This whole Gaza nightmare has brought the the forefront a real problem for non Jewish people who want to fight antisemitism but also can’t abide the actions of Israel. Hearing that I am antisemitic because I don’t agree with the way Israel is going after Hamas is hard to hear, and I have no idea what I’m supposed to do about it. Support the bombing and starving of civilians and children? Hamas poses an existential threat to Israel, and I support their right to defend themselves, but there’s got to be another way. What’s happening there now is a horror, the latest horror. the earth beneath Israel is soaked in so much blood, thousands of years of human misery. How can one patch of earth be worth that?
fwiw, most scholars of the conflict that I've seen don't really think the conflict is 1000s of years old in any meaningful sense. It's really a modern/contemporary mess, starting pretty much in the late 19th/early 20th century.
Lots of Jewish ppl (like me!) are opposed to Israel's occupation and the current horrific attack on Gaza. So I don't think opposing that is antisemitic, though opposition is also unfortunately a way for some antisemites (like Candace Owens) to try to launder their hate.
I meant all of the conflict there, not just the current one. I’m don’t know a lot of the history, but I remember learning about what Rome did (was that Titus?) in Jerusalem, and there have been (if I’m remembering right) a number of times that Jerusalem was conquered. I open to the idea that I am wrong on this.
oh, there's certainly been a long history of various kinds of conflict...but that's the case in most places where we have records going back that long!
You are right of course that the contemporary problem started with the rise of zionism and encouraging Jewish people to return to Palestine. Zionism originated as a refuge for Jewish anti-semitism in Europe and became "it has always been our land because gave it to us." While I do not believe most Israeli Jews feel that way, on the other the religious purists who do believe the land is divinely theirs have an undue political influence.
While I don't know if Netanyahu is a religious Jew himself, he strongly allies himself with that ideology and it has benefited him politically.
There is also a misconception of Americans that the Israeli elections are for candidates. This is untrue. Israelis vote for parties and the party then selects its members into the Knesset. Netanyahu is a member of the Likud party, once very strong but in the last election the party took a shellacking and doesn't have a strong voice in the Knesset, so Netanyahu allied himself with the stronger religious right parties to form a government.
That is the problem when we Americans talk about voting him out of power. Nearly three out of four voters against Likud to get Netanyahu out of power, but Likud reinstalled him because they thought he would be able to lead them back into power by his capacity to unite with the religious parties. But of the 120 seats in the Knesset, only barely over a fourth are Likud seats (32) but the rightist parties that allied to form his government added 32 more and they have a majority of 64-56.
And so we are left with the religious zealots who do believe Israel is their god-given inheritance dominating the political landscape. And those religious and the concept of being able to return and control the land as a divine right is of great historical relevance.
Therein lies an issue that sets the majority of the people in Israel wanting to find a refuge being controlled by a minority who see slaughtering Gazans in the same light as Joshua's killing every person as unclean that lived in the land.
So even though they don't come out and say it, they are certainly attempting to justify their slaughter and/or removal of Palestinians as a religious right through their actions.
Because of that, it makes the problem at hand, much more ancient in nature than the zionist return.
Should you, Noah, be an Israeli, your thoughts would be in the majority it seems, by electoral votes. But it is both 1000's of years old and a very contemporary mess because the religious right in Israel, just as the religious right in America, are using religious origins that are not really true to justify their very contemporary efforts.
And thus you are completely correct, it is a modern/contemporary mess and the historicity used by the religious is no more valid that rightest Christians suggesting somehow Donald Trump will make America a Christian nation (again).
I don't know the solution to the political situation in Israel anymore than I know the solution to the political mess in America. But one thing is quite clear, the path both are on using a religiously inspired morality to obtain power is only going to make enemies and never find any solutions.
Maybe that is why the founders here-in America--said the two should not be mixed. Ironically-correct me if I'm incorrect-but I think the Israeli founding principles stated the same thing.
Just remind People that Israel is a country not a religion. But of course they know this. Trying to conflate the two is a deliberate right wing fascist tactic.
No other religion and no other ethnicity has ever been gifted a country (being Jewish is both). What do you think Zionism is? Literally a country / homeland for any Jewish person wishing to live there.
I had always thought that Zionism was a particular political movement WITHIN Judaism, rather like Christian Nationalism is a political movement within Christianity. Is there ANY rational basis for requiring Zionism of any Jew, either outside or inside Israel?
