Hundred Years together available in some less or more censured versions on libgen.gs. Download the pdf/txt version and do a few searches for Tolstoy(he was incapable apparently to understand that free land would incentivize at all the jew villagers from the Western territories). Over the history of Russia at multiple occasions different policies were applied to Jews, and none as to offering land to settle on, had any impact. No parasites will leave their hosts to starve(cities, other populations to exploit). The Jew, what stands for it, as a Jew sees fit, is quite peculiar in this way.
As a sign of how much actual content has been evacuated from our concept of what anti-Semitism even means, you sometimes see arguments championing the use of the unhyphenated compound "antisemitism" over the hyphenated "anti-Semitism" (specifically English-language arguments, since this choice isn't necessarily present in other languages such as, to pick a totally random example, German) on the basis that the hyphenated spelling somehow affords legitimacy to the existence of entities called "Semites" or "Semitism," whereas an ideologically-acceptable rejection of anti-Semitism should imply deliberately refusing to fathom such concepts or how they might fit into a broader anti-Semitic worldview.
Obviously this echoes a general intellectual disease you've already discussed in modern Western educated society, where trying understand an opposing worldview the way its adherents understand it themselves is seen as inherently suspicious if not outright treasonous, but there's also a motivation more specific to "anti-Semitism": for anyone who believes that the ideology of European Jewish ethnonationalist colonial expansionism in historic Palestine (a.k.a. "Zionism") is congruent with Jewish identity, that the modern State of Israel is a member in good standing of the vaguely-defined entity known as "the West," and that anti-Zionism is congruent with anti-Semitism, it's rather inconvenient to recall that the traditional European concept of "Semite"/"Semitic" encompasses Jews *and Arabs* in equal measure (much as Hebrew and Arabic are both "Semitic languages" in the still-surviving jargon of linguistics) and that those who originally coined the concept of "anti-Semitism" to frame their hatred of Jews and Judaism were making a consciously Orientalist racial argument about Jews' alleged status as Easterners with an ethnic and cultural identity alien to the West, bearing a closer kinship to Arabs/Muslims than to Europeans/Christians.
Aside from what this says about European attitudes toward Jews and Zionism (paraphrasing Aime Cesaire, these people's objection to the Nazis wasn't their crime against humanity as such but the idea that they perpetrated it against "Westerners," albeit without acknowledging their "Western"-ness until after the fact) there are also some fairly pointed implications about xenophobic hostility in present-day Europe toward Arab/Muslim migrants and those with Arab/Muslim migrant backgrounds: neither motivated by any principled opposition to migrants' "imported anti-Semitism," nor somehow vaguely "similar" to a historical European anti-Semitism that's since been expunged from the mainstream European worldview, such attitudes in fact *are* straightforward and unambiguous expressions of Europe's ongoing anti-Semitism, entirely modern and fundamentally unexpunged.
I would add that the "message" model strikes me as the best explanation for what all the main actors (except probably the separatists and possibly the Ukrainian governments) have been doing in Ukraine since 2014. I don't think a direct war between Russia and the US was ever particularly likely, putting the idea of Ukraine's strategic importance in the 21st century into question. But it is an obvious place for both sides to send "messages" to each other, at increasing cost to the locals on either side of the frontlines. It would help explain some peculiarities of pacing and the limited commitment to the conflict, which seems at odds with both sides' official presentation of it as some grand clash of civilisations.
Another example of the sort of thing you're talking about is Jean-Jacques Dessalines' massacre of (most) Europeans in Haiti. It was often characterised as a senseless slaughter. "Not policy but revenge, and revenge has no place in politics," as the Marxist C. L. R. James had put it. In this respect, Marxists (of that type, at least) are scarcely distinguishable from what you describe under the name of Liberals. Only the kind of policy they like and agree with (for instance, in James' case, our Red Terror) may be acknowledged as a "policy" and a legitimate part of "politics". To me it seems rather obvious that it was policy and rational (in the sense of being based on the mental calculation that killing all but the friendliest Europeans would make Haiti's black population safer). Moral judgements aside, such rational calculations could also be mistaken for any number of reasons. But was it "senseless" or an irrational act of vengeful passion? Hardly.
It is not a coincidence that Zionists use much of the same rhetoric and the self-same arguments that Nazis and apologists for apartheid South Africa made.
