#Radicalized Leftists Are No Different Than Nazis

[msclaritea]

[humusboii2thereturnoftheking]

Palestine is Ruining the Left

I've taken this from Reddit because I've found it an interesting read, I did not write this myself, a user named u/ u/TooLittleNuance did. Feel free to reply and engage in converation.

I'm an Israeli-American leftist who has been active in American and Israeli politics for a number of years now. I have always advocated for human rights, equity, and self-determination for Palestinians who are oppressed(to different extents) under Israel, a nation that commits itself to Jewish domination of institutions. I always voted and campaigned for progressive Democrats and I assisted with the Israeli Meretz party from abroad. This is why I think the current Palestinian-sympathetic movement is ruining the left:

Abandonment of Pragmatism - Just like the 2020 George Floyd protests("Defund the Police"), the Western left has completely embraced a suicidal strategy of idealistic radicalism. Many of those on the left insist the solution to the conflict is a one-state solution consisting of Palestine "from the River to the Sea". Unfortunately, they've appropriated the Palestinian mythology in their ambitions to magically destroy Israel and the ideology of Zionism by BDS somehow or supporting Palestinian "armed struggle". It doesn't take a lot of thought to see how both of those methods are incredibly ineffective and immoral to advocate for and implement. So, instead of a pragmatic approach, like empowering the Israeli left through donations and advocacy, supporting a reasonable solution(two-state or one-state under Israel), or calling for the ultimate humanitarian end to the war of a unilateral Hamas surrender, the Western left insists on a dream scenario that will never happen. This is the most egregious behavior of the left and it's their most common mistake(i.e. Vietnam). This is due to the fact that Palestinians, especially in Gaza, are suffering under disproportionate Israeli force with no Western movement to realistically end it. In fact, these Western leftists, due to these tactics, are assisting in empowering and legitimizing the far-right of Israel. They are the perfect strawman to turn people off to the left in Israel, which, in turn, results in a lengthened Palestinian suffering.

Maximalism - There's a tendency on the left to outcompete each other in radicalism. It's not catchy or sexy to say "The war tactics that Israel uses are disproportionate and don't consider enough of the humanitarian cost", it has to be "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing" in order to provoke an emotional reaction from uneducated Westerners. It's not "the security policy of Hafradah has resulted in reduced human rights of Palestinians compared to Israelis", it has to be "Apartheid"(with the only legal precedent being South Africa). These maximalist statements immeasurably hurt the movement for true progress on Palestinian human rights. It results in a boy-who-cried-wolf situation: If Israel decides to transfer the entire Gazan population to the Sinai, what is that called? A "genocide"? Due to the present labeling of the war, nobody will believe it. What if Israel permanently transfers or kills 100,000 Palestinian civilians? 200,000? 1 million? What will that be called? How can it get worse than "genocide"? This Maximalist rhetoric is not only inaccurate, but it's incredibly damaging to describe the proportionate extent of Palestinian suffering, which is vital to any movement that faithfully advocates for an upliftment of Palestinian life and identity.

Normalization of Bigotry - Explicit or latent Jew-Hatred is being increasingly embraced by radical sections of the Western left. Tropes such as "Zionist"(a euphemism for "Jew" for many) control of governments or blood libel. Wishing "Death to Zionists" or equating them with Nazis is, in most cases, latent Jew-Hatred. Regardless of your thoughts on the definition of Zionism(there is no definition, it is a meaningless term), it's clear that many believe that "Zionists" are just uppity Jews. Of course, this is genuinely believed by a small portion of the left. However, a substantial part of Western leftists has repeatedly failed to condemn this Jew-Hatred and to stop mirroring the language of these latent or explicit Jew-Haters. This is 1000x worse in the case of Israelis. For Western leftists, it's normal to call Israelis "colonizers", "demons", "rapists", and "child-murderers" on their social media without repercussion or introspective irony. As somebody belonging to the Israeli nationality, I have been desensitized to the insane amount of bigotry from those that I formerly respected. However, many Israelis or Jews aren't as depersonalized as I am, and they definitely take the bigotry to heart. What do you think results from that? Usually, a vote for Likud(Netanyahu's Party) or a donation to AIPAC. Thus, propagating a cycle of bigotry and continuing the suffering of Palestinians.