In fact, I'm not sure I really understand Zionism in the context of this war. Does it always oppose a two state solution? Does it always believe that all of Palestine should be Jewish? If so, how does it include Gaza, which in Biblical times was not part of Israel?
When people called me "antisemitic" for opposing the approach Israel is taking in this war, I always just asked if being anti-Putin makes me anti Orthodox Christian or being anti-Mike Johnson makes me anti-Christian. Or why the concept that Israel has a "right" to Gaza or the West Bank differs from Putin's belief that Russia has a "right" to Ukraine.
I agree that Israel has a right to defend itself, just as Ukraine does. But how killing Palestinian civilians is "defense" is beyond me.
ack; lot of questions there, and the answers are somewhat complicated and disputed. Zionists will make broad claims that Jewish people have the right to their own state and that Jewish safety requires a state; those intertwined arguments are generally the basis for saying anyone who opposes zionism is antisemitic, I think. (Obviously I find these arguments unconvincing!)
Zionism doesn't require opposing a two state solution, at least in theory. Zionists supposedly oppose a situation in which Palestinians and Jews are all in a single state since then Palestinians would have more votes and it wouldn't be a Jewish state any more. In practice, Israel has undermined the two state solution and fought any recognition of Palestinian national aspirations.
I noticed that Stephanie Ruehl had Greenblatt on her show several times in October, calling him a dear friend (as MSNBC hosts are wont to do). I’m not sure if she continues to give her dear friend a platform as I gave up watching her for other reasons, but I found the eye-batting uncomfortable in the face of so much Jewish opposition to Israel’s current position.
Good article, but I also expected it to go a bit more into “anti-Zionism is anti-semitism” than it did, and how one of the most dangerous facets of the ADL’s support of Israeli colonialism is how it perpetuates the lie central to the Ethnostate: that the State represents the Race, that a Race’s State deserves its allegiance above all else, and that disagreement with or crime against the State is one against the Race— and simultaneously and necessarily, any crime owned by the State ought also be owned by the Race in the worlds’ eyes. This lie is essential to an Ethnostate’s existence and not only fans the flames of antisemitism on its own, but fans them in a way the Ethnostate COUNTS ON in order to further their us-versus-them mentality and the uplifting of race and alliance TO race as the defining priority of the State to the exclusion of all others, justifying any of that State’s denigration and oppression and externalization of harm to those not of the Ethnostate’s chosen race while serving as a shield against criticism by putting the lives of ALL of their race, even those outside the country who disagree with the State, at the opposing end of bigotry and violence that the State would have otherwise earned all on its own. The violence and hatred directed at innocent, unrelated Jews across the world is a FEATURE of the Ethnostate that works to its advantage, not a bug, the victims its body-shields who both absorb some of the violent retribution and hatred their State itself and administration officials would have deserved for its actions, victims of an increasingly more fascist state that gets to count each innocent death or act of criticism as an existential attack justifying racial retribution and furthering a regime that never actually has reason to SAVE or safeguard the Jewish hostage, to truly work hard at all to prevent terrorist attacks against its populace, because every attack “from without” justifies the Ethnostate’s racist policies and race-against-race actions, and because Fascism dismisses the innocents who die as losers and lauds those who survive or attack back and deal damage to other races as winners. Punishing enemies is more important than safety, the MOST important feature of the Ethnostate; safety (and actions of equity and repair that could have actually reduced hatred and politically destroyed Hamas) is not only not a priority, but essential NOT to maintain, because an Ethnostate can only justify itself if the Race is constantly in danger, no matter where it is in the world. And a Fascist state like Israel is becoming needs to broaden its list of enemies to include those within, the criticizers even within their race or “in-group” as stabs in the back that must be neutralized to increase state power.
We’ve seen the Hard Right and Nat-Cs in this country use the same arguments for decades to try to pre-emptively treat America as some sort of White Christian Ethnostate for which those of the in-group are justified in Supremacy and oppressing those in the out-group, and any externalized violence and oppression and colonialism is justified by the supremacy of the Race (minus the Race Traitors) above all else. They want any violence against the “right sort” of people to be counted as violence against us deserving of retribution, sometimes preemptively, and they would rather the “wrong sort” of people like migrants and foreigners not be treated as people at all. Israel’s Ethnostate enjoys plenty of support from the Right as a template of how they would have us restructure this nation around Christian Nationalism and permanently enshrine our underlying national current of Supremacy as an explicit virtue owned by the State.