"We gave them this nice Ghetto/Bantustan, why couldn't they be satisfied?"
Are you one of those moral, oh-so-compassionate Western liberals who are calling for a Jew-free Palestine, because Israel bombs hospitals? Do you have a dog in this fight? Do you have experience of West Asia? Do you even know Hebrew? Arabic?
Way to strawman.
@David Collins
The availability of nuclear weapons to both sides ensures that this fight can come to EVERYBODIES "dog".
(Thanks to Pakistan & ISI, Saudis are already an undeclared nuclear weapons state, Iran is about 1" from also being one, if they have the will).
"Most organised crime gangs avoid overt displays of violence as far as possible, in favour of creating a climate of fear which enables them to exercise control over large numbers of people."
This is, ironically, typical of most forms of repression, censorship, etc, in pretty much every regime. People have often pointed out that there is hardly any overt censorship in PRC: but people either know to avoid doing things that offend the "important people" or don't care enough to go out of their way to cross the boundaries (e.g. breaching the so-called Great Firewall is easy--pretty much any VPN is enough. But very few people care enough to bother.)
This, of course, brings us to the state of things in the Liberal West: things are as "manipulated" as in almost any well-functioning "authoritarian" regime. The alleged difference, that there is very little (obviously) overt intimidation, intrusion, censorship, or other openly problematic actions actually underscores how similar successfully functioning governments are--b/c there's hardly of that in PRC either, for example. Only in badly functioning regimes (authoritarian or otherwise) can you find overt and pretentious displays (and uses) of power. And, fwiw, overt use of power of coercion, at least as far as I can tell, has been on the rise in the West, allegedly in the name of "freedom and democracy" and all that.
People have often pointed out that there is hardly any overt censorship in PRC?
Au contraire, mon brave, PRC censorship is 100% overt.
Beijing publishes the rules and the censor's explanations if someone appeals against their decisions. It's an educational process, and very interesting because China's leading public intellectual, Wang Huning, oversees it. He's also #4 on the Steering Committee and Xi's traveling companion.
Western 'rules' are secretive and constantly changing, there is no appeal, and we don't know who's behind the curtain.
The point that I'm making is simply that most censorship, anywhere, is done "voluntarily," not forcibly imposed by the state authority. For most part, there aren't armies of government agents going around watching everything and erasing illicit speech by force: that's the cartoonish caricature used to describe what's going on in countries where legal censorship exists. People involved in media, publishing, etc. know what's acceptable or not and quietly set objectionable speech aside without being told to do so explicitly by the state on case by case basis.
As you note, that raises an interesting question where "freedom of expression" supposedly exists. It is clear that there is no such thing: the informal censorship, social norms (that changes constantly), etc. preclude what is acceptable speech and, even if the illicit speech are not "forcibly" shut down, there are marginalized one way or another. The catch is that the theoretical "freedom of expression" means that how this process takes place becomes opaque and arbitrary so that the theoretical "freedom" becomes more repressive than where the limits are acknowledged but are considered negotiable as part of public policy.
No society ever has true "freedom of speech". If you go outside certain perimeters you will be shunned and unsuccessful in life. The amount of tolerating for folks at the edge of each society's Overton window tells us a lot about that society's priorities.
In Russia, the priority appears to be stability and traditional values. For China, it's stability and the CPC. For both, there are substantial and rather heavy handed efforts to tamp down ethnic strife precisely because they have seen how the West instrumentalized such strife to destroy countries - Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Syria, and Libya are just the most prominent recent examples.
For the US, it's about preventing any outbreak of mass leftist politics and anti-imperialism/anti-capitalism. Whereas Russia and China have substantial popular support for their projects, since both have experienced mass instabilities in living memory, I would argue that the lack of popular support for the objects of US/Western censorship is why it is so obfscated, confused, and done through crypto/underhanded means.
This gets back to my increasing frustration with our host's discussions, which manages to be very insightful and subtle, yet completely unwilling to engage with the actuality of the US and the West tipping of scale in the last 500 years through their technology/wealth/ruthlessness.
Sure, it's interesting and useful to explore the dynamics of friction and strife and local agency and stuck systems of thinking involved in these conflicts, but there's also a very important reason why left actions have been handicapped or destroyed time and again in the last 105 years, while rightwing genocidal freaks like Modi, Milei, Bosonaro, and Netanyahu are allowed to persist.