Propaganda - This war has sparked the largest disinformation campaigns in human history. Multiple state entities (Israel, U.S., Russia, Iran, Qatar) and numerous private entities are pumping out loads of propaganda in order to manipulate uneducated Westerners into supporting their interests. Since October 7th, known Russian disinformation propagator, Jackson Hinkle, has skyrocketed in followers due to his ability to mislead Western leftists on the war. I have seen an unfathomable amount of reposts from Al Jazeera and MiddleEastEye, known Qatari state propaganda and major propagates of misinformation. I have always appreciated the value of institutional skepticism that embodied many of the historical and academic leftist leaders. However, right now, those values are completely thrown out in favor of Russia or Iran's geopolitical advocacy of "everything the West does is bad". The previous three points of behavior are certainly emboldened by the paid disinformation and bots that propagate anti-Western sentiment to destabilize Western democracy. Meanwhile, the basic interests of Palestinian civilians are left unregarded while these state operatives kill their only lifeline.

Reactionary Resurgence - One of the main factors that attracted me to the left was its rejection of reactionary ideology(the establishment of traditional institutions from the past). For Israelis and Palestinians, reactionary rhetoric is normalized and encouraged in many cases. However, this reactionary ideology that has plagued those who share my nationality has spread to Western leftists in their advocacy for Palestine. Western leftists constantly appropriate the far-right and reactionary talking points that many radicalized Palestinians spout. An example would be the insistence on the exclusive indigeneity of Palestine from the River to the Sea, which abandons the progressive values of anti-nationalism and intersectionality. Another example would be the appropriation of Palestinian Martyrdom, in which many of them embraced the idea that human life can be inherently reduced to a political or national cause by their manner of death. This is a clear rejection of the values of individualism, secularism, and anti-nationalism.

Historical Negligence - Those who are even a little bit informed on the Israel-Palestinian Conflict understand that the conflict is too complex to be treated as a soccer match of Israelis vs. Palestinians. Many Israeli and Palestinian leaders set roadblocks to an equitable peace, while many others progressed the conflict to a more positive state. Even more than the historical complexity of this conflict, evaluating the moral complexity requires a graduate degree in a relevant field with hundreds of hours of research. I typically advise not to trust anybody's commentary of the conflict with any less credibility than the previous sentence. However, the Western left has instead decided to follow the historical and moral analysis of demagogues. There's constantly factually wrong or misleading historical information on many of these Palestinian-sympathetic accounts. An example is the map of a "disappearing Palestine" that millions have reposted, a blatantly misleading map meant to depict "Zionist colonization", meanwhile, neglecting the historical borders of the conflict. There are many other forms of historical negligence that they commonly employ that are extremely damaging for understanding the conflict.

In conclusion, Western leftists are keeping up with the Western traditions of white saviorism and interfering with this particular trendy foreign conflict. I could have written a few more grievances that I have of the Western left(including the embracement of far-right Islamist groups) but I wanted to keep the post relatively short. In several months, Western leftists will forget about the Gazans suffering under the disproportional force of the IDF. Nobody will self-criticize the ideas or tactics that they engaged in, meanwhile, the Israeli left-wing and reliable non-Hamas Palestinian advocacy organizations are left in the dust by an ineffective white-savior-esqe Western movement. Not only that but due to all of these factors making the left look like lunatics, Biden and the Democrats are being affected in the polling, which may result in Trump being elected, a terrible outcome for Palestinians.

[qqueenofhades]

what's been particularly vile to me is this group of white online leftists who insist that anyone who cares about more than this one issue for the election is a bad person, like, as if us black and brown people are making up reasons to be afraid and not.....believing the gop when they say they are coming for us. believing trump who has said previously that he does not bluff, that he will do the things he's said he will do (i hate what social media has gone to the word gaslighting but it feels like gaslighting. we lived through four years of trump. we saw the damage. stop treating us like we're being dramatic). it must be great to not have to worry about that i guess? "life won't change under trump" is such a telling admission because maybe theirs won't but mine will. and so many others' will.

and it is often again these (white) online leftists that love to call anyone who disagrees with them a white liberal (derogatory) because they know it would be racist (bad) to be this shitty and condescending to poc but they don't want to actually listen to anything black and brown voters are saying. it's easier to just call us white liberals and throw our opinions out, to ignore the work of black people for decades to gain the right to vote, to disregard the weight of telling them to not do that. it's genuinely appalling. they care so much about racism until it's time to engage with poc who have different opinions than their online echo chambers, then we're just stupid liberals with terrible opinions like..... wanting to live. not wanting four more years of trump. so sorry for that.

sorry for this vent in your inbox, i'm just so fucking tired of white people trying to rewrite history as if trump wasn't that bad. he was for my family and countless others and i am terrified for what's to come if he wins.