I wish I were prosaic to do so more elegantly like you usually do instead of my own drawn-out word salad. 😭 If it helps, A.R.Moxon’s constant writings on the national current of Supremacy, of the “Livers and Die-ers”, while America- and Trump-centric, help explain a number of the ur-fascistic tropes that fascist and nationalists lean on that makes their ideology so tempting to those who fear death, believe in the myth of scarcity, and fall into the tempting lie that simply externalizing the exploitation and deaths of “those people” means that they don’t have to be the ones who die. https://armoxon.substack.com/p/the-die-ers That we essentially ought aspire to Omelas, and if the spell of prosperity the child’s suffering is supposed to bring about fails to materialize, why, we ought need but more children for the cage.
See the link from AR Moxon in my above reply and his other works— they’re great at explaining how the national current of our nation is that of Supremacy, specifically of the “White Christian” variety, and that the very reason those who defend Supremacy so ardently can be called “Conservatives” is because they’re conserving and reinforcing an already Supremacist mainstream status quo that dehumanizes the marginalized and foreign, the minorities and homeless, and discounts their opinions in favor of White Christian convenience in a way that permeates every layer of mainstream media and our society. It takes effort to swim against that current and fight to change the nation’s course. Even the liberal party maintains Supremacy in countless ways, treating the marginalized as footballs instead of their constituents, identifying more with the white Right and needing to “understand” and appeal to them and to listen to their victims… and of course, enabling the genocide of brown people in Gaza out of callous disregard and political convenience. Supremacy might dominate America, but it hasn’t completely won and become Fascism *yet*, and we still have room to fight to endure that doesn’t happen even if the margins of victory keep shrinking with every capitulation the less-fascist party makes to fascist interests.
Yep. Those of us who live here have to keep fighting, especially those of us who are parts of vulnerable groups or their allies whose very survival is at stake. But it’s still more likely than not that America falls to fascism completely, leverages the rest of its wealth (before fascist incompetence and disaster dries it up) to help push the rest of the Democratic world into fascism too like Russia has relentlessly been doing with its money (with successes like Trump, Viktor Orban, and Brexit), and the entire world domino-effects into a slow rightward hell with power and wealth too concentrated in the top 0.1% to be resisted until the global warming that same 0.1% prevented us from fixing begins to wreck the entire world in a few decades and render the political struggles of the human race a dance over their own graves as we tear each other apart just to be fed. The Myth of Scarcity at the heart of right-wing supremacists ideology has never been more false over the past hundred years — the idea that some need to be exploited and used and starved in order for others to be fed and comfortable — but by all the selfish efforts of corporations and greedy billionaires and the Slow AI of wealth-accumulating-at-the-planet’s-cost they’ve overwhelmed society with, that Myth is rapidly on its way to becoming real, and the years when it finally does will be more horrible than anyone can possibly imagine. All the suckers, especially the American ones consistently voting for Fascism and global warming, will quickly find that no amount of externalized war or exploitation of the rest of the world or military might will save them from losing even the meager life comforts and food security they enjoyed up until this point… only the top 0.1% will be spared unyielding hardship, and even THEM only for a couple decades more in their selfish apocalypse bunkers, because all their wealth is powerless without a populace to feed them and spend it on. And soon after that, the end for everyone.
(For example, and this might just be an oddball guess of mine, but I’m personally convinced that Biden’s ongoing callousness toward the southern border and willingness to self-destructively overfund Border Patrol and deny migrant humanity isn’t just latent racism, but also a cynical bet on the security of the United States in the face of Global Warming’s increasing inevitability: namely, an unwillingness to provide humane pathways to open up the southern border so that the United States will have precedent to callously and militarily block a FLOOD of climate refugees decades down the line, as if that act of incredible cruelty and national selfishness could help save us from Global Warming’s effects just a little longer. Take that strange hypothesis of mine with a grain of salt.)