Gaza and Palestine/Israel is precisely this. The left is called naive and somehow failing to understand the nuances of the situation. But anyone who bothered to take a closer look, as I and millions (perhaps billions) have in the last 50 days, comes away realizing that its precisely as stark and simple as the likes of Caitlin Johnstone presents it.
Israel is a settler state at a time when the level of oppression and the racist ideology required to sustain it is no longer there in vast majority of the world, including in the population of the West.
Its elaborate tie in with the US MICIMATT and the Western guilt over the Holocaust (odd how WWII deaths never bought the Chinese or Russians any Western deference for their respective security concerns) bought it a couple more decades longer than cohorts such as like Rhodesia and aparteid South Africa, but it will end soon enough one way (relatively peacefully and sanely) or another (murder suicide via nuclear warheads).
Violence can be a very useful tool for weak governments, not only to dominate a minority "other" but also to control "us" -- the governed. Certainly, a state of war gives governing elites more latitude to engage in internal repression like censorship and other measures to consolidate domestic political control. This is happening in Israel today. It happened after 9-11 in the U.S. (e.g. with the Patriot Act). The fear of terrorism, stoked by the right wing, helps to keep our Patriot Act in place, giving immense powers to the surveillance state.
Israel is now such a diverse population (due to the return of its diaspora from around the world) that the need for domestic political control is greater today than ever. We saw Israel cracking up earlier this year over Netanyahu's proposed radical changes to laws. Regular eruptions of violence by Hamas help to unify the Jews (and the Palestinians as well) and keep everyone in line.
If true, neither Israel nor Hamas will see any real benefit from a stable long-term peace (this may not be true of the Palestinian authority in the West Bank). But while a rather sustained low-level of violence can be beneficial for all kinds of reasons as Aurelian points out (political and signaling), Israel's "over the top" actions in Gaza don't seem rational. Already (according to today's Washington Post) neighboring Arab peoples are seeking the end of diplomatic rapprochement with Israel. Anti-Israel sentiment in the U.S. (and in Europe too?) is also rapidly rising. How can this seeming genocide in Gaza help Israel in the long run?
A bigger question is the cost-benefit calculus of continuing the U.S.'s many proxy wars with weak partners and/or more powerful adversaries. I think it's clear that the U.S. is the big loser so far, in terms of erosion of U.S. power (both "soft" and "hard") in the eyes of the world. The only entry in the "plus" column is economic (increased energy exports to Europe and MIC spending) but in every other respect these proxy wars are a big loser at home and abroad.
The U.S. has become so used to pushing its weight around as the armed-to-the-teeth "indispensable" unipolar hegemon we've forgotten how to wield the tools of diplomacy. We need to learn that violence is part of a continuum of policies and signaling measures, as Aurelian so well explains!
@Portlander
"When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail"
The USA has invested a historically disproportionate % of GNP into hammers for about 70 years now. Coming up on three consecutive generations of "bigger hammer" centric people among those who rule The West™.
The "unipolar moment" clearly ate America's diplomatic and strategic brains.
As they have sown, so shall they reap ...
Regarding the Bosnian War, on the 18th of March 1992, the leaders of three consecutive nations: Serbs, Croats and Muslims (today Bosniaks) have signed the Lisbon Agreement brokered by Peter Carrington and Jose Cutillero, in order to prevent the outbreak of the war.
After the meeting with the US ambassador in former Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmermann, the Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegovic has withdrawn his signature from the agreement on the 28th of March 1992.
That’s how the Bosnian War started.
Sounds familiar?
@Oklopnic
"The more things change, the more they stay the same"?
"Securing the realm". Any state or coalition potentially competitive in the future should be disrupted NOW. Neoliberal/neocon/PNAC doctrine/The RAND Corporation (link to RAND paper below).
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2006/RAND_MG403.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjp4YX6m-yCAxVMle4BHeEXDzMQFnoECCUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2slmGJJe33MehhEtLqKG1P
"Yet this way of thinking is not exclusive to the Nazis: it is indeed the default way of thinking in societies where politics is based on racial, ethnic or religious identity."