The thing about (the often-white) Online Leftists is that they have become just as much as a radicalized death cult as the diehard Trumpists. If you don't want to die for The Revolution and/or sacrifice your life, friends, family, the rest of the country, etc., then you're Insufficiently Pure and must be Purged. (Which I think is just complete BS, as none of them could actually handle sacrificing anything, but it's increasingly the only kind of performative rhetoric that is acceptable in leftist-identified discourse spaces.) This is functionally identical to "if you aren't willing to lay down your life for our Lord and Savior Donald Trump and the Great White Christian Nationalist Dictatorship, you're a liberal cuck," but with the names and justification changed. It doesn't change the underlying radicalization, nihilism, and insanity of the premise.

Another thing the Trumpists and the Online Leftists have in common is that they are busily rewriting just how bad Trump was in order to serve their Ideology. Ever since January 6, 2021, the Republicans have thrown everything they have at revising and whitewashing any suggestion that it was an "insurrection," and the Online Leftists have done the same, in an attempt to "prove" their insane point that Trump "would be better" than Biden. This is embodied in the recent ultimate-brainworm-nonsense maximalist-online take that "Biden has to lose so the rest of the world will see that the US rejects genocide!!!" That's right, the message that the rest of the world would take from Biden losing to Trump is that the US rejects genocide. Never mind if Trump literally wants to commit all the genocide possible and to install himself as a fascist theocratic dictator. In the deeply twisted minds of the Online Leftists, this is the only possible interpretation of Biden's loss, so they'll push for it as hard as they can! The Trumpists and the Online Leftists, at this point, are working pretty much in concert to damage Biden for similar insane reasons and get Trump elected. Etc etc., one Nazi and ten people at the same table is eleven Nazis.

Like. Sure. Four years ago, when Trump was president and people were dying by the thousands because he didn't want to wear a mask because it smeared his bronzer, just to name literally one of the terrible things he did every single day (and not even mentioning how much worse a second term would be) we were absolutely better off. Super-duper great. (Sarcasm.) Either that or "there is suffering and evil in the world and the only solution is to drastically increase the suffering and evil for everyone and to destroy what progress we have managed to make because It Does Not Fix Everything Now" is an absolute moral imperative, and either way, yeah. I'm calling bullshit.

[a-very-tired-jew]

They let X happen, why are they doing Y?!

So this is an argument I see in some form in Leftist spaces regarding the response of college campuses to protestors in recent days. Often it's used as "Sure, they'll let neo-Nazis on campus with no problem, but the moment we have a peaceful protest they call the cops." Except here's the problem. It's not a peaceful protest. It's also not a one time thing like the neo-Nazis. Every campus I have ever worked at or attended has had neo-Nazis show up and march around. They were booed and counter-protested. They stood there grinning with their slogans, took their pictures, and then went on their way to post on the internet about how they "owned the libs". Neo-Nazis do not have a prolonged presence on campus and they do not protest weekly for 6 months straight at campuses across the country. Sometimes there's altercations and violence, and sometimes there's not. Usually it makes the news in some capacity and that's it. Compare this to the Western Activists who have been protesting since October. Many campuses have seen weekly, if not daily, protests where protestors have held signs supporting terrorist groups, justified the actions of 10/7, chanted antisemitic rhetoric, and engaged in a whole host of concerning activities that have continued to escalate in some way. This escalation has culminated in different ways across these campuses but has resulted in Jewish students being attacked, Jewish dorms and student centers being defaced, bomb threats, attempted arson, stabbings, and so on... All of which has now led to these same groups, whose members have committed the aforementioned actions in some capacity, to established encampments on their college campuses. Think about that. Your peaceful protests are more violent that neo-Nazis showing up to college campuses. That's why the police have been deployed. You can delude yourselves all you want, but there are clear incidents over the course of these 6 months that show why this is happening, and you have no one to blame but yourselves. We have told you since the beginning that you need to address the antisemitism and radicalization present in your movement, but instead you ignored Jews and claimed Zionists were using claims of antisemitism as a "weapon to silence criticism of Israel". Well, it turns out we were right and your movement is now regarded as a violently antisemitic one by the authorities. Instead of accepting this and correcting it, you have continued to blame Jews Zionists. I would not be surprised if we see this escalate further into violent protests with things like cocktails being thrown, and even then I know you will blame the Jews Zionists for your own actions. Take a step back, breath, and think. Your peaceful protests are more violent than neo-Nazi protests. A Jew should not be saying this. A Jew should not be going "hey, those neo-Nazis? Actually less violent than what's going on right now." It should not take a Jew to point out the sheer ridiculousness of this entire situation. That should be a red flag that something is very, very wrong.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Phyllis Chesler

What’s unique is that, instead of the world having sympathy for the victims, the sight of Jewish blood unleashed global bloodlust for more Jewish blood.