We can still avert this oncoming tragedy. But we have to keep fighting as hard as we have the limited personal energy left to do, drained as we all are under this bleak, exploitative system— and more than anything else, more than any strategy or solidarity we could possibly employ against the unstoppable machine of Capitalism’s self-destructiveness— to avoid the collapse of democracy and the end of the planet for humanity both, we all have to get VERY, VERY, VERY VERY LUCKY. The evils of Trump and overconcentrated wealth are stupid and selfish enough that they might still eat and choke themselves before they finish eating the rest of us. That’s pretty much the only reverse domino effect we can hope for to escape Hell World. The better organized we are and the more we’ve fought, the better we will be positioned to take advantage of that luck… if it happens.
Careful about equating the “Communist domino effect” theory of old with this. Back then, there was a CAPITALIST domino effect of the US’s CIA and international corporations using wealth, subterfuge, and military might to overthrow COUNTLESS governments in favor of ones that could be better exploited by the United States and corporations (recall Banana Republics?), even and ESPECIALLY if it meant overthrowing leftist, more socialist governments with dictatorships more amenable to what the US considered its interests! Communist countries were trying to expand their influence in other countries too, sure, but the Capitalist ones were BETTER at it because of the prosperity and power that democratic Capitalism put at their disposal to further UNDEMOCRATIC Capitalism. Furthermore, the “Communist domino effect” theory was partially an excuse for Capitalists to justify doing the same but harder, and partially the reality of the FASCIST domino effect that political scientists have observed and proven in recent years: It’s simply a fact that authoritarian corrupt countries, run like kleptocratic Mafias who maintain they hold on power through exploitation and intimidation of their people, have recognized that they GREATLY benefit by having OTHER fascist corrupt countries on the world stage, who are amenable to bribery and
There are lots of secular and atheist zionists, and many Christian ones, just as there is substantial religious Jewish opposition to Zionism. I think it’s important to be clear that religious Jewish ppl are not necessarily Zionist. Many of them are not.
This whole Gaza nightmare has brought the the forefront a real problem for non Jewish people who want to fight antisemitism but also can’t abide the actions of Israel. Hearing that I am antisemitic because I don’t agree with the way Israel is going after Hamas is hard to hear, and I have no idea what I’m supposed to do about it. Support the bombing and starving of civilians and children? Hamas poses an existential threat to Israel, and I support their right to defend themselves, but there’s got to be another way. What’s happening there now is a horror, the latest horror. the earth beneath Israel is soaked in so much blood, thousands of years of human misery. How can one patch of earth be worth that?
fwiw, most scholars of the conflict that I've seen don't really think the conflict is 1000s of years old in any meaningful sense. It's really a modern/contemporary mess, starting pretty much in the late 19th/early 20th century.
Lots of Jewish ppl (like me!) are opposed to Israel's occupation and the current horrific attack on Gaza. So I don't think opposing that is antisemitic, though opposition is also unfortunately a way for some antisemites (like Candace Owens) to try to launder their hate.
I meant all of the conflict there, not just the current one. I’m don’t know a lot of the history, but I remember learning about what Rome did (was that Titus?) in Jerusalem, and there have been (if I’m remembering right) a number of times that Jerusalem was conquered. I open to the idea that I am wrong on this.
oh, there's certainly been a long history of various kinds of conflict...but that's the case in most places where we have records going back that long!
You are right of course that the contemporary problem started with the rise of zionism and encouraging Jewish people to return to Palestine. Zionism originated as a refuge for Jewish anti-semitism in Europe and became "it has always been our land because gave it to us." While I do not believe most Israeli Jews feel that way, on the other the religious purists who do believe the land is divinely theirs have an undue political influence.
While I don't know if Netanyahu is a religious Jew himself, he strongly allies himself with that ideology and it has benefited him politically.
There is also a misconception of Americans that the Israeli elections are for candidates. This is untrue. Israelis vote for parties and the party then selects its members into the Knesset. Netanyahu is a member of the Likud party, once very strong but in the last election the party took a shellacking and doesn't have a strong voice in the Knesset, so Netanyahu allied himself with the stronger religious right parties to form a government.
That is the problem when we Americans talk about voting him out of power. Nearly three out of four voters against Likud to get Netanyahu out of power, but Likud reinstalled him because they thought he would be able to lead them back into power by his capacity to unite with the religious parties. But of the 120 seats in the Knesset, only barely over a fourth are Likud seats (32) but the rightist parties that allied to form his government added 32 more and they have a majority of 64-56.