The imposition of this way of thinking is also a way of maintaining or acquiring control, which is being used, I think, in the United States, and in the long term is itself destabilizing; the users of such much always be afraid of it being used against them, and if their word is not good, why would anyone enter into an agreement with them? Rather like an agreement incapable United States, which has destroyed its credibility as it acts violently and greedily, while always speaking lies.
Yet, war in the western style of total war is also extremely destructive, more so than most early conflicts, adding religion into it makes something already terrible, much worse. When one considers that a war is almost always a chaotic thing that frequently gets out of the control of the instigators.
People mock liberalism, which to be honest, the modern version is a sick joke of the Western Elites, but it was created for a reason. The Wars of Religion had devastated much of Europe with the absolute rule of kings and religious governance. The American Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights come from the Enlightenment and Classical Liberalism. A way of having disagreement and conflict without all the bloodshed. Conflict by debate and the ballot box instead of the gun.
I guess that what I am ineptly saying is that the modern Western world developed its institutions because violent conflict, particularly violent Western style conflict, is too destructive to survive, or at least, the survival of the West during any conflict is threatened. People who want to tear all down, or the foolish leaders who think that violence and ethnic cleansing is the way to go, ignore why things exist as they do.
People seem to forget that the Enlightenment didn't come around until the Treaty of Westphalia, which itself didn't come around until after the horrors of the Thirty Years War.
So, having forgotten they are embarking on a replay ...
Well, yes, but I am thinking that classical liberalism was ***deliberately*** chucked down the memory hole. There has been the drifting and forgetting that usually happens, but I think that the previous forty years roughly has seen the process enhanced and directed. We would still have the same problems, including that of forgetting, but they would not be nearly as severe.
The ideas of the Rule of Law which included equal rights and protections from both the government and the mob and the essential equality of all men (and women), plus vigorous, even brutal, but non-violent, debate under freedom of speech and belief are all inconvenient to a growing number. This include illiberal neoliberals, pseudo leftists, neoconservatives, and reactionaries, which include both those funded by the likes of the Koch Brothers and the Woke Identitarians.
Most Americans from the very conservative to the very left could be considered liberal even if they would not named themselves that. If you asked about the separate ideas of the Enlightenment and Classical Liberalism (Heck, taxing the rich and national healthcare as well) they would probably say that they believed in all of them. And yet, a growing percentage of the PMC (Professional Managerial Class) seem to not accept it especially freedom of speech. The people in the top ten percent want to remain in the top ten percent and they believe that anyone in the bottom eighty percent probably deserves to remain with their fellow losers and whatever crumbs that the elites deign to give them. Then there are the scary Christian Nationalists and other American factions who want to remake the nation in their own preferred imagination.
So, yes, many forgot or are unwise. Others as well, I could call stupid, but some hit the gas, cut the brake lines, and took over the steering wheel because they think it benefits them, and here we are.
A not very subtle support for genocide.
I think you might be correct. While there might not be a "Solution" to the Gaza crisis, there is definitely a "solution" espoused overtly or covertly by many "intellectuals", usually expressed as "there is nothing we can do". Quite convenient. OTOH, when the wheel turns, as it inevitably does, and the positions are reversed, such might rue their inaction.
Ishmael Zechariah
This is definitely between the lines, to be noticed. And laborous wrestling to distinguish this from what "nazi" was supposed to be doing. A very sophisticated effort to a single short-term goal: get away with annexing Gaza and lever Israel economically and militarily to the right of "autonomy".
The early Zionists made a bad choice of territory to put their sweat. The arm-pits are sweaty today. They should have plunked their efforts else-where. Choices and options were at hand.
@botmekas@gmail com
The only choice I am aware of truly having been offered had pretty bad winter weather & olive trees won't grow outdoors there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Autonomous_Oblast
It's actually in a very strategic area to take advantage of the Eurasian pivot. As for olives, the Ashkenazi have not needed olives for the hundreds of years living in eastern Europe. But tapering of Western imperialist support and lack of opportunities for arms trafficking and human trafficking probably dooms it as a future Zionist project.
This (an offer to territorially settle in all generosity) has happened on more then a single occasion over the ages. See Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
@botmetkas@gmail.com
Could you be a bit more specific? Or provide a link, at least? Certainly, I should someday read all the works of Solzhenitsyn, but I'm a bit busy to right now?