I was not surprised by the great American feminist silence after Oct. 7. I’ve been dealing with antisemitism/anti-Zionism on the left and among feminists since 1971. I’ve written books and hundreds, maybe a thousand, articles on the subject.

Thus, I may have been among a handful of people not surprised by the feminist silence about Oct. 7 and the ongoing denial of this atrocity.

Such a silence has deep roots in the politically correct academic world.

You are either a victim or a victimizer; you are oppressed or you are an oppressor; you are colonized or you are a colonizer. Israel has been designated as the world’s chief oppressor and colonizer. 

Some victims are more sacred than others. Men of color are more important than white men; Muslim men of color are even more important, unless they’ve been killed by other Muslims. Then, their deaths do not matter. The murders of women of all colors matters even less.

In addition, there is the belief in multicultural relativism—that all cultures are equal; that there is no objective truth. Everything is relative, subjective; everyone is entitled to their own narrative.

Here’s one reason my views are so different:

Most Western pro-Palestinian feminists, leftists and academics have never lived in a Muslim country or moved in Muslim circles or worked with Muslim dissidents as I do.

I wrote about this in An American Bride in Kabul.

They have absolutely no knowledge of Islamic gender and religious apartheid; Islamic imperialism, Islamic colonialism, or Islamic conversion via the sword; no understanding that Muslims practiced anti-black slavery and sex slavery—and many still do.

Demonizing Israelis as “worse than the Nazis” allows Europeans to continue the Holocaust against the Jews and feel that they are rendering themselves safe from radical Islamic hostility by appeasing the Islamist Muslims who live in their midst. It is also a way of scapegoating Jews and Israel for the crimes of European and Muslim racism and colonialism.

Like so many, I had assumed that the world’s hatred and persecution of Jews had ended; that Jewish history would never again repeat itself. 

I was wrong.

It was foolish to have thought that Jew-hatred would suddenly become extinct or that Israel would not remain under siege.

We must shed our illusions—permanently. We cannot expect that conditions will always improve, or that one country or another will always be a safe haven for Jews. 

One cannot win a war of ideas if one refuses to fight it.

[beautifulmorningstar]

Ladies. I think it's important to remember that since radical feminism- and frankly, other forms of milder but at least REAL feminism (that isn't imperialist/white libfeminism)- is now taking off as an actual option for more women, especially bec they're connected online and open to information exchange on the subject (Korean feminists spreading 4B, women's oppression in some countries radicalizing new feminists, legal insanity in several countries waking up some women, major hate crimes against women being publicly played out in courts, treatment of women during war etc)... and there is definitely a more vocal and visible lashback against CERTAIN MRA MOVEMENTS around here (yes the barefaced MRA movements and incels etc but ALSO the veiled ones like gender "activism"), we are probably gonna see an uptick of:

1. Blatant harassment towards feminists, esp rfs

2. A reattempt at covert isolating of feminists

3. Covert personal attempts to "befriend" feminists in order to endanger them

And, I deeply suspect,

4. People suddenly trying to ENGAGE with feminists with the intent of bad faith reading AND political conversion

Points 1 and 2 are old and well-known, and frankly has become the reason that these evil narcissistic bullies are no longer being listened to or supported by the general and (important distinction:) well-meaning public. Point 3 is something I should hope everyone is already taking precautions against.

Point 4, however, I do believe will be their fallback during this period (more than before). Suddenly, attempts will be made to dissuade you from investing in women's rights (hard as it already is in this world and with so many different alignments of women's concerns) and I think we're going to see "feminist blogs" popping up (or even just regular blogs or full-out TRE blogs) trying to engage "in good faith" (/sarcasm). They might make posts that genuinely seem harmless, ask innocuous questions, or challenge feminist concepts in an innocently critical way - all of which can be easily mistaken for actual curiosity and genuine intention. I'm not saying to disengage , those who are actively doing amazing work on here... I am saying, though, be aware of intentions.