And so we are left with the religious zealots who do believe Israel is their god-given inheritance dominating the political landscape. And those religious and the concept of being able to return and control the land as a divine right is of great historical relevance.
Therein lies an issue that sets the majority of the people in Israel wanting to find a refuge being controlled by a minority who see slaughtering Gazans in the same light as Joshua's killing every person as unclean that lived in the land.
So even though they don't come out and say it, they are certainly attempting to justify their slaughter and/or removal of Palestinians as a religious right through their actions.
Because of that, it makes the problem at hand, much more ancient in nature than the zionist return.
Should you, Noah, be an Israeli, your thoughts would be in the majority it seems, by electoral votes. But it is both 1000's of years old and a very contemporary mess because the religious right in Israel, just as the religious right in America, are using religious origins that are not really true to justify their very contemporary efforts.
And thus you are completely correct, it is a modern/contemporary mess and the historicity used by the religious is no more valid that rightest Christians suggesting somehow Donald Trump will make America a Christian nation (again).
I don't know the solution to the political situation in Israel anymore than I know the solution to the political mess in America. But one thing is quite clear, the path both are on using a religiously inspired morality to obtain power is only going to make enemies and never find any solutions.
Maybe that is why the founders here-in America--said the two should not be mixed. Ironically-correct me if I'm incorrect-but I think the Israeli founding principles stated the same thing.
Just remind People that Israel is a country not a religion. But of course they know this. Trying to conflate the two is a deliberate right wing fascist tactic.
No other religion and no other ethnicity has ever been gifted a country (being Jewish is both). What do you think Zionism is? Literally a country / homeland for any Jewish person wishing to live there.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say
I had always thought that Zionism was a particular political movement WITHIN Judaism, rather like Christian Nationalism is a political movement within Christianity. Is there ANY rational basis for requiring Zionism of any Jew, either outside or inside Israel?
In fact, I'm not sure I really understand Zionism in the context of this war. Does it always oppose a two state solution? Does it always believe that all of Palestine should be Jewish? If so, how does it include Gaza, which in Biblical times was not part of Israel?
When people called me "antisemitic" for opposing the approach Israel is taking in this war, I always just asked if being anti-Putin makes me anti Orthodox Christian or being anti-Mike Johnson makes me anti-Christian. Or why the concept that Israel has a "right" to Gaza or the West Bank differs from Putin's belief that Russia has a "right" to Ukraine.
I agree that Israel has a right to defend itself, just as Ukraine does. But how killing Palestinian civilians is "defense" is beyond me.
ack; lot of questions there, and the answers are somewhat complicated and disputed. Zionists will make broad claims that Jewish people have the right to their own state and that Jewish safety requires a state; those intertwined arguments are generally the basis for saying anyone who opposes zionism is antisemitic, I think. (Obviously I find these arguments unconvincing!)
Zionism doesn't require opposing a two state solution, at least in theory. Zionists supposedly oppose a situation in which Palestinians and Jews are all in a single state since then Palestinians would have more votes and it wouldn't be a Jewish state any more. In practice, Israel has undermined the two state solution and fought any recognition of Palestinian national aspirations.
Yes, your understanding is correct.
I noticed that Stephanie Ruehl had Greenblatt on her show several times in October, calling him a dear friend (as MSNBC hosts are wont to do). I’m not sure if she continues to give her dear friend a platform as I gave up watching her for other reasons, but I found the eye-batting uncomfortable in the face of so much Jewish opposition to Israel’s current position.