Really interesting presentation. I'd like to think this will end differently, because "the world is watching," and many who see, do not wish to be complicit in this. I think we, who have a different objective, that which hopes for a more harmonious outcome, must do what we can to bring about new ways of thinking, because nuclear weapons do affect the equation's outcome. My small contribution to trying to end the current narrative, and the bombing that is set to resume is here:
https://chng.it/CRQ7qw4Gzn
This is one small thing we can do. If we can do more, let us do more.
The difference is that the United States is prepared to crush any dissent.
@Feral Finster
When you've seen one temporarily wire fenced off (out of sight of "the important folks") Free Speech Expression Zone™, you've seen the future of peaceful dissent.
I dislike the other variety of dissent as postulated in our binary US centric belief system. But I am an anachronism.
Framing the west as the peace negotiators, what a joke.
thank you!!! Putting together the different pieces about the conflict in Ukraine, anyone would think that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is not a conflict between two different nations, it is a civil war, it is a conflict between two regions that have a lot in common, it is not the typical conflict between two foreign nations, this is obvious, but it seems like it's not so obvious to many people, when it really is.
Or you could view it as Russians do, and see it as a war between Russia and NATO, with Banderites reprising the role of the South Vietnamese government.
Thank you Aurelien🙏
"We are a profoundly Aristotelian society: everything is either A or B, there is nothing in the middle." -- Thanks to Aquinas and his Jesuitical claque as well.
"Dualistic" is how it's put in classical philosophy and theology. As far as it goes, dualism works very well and is always useful. Taking it everywhere is epistemological malpractice meriting the severest opprobrium as moral violence.
The truth is the whole -- says Hegel, who later abuses that insight right violently, as does his student Marx and mentee Nietzsche. (Hegel's student Kierkegaard does not abuse that truth). The whole includes dualisms beyond counting, but inquiry transitions from that two-dimensional framework to three, then four, and finally to five dimensions -- Space Air Fire Sea Land -- very rapidly once one waits upon reality instead of rushes out to master it, which of course is impossible for us human lot.
IMO, given the passionate devotion of our blessed professoriate and officialdom -- also blog commenters, and not a few blog principals, such as Instapundit and Power Line crews -- to the moral violence of reductionist epistemological malpractice, I submit that honoring them with recognition as two-dimensional Aristotelians is too generous. I see them as aspiring to one-dimensional creature-hood: I, me, my, mine. Which is to say, diminished womanhood.
Remember the polymath Anglican Priest Edwin Abbott Abbot's two-dimensional "Flatland?" Women therein are line segments, Abbott's best-effort geometrical figure to symbolize a one-dimensional figure -- a point, the other possible symbol for one-dimensionality, having not even one dimension because there cannot be one dimension without at least one other, as Abbott demonstrates.
This discussion manages to ignore the West's hand in forcing the breakup of previously peacefully coexisting Yugoslavia through economic starvation, then support of the most extreme factions of each ethnicity, then distortions of what's happening on the ground to pin the blame on the Serbs, and finally by bombing the civilian populations in Serbia to set up NATO-ministans of Kosovo and Montenegro.
As for Katyn Forest, Grover Furr did a very thorough debunking using Polish forensic evidence. It's another "just so" Western (plus Khrushchevite/Gorbachevite revisionist) lie to demonize Soviet Communism. The crimes of communism cannot compare with the crimes of Western imperialism, even in the 20th century, nevermind the last 500 years.
Israel hasn't managed to destroy the Palestinian people after 80+ years of terrorism and its terrorist actions have been roundly condemned by everyone except American and its closest satrapies/sub-imperials. So I wouldn't be so quick to write the Gazans off. They seem to be in the same position as Hezbollah, more or less, in 2006. If US will to support Israel 110% on everything falters, Israel may disappear from the map (and no it doesn't have to be genocides of Jews but actual establishment of a single state that equally treats all its people, including poor Jews - Israel currently has one of the highest wealth disparity in the "developed" world).
Genocide is not complicated and the rest of the world that Aurelien identities as spectrum tolerant does not in fact tolerate it - as peoples who often experienced imperialism first hand, they recognize it as the evil that it is and condemn it. They still fear repercussions of going against the US to act on their feelings about Israel, but that inaction isn't due to indifference or grasp of subtlety, it's because USGov/Corps forcefully prevent dissent amongst the vast portions of humanity who don't approve of genocide.