Many women are on here just watching feminist spaces, without actively engaging. They are just as much the political conversion goal as the feminists that get approached. Anything and everything can be used to achieve their end - for example, using current politically-charged events to twist your perception of women's rights, or to dismiss feminism as a lesser concern; demanding to know why so many feminists believe in the inherent worth of women but refusing to engage in good faith; trying to convince rfs that non-females deserve a space inside feminism for whatever banal reason but framing it in new and less brash ways.

Of course, to non-feminist populations they'll be actively calling feminists "fascists and nazis" and whatever as per usual. I just think it's important to note that, as we've seen with western leftist spaces, the best way to dismantle progressivism is to "covertly" do it from the inside while still appealing in some way to the people inside that movement.

I don't need to remind anyone that there will always be men who understand the most basic structure of societal oppression (slavery and sexual slavery/coercion of women), and men who have too much time on their hands. One of the first things boys learn is class consciousness as an oppressor class - and half the battle (esp in the western world, but increasingly everywhere) of overcoming subjugation is psychological.

[gveret-fic]

Re: prev ask

something that I’ve noticed that western leftists like to do is pretend to be more radical in order to have the “moral high ground”, to be more woke and be a better leftist than other people. in doing so they both succumb to right wing framing, center themselves on issues that really don’t affect them in the bigger picture, and cause unnecessary infighting.

the reality is that in order to cause positive change we need to unify by not fighting on the minutiae of ideological issues/hypotheticals and instead focusing on pushing for policy that will mitigate the current problems at hand. ie: the majority of Americans including a spectrum of people with different views on I/p currently want a ceasefire and a hostage deal.

do not let politicians forget that what we are really discussing is the very real issue of dying babies in Palestine.

also nazis are bad. do not let nazis pretend to be allies of brown people when their main contention with Jews is the fact that they aren’t “white enough”

It may surprise you to learn that a majority of Israelis also support a hostage deal, which de facto means a ceasefire. In fact, thousands of people have been marching in the street every single week (and several dozen, every single day) for months now demanding a hostage deal.

And do you know what happens when a fundamentalist, extremist, criminal, anti-democratic government is elected, and there are mass protests in the streets? Nothing. Because they don't care, because this isn't a democracy, because public opinion can't sway a government that isn't serving the public.

That's what Amricans are courting with Trump.

As to the effectiveness of mitigation strategies in general, there's plenty of debate over that, so I wouldn't accept it as fact. But there's no doubt that nothing short of overwhelming unified majority can stop an actual war. Even that might not be enough. This is absolutely the time to be pragmatic and solution-oriented and stop daydreaming of decolonial revolution.

I agree that Nazis are bad, but your phrasing here is incorrect and misleading. There's no "main contention" with Jews, it's pure irrational genocidal antisemitism. And the reason behind it certainly isn't that Jews aren't "white enough". Nazis considered Jews our own separate, inferior race, completely disctinct from other races, distinct enough that we aren't even considered human and should be exterminated about it. Like there's a whole Nazi racial theory you can easily google and I encourage you to do so.

[mariacallous]

In 2007 I published what was probably my most-read book What’s Left. It asked novel questions.

"Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal-left is against come from the liberal-left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don…Why, even in the case of Palestine, can’t those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see?

“After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a superior literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? And why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology from the ultra-right?”

In short, I asked why was the world upside down? In the past conservatives made excuses for fascism because they mistakenly saw it as a continuation of their democratic right-wing ideas. In the early 2000s, overwhelmingly and everywhere, liberals and leftists were more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements, with the exception of their native far-right parties. As long as local racists were white, they had no difficulty in opposing them in a manner that would have been recognizable to the traditional left. But give them a foreign far-right movement that was anti-Western and they treated it as at best a distraction and at worst an ally.

I say my questions were novel because, although socialism was one of the great political movements of the 20th century, few discussed the consequences of its collapse in the 1980s. The decline of the socialist religion had as profound and as perverse consequences as the collapse of Christianity in the late 19th century. But no one, or next to no one, wanted to think about them.

As a good atheist I hated to paraphrase GK Chesterton, but there’s no escaping the old Catholic apologist.  My argument boiled down to saying that what Chesterton said about God applies just as well to socialism.  When men stop believing in it, “they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

After dreams of socialism and communism vanished in the 1980s, large sections of the radical left preferred any enemy of the West to the West having no enemies at all: radical Islam, insane Sunni and Shia dictators, Putin’s Russia, violent misogynists and homophobes. As long as they were anti-western, and in particular the enemies of the US and Israel, the radical left was happy to form alliances.