Good article, but I also expected it to go a bit more into “anti-Zionism is anti-semitism” than it did, and how one of the most dangerous facets of the ADL’s support of Israeli colonialism is how it perpetuates the lie central to the Ethnostate: that the State represents the Race, that a Race’s State deserves its allegiance above all else, and that disagreement with or crime against the State is one against the Race— and simultaneously and necessarily, any crime owned by the State ought also be owned by the Race in the worlds’ eyes. This lie is essential to an Ethnostate’s existence and not only fans the flames of antisemitism on its own, but fans them in a way the Ethnostate COUNTS ON in order to further their us-versus-them mentality and the uplifting of race and alliance TO race as the defining priority of the State to the exclusion of all others, justifying any of that State’s denigration and oppression and externalization of harm to those not of the Ethnostate’s chosen race while serving as a shield against criticism by putting the lives of ALL of their race, even those outside the country who disagree with the State, at the opposing end of bigotry and violence that the State would have otherwise earned all on its own. The violence and hatred directed at innocent, unrelated Jews across the world is a FEATURE of the Ethnostate that works to its advantage, not a bug, the victims its body-shields who both absorb some of the violent retribution and hatred their State itself and administration officials would have deserved for its actions, victims of an increasingly more fascist state that gets to count each innocent death or act of criticism as an existential attack justifying racial retribution and furthering a regime that never actually has reason to SAVE or safeguard the Jewish hostage, to truly work hard at all to prevent terrorist attacks against its populace, because every attack “from without” justifies the Ethnostate’s racist policies and race-against-race actions, and because Fascism dismisses the innocents who die as losers and lauds those who survive or attack back and deal damage to other races as winners. Punishing enemies is more important than safety, the MOST important feature of the Ethnostate; safety (and actions of equity and repair that could have actually reduced hatred and politically destroyed Hamas) is not only not a priority, but essential NOT to maintain, because an Ethnostate can only justify itself if the Race is constantly in danger, no matter where it is in the world. And a Fascist state like Israel is becoming needs to broaden its list of enemies to include those within, the criticizers even within their race or “in-group” as stabs in the back that must be neutralized to increase state power.
We’ve seen the Hard Right and Nat-Cs in this country use the same arguments for decades to try to pre-emptively treat America as some sort of White Christian Ethnostate for which those of the in-group are justified in Supremacy and oppressing those in the out-group, and any externalized violence and oppression and colonialism is justified by the supremacy of the Race (minus the Race Traitors) above all else. They want any violence against the “right sort” of people to be counted as violence against us deserving of retribution, sometimes preemptively, and they would rather the “wrong sort” of people like migrants and foreigners not be treated as people at all. Israel’s Ethnostate enjoys plenty of support from the Right as a template of how they would have us restructure this nation around Christian Nationalism and permanently enshrine our underlying national current of Supremacy as an explicit virtue owned by the State.
well, can't cover everything! have to leave something for commenters to explicate!
I wish I were prosaic to do so more elegantly like you usually do instead of my own drawn-out word salad. 😭 If it helps, A.R.Moxon’s constant writings on the national current of Supremacy, of the “Livers and Die-ers”, while America- and Trump-centric, help explain a number of the ur-fascistic tropes that fascist and nationalists lean on that makes their ideology so tempting to those who fear death, believe in the myth of scarcity, and fall into the tempting lie that simply externalizing the exploitation and deaths of “those people” means that they don’t have to be the ones who die. https://armoxon.substack.com/p/the-die-ers That we essentially ought aspire to Omelas, and if the spell of prosperity the child’s suffering is supposed to bring about fails to materialize, why, we ought need but more children for the cage.
Isn't America already christian nationalist! Maybe you haven't seen Trump's new legal bills fund raiser, err, I mean his American bible.
Even your courts have 'in god we trust' emblazoned on them.
See the link from AR Moxon in my above reply and his other works— they’re great at explaining how the national current of our nation is that of Supremacy, specifically of the “White Christian” variety, and that the very reason those who defend Supremacy so ardently can be called “Conservatives” is because they’re conserving and reinforcing an already Supremacist mainstream status quo that dehumanizes the marginalized and foreign, the minorities and homeless, and discounts their opinions in favor of White Christian convenience in a way that permeates every layer of mainstream media and our society. It takes effort to swim against that current and fight to change the nation’s course. Even the liberal party maintains Supremacy in countless ways, treating the marginalized as footballs instead of their constituents, identifying more with the white Right and needing to “understand” and appeal to them and to listen to their victims… and of course, enabling the genocide of brown people in Gaza out of callous disregard and political convenience. Supremacy might dominate America, but it hasn’t completely won and become Fascism *yet*, and we still have room to fight to endure that doesn’t happen even if the margins of victory keep shrinking with every capitulation the less-fascist party makes to fascist interests.
The room to fight seems increasingly narrow.
The rest of the world looks on at America, aghast.