Just because genocides happened before doesn't make it justified to happen in 1947-2023. Or 1492-1945.
Two Hundred Years together available in some less or more censured versions on libgen.gs. Download the pdf/txt version and do a few searches for Tolstoy(he was incapable apparently to understand that free land would incentivize at all the jew villagers from the Western territories). Over the history of Russia at multiple occasions different policies were applied to Jews, and none as to offering land to settle on, had any impact. No parasites will leave their hosts to starve(cities, other populations to exploit). The Jew, what stands for it, as a Jew sees fit, is quite peculiar in this way.
As a sign of how much actual content has been evacuated from our concept of what anti-Semitism even means, you sometimes see arguments championing the use of the unhyphenated compound "antisemitism" over the hyphenated "anti-Semitism" (specifically English-language arguments, since this choice isn't necessarily present in other languages such as, to pick a totally random example, German) on the basis that the hyphenated spelling somehow affords legitimacy to the existence of entities called "Semites" or "Semitism," whereas an ideologically-acceptable rejection of anti-Semitism should imply deliberately refusing to fathom such concepts or how they might fit into a broader anti-Semitic worldview.
Obviously this echoes a general intellectual disease you've already discussed in modern Western educated society, where trying understand an opposing worldview the way its adherents understand it themselves is seen as inherently suspicious if not outright treasonous, but there's also a motivation more specific to "anti-Semitism": for anyone who believes that the ideology of European Jewish ethnonationalist colonial expansionism in historic Palestine (a.k.a. "Zionism") is congruent with Jewish identity, that the modern State of Israel is a member in good standing of the vaguely-defined entity known as "the West," and that anti-Zionism is congruent with anti-Semitism, it's rather inconvenient to recall that the traditional European concept of "Semite"/"Semitic" encompasses Jews *and Arabs* in equal measure (much as Hebrew and Arabic are both "Semitic languages" in the still-surviving jargon of linguistics) and that those who originally coined the concept of "anti-Semitism" to frame their hatred of Jews and Judaism were making a consciously Orientalist racial argument about Jews' alleged status as Easterners with an ethnic and cultural identity alien to the West, bearing a closer kinship to Arabs/Muslims than to Europeans/Christians.
Aside from what this says about European attitudes toward Jews and Zionism (paraphrasing Aime Cesaire, these people's objection to the Nazis wasn't their crime against humanity as such but the idea that they perpetrated it against "Westerners," albeit without acknowledging their "Western"-ness until after the fact) there are also some fairly pointed implications about xenophobic hostility in present-day Europe toward Arab/Muslim migrants and those with Arab/Muslim migrant backgrounds: neither motivated by any principled opposition to migrants' "imported anti-Semitism," nor somehow vaguely "similar" to a historical European anti-Semitism that's since been expunged from the mainstream European worldview, such attitudes in fact *are* straightforward and unambiguous expressions of Europe's ongoing anti-Semitism, entirely modern and fundamentally unexpunged.
I would add that the "message" model strikes me as the best explanation for what all the main actors (except probably the separatists and possibly the Ukrainian governments) have been doing in Ukraine since 2014. I don't think a direct war between Russia and the US was ever particularly likely, putting the idea of Ukraine's strategic importance in the 21st century into question. But it is an obvious place for both sides to send "messages" to each other, at increasing cost to the locals on either side of the frontlines. It would help explain some peculiarities of pacing and the limited commitment to the conflict, which seems at odds with both sides' official presentation of it as some grand clash of civilisations.
Another example of the sort of thing you're talking about is Jean-Jacques Dessalines' massacre of (most) Europeans in Haiti. It was often characterised as a senseless slaughter. "Not policy but revenge, and revenge has no place in politics," as the Marxist C. L. R. James had put it. In this respect, Marxists (of that type, at least) are scarcely distinguishable from what you describe under the name of Liberals. Only the kind of policy they like and agree with (for instance, in James' case, our Red Terror) may be acknowledged as a "policy" and a legitimate part of "politics". To me it seems rather obvious that it was policy and rational (in the sense of being based on the mental calculation that killing all but the friendliest Europeans would make Haiti's black population safer). Moral judgements aside, such rational calculations could also be mistaken for any number of reasons. But was it "senseless" or an irrational act of vengeful passion? Hardly.