Yep. Those of us who live here have to keep fighting, especially those of us who are parts of vulnerable groups or their allies whose very survival is at stake. But it’s still more likely than not that America falls to fascism completely, leverages the rest of its wealth (before fascist incompetence and disaster dries it up) to help push the rest of the Democratic world into fascism too like Russia has relentlessly been doing with its money (with successes like Trump, Viktor Orban, and Brexit), and the entire world domino-effects into a slow rightward hell with power and wealth too concentrated in the top 0.1% to be resisted until the global warming that same 0.1% prevented us from fixing begins to wreck the entire world in a few decades and render the political struggles of the human race a dance over their own graves as we tear each other apart just to be fed. The Myth of Scarcity at the heart of right-wing supremacists ideology has never been more false over the past hundred years — the idea that some need to be exploited and used and starved in order for others to be fed and comfortable — but by all the selfish efforts of corporations and greedy billionaires and the Slow AI of wealth-accumulating-at-the-planet’s-cost they’ve overwhelmed society with, that Myth is rapidly on its way to becoming real, and the years when it finally does will be more horrible than anyone can possibly imagine. All the suckers, especially the American ones consistently voting for Fascism and global warming, will quickly find that no amount of externalized war or exploitation of the rest of the world or military might will save them from losing even the meager life comforts and food security they enjoyed up until this point… only the top 0.1% will be spared unyielding hardship, and even THEM only for a couple decades more in their selfish apocalypse bunkers, because all their wealth is powerless without a populace to feed them and spend it on. And soon after that, the end for everyone.
(For example, and this might just be an oddball guess of mine, but I’m personally convinced that Biden’s ongoing callousness toward the southern border and willingness to self-destructively overfund Border Patrol and deny migrant humanity isn’t just latent racism, but also a cynical bet on the security of the United States in the face of Global Warming’s increasing inevitability: namely, an unwillingness to provide humane pathways to open up the southern border so that the United States will have precedent to callously and militarily block a FLOOD of climate refugees decades down the line, as if that act of incredible cruelty and national selfishness could help save us from Global Warming’s effects just a little longer. Take that strange hypothesis of mine with a grain of salt.)
We can still avert this oncoming tragedy. But we have to keep fighting as hard as we have the limited personal energy left to do, drained as we all are under this bleak, exploitative system— and more than anything else, more than any strategy or solidarity we could possibly employ against the unstoppable machine of Capitalism’s self-destructiveness— to avoid the collapse of democracy and the end of the planet for humanity both, we all have to get VERY, VERY, VERY VERY LUCKY. The evils of Trump and overconcentrated wealth are stupid and selfish enough that they might still eat and choke themselves before they finish eating the rest of us. That’s pretty much the only reverse domino effect we can hope for to escape Hell World. The better organized we are and the more we’ve fought, the better we will be positioned to take advantage of that luck… if it happens.
I sincerely and deeply hope you're right, that there's still a sliver of hope.
I'm not convinced about a domino effect. There were never reds under the bed, for example, communism didn't win the ideological race.
Many scores of counties aren't, and would never, follow in America's current footsteps. That gap gets wider by the day.
Careful about equating the “Communist domino effect” theory of old with this. Back then, there was a CAPITALIST domino effect of the US’s CIA and international corporations using wealth, subterfuge, and military might to overthrow COUNTLESS governments in favor of ones that could be better exploited by the United States and corporations (recall Banana Republics?), even and ESPECIALLY if it meant overthrowing leftist, more socialist governments with dictatorships more amenable to what the US considered its interests! Communist countries were trying to expand their influence in other countries too, sure, but the Capitalist ones were BETTER at it because of the prosperity and power that democratic Capitalism put at their disposal to further UNDEMOCRATIC Capitalism. Furthermore, the “Communist domino effect” theory was partially an excuse for Capitalists to justify doing the same but harder, and partially the reality of the FASCIST domino effect that political scientists have observed and proven in recent years: It’s simply a fact that authoritarian corrupt countries, run like kleptocratic Mafias who maintain they hold on power through exploitation and intimidation of their people, have recognized that they GREATLY benefit by having OTHER fascist corrupt countries on the world stage, who are amenable to bribery and
So much clear thinking well expressed here as in all your political commentary. This is why I am glad to subscribe
I'm an atheist, ergo, by definition I'm anti Zionism. There are no god's chosen people.
There are lots of secular and atheist zionists, and many Christian ones, just as there is substantial religious Jewish opposition to Zionism. I think it’s important to be clear that religious Jewish ppl are not necessarily Zionist. Many of them are not.
True
Ditto.
He needs to resign.