Or as Judith Butler explained the new orthodoxy in 2006, “Understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.”That by any normal standard Hamas and Hezbollah were tyrannical, inquisitorial, and misogynist was irrelevant. They were anti-western and that alone made them “progressive”.

Not everything I wrote in 2007 stands up well today. In the 2010s we began to see Conservatives fawning over trash like Viktor Orban, and from 2016 on we have seen the wholesale abasement of the US right before Donald Trump. The lure of authoritarianism was by no means confined to the left

But overall, what I said remains true. And just to be clear, I did not then and do not now believe in the horseshoe theory. The far left is not the same as the far right. There is a huge difference between living in a country ruled by Donald Trump and a country ruled by Nicolas Maduro or between Iran and North Korea. The far left and far right target different people, and serve different interests.

It is better to think of radical Islam seducing elements of an exhausted radical left. The white western working class would no longer die for the revolution (truth be told, it was never that keen on dying for the revolution even at the best of times for the left). But young Muslim men would fight and kill Americans and Israelis. And if you could forget about the obscurantist religious tyranny, the hatred of every human right, the persecution and murder of Arab and Iranian leftists, they might in a certain light appear to be a replacement for the western working class that had let the far left down so badly.

When What’s Left came out respectable critics said words to the effect of “come on, Nick, you are just talking about tiny groups of post-Stalinists and post-Trotskyists. The real left was in the then Labour government, trade unions and charities and campaign groups.”

I replied with words to the effect of politics is downstream of culture. Look at academia, the comment pages of the Guardian, the organisers of demonstrations, the left trade unions and many of those supposedly respectable campaign groups and charities. They are getting drunk on a weird mixture of far-leftism, far-rightism and postmodernism. They will embrace medieval levels of superstition and regimes they would have no hesitation in describing as fascist if they were white.

I asked where this was leading. The far left provided an answer when, to the astonishment of my respectable critics, it took over the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn.

Now the Gaza war has led to another pact being formed between the western far left and radical Islam. Over at Quillette,  an American academic, Susie Linfield, has gone through the whole hideous detail of how leftist thought leaders and academics celebrated the murderers. Some of those she indicted are so predictable you would miss them if they were not there.

Linfield notes that in the New Left Review, Britain’s leading Marxist journal, Tariq Ali praised the terrorists for “rising up against the colonizers” and implied, bizarrely, that the murders resulted from Palestinian frustration with Israel’s recent enormous pro-democracy demonstrations against the Netanyahu government.

Elsewhere depression replaces tedium. Anyone who remembers the scrupulous work of Michael Waltzer on what constituted just war will be appalled about what has happened to Dissent, the journal he edited.  Dissent used to believe that the deliberate targeting of civilians was a war crime. Not so now when the civilians are Jews. In its pages, one writer  described Israel as a ‘genocide machine’ and argued that Israeli victims should not be grieved.

“It is not possible to publicly grieve an Israeli Jewish life lost to violence without tithing ideologically to the IDF—whether you like it or not.” So grief is impermissible. Indeed, it’s worse than that: grief is colonialist.

 Elsewhere tenured academics were unable to contain their enthusiasm: the attacks were “innovative,” “astonishing,” a “major achievement,”  “awesome,” “incredible,” and “a stunning victory,’’ one wrote.

Ah professors. They write in ink and dream of blood.

The essential point to bear in mind is that these expressions of joy at the death of Jews on 7 October was almost instantaneous. It came before a single Israeli bomb fell on Gaza. It was not a condemnation of Israel’s disproportionately violent response. That was still to come. Instead of rational protest there was a celebration of the mass murder of Jews by Hamas, a terrorist group inspired not only by Islamism but by European fascism.  As if to confirm my argument in What’s Left the far left was cheering the far right because it has no one else to cheer.

The same question I asked in the early 2000s can be asked now: where is this heading?

I do not go along with the view among conservatives that all who march with Islamists and their leftist allies are antisemites by definition. From the start of this war, I have said that Israel’s aim of destroying Hamas is impossible. I was going to say that it is impossible without unacceptable civilian casualties. But in truth it is impossible in all circumstances. The Israeli forces simply cannot find Hamas fighters as they melt into a population of two million disorientated people. This is not simply my view. Military specialists are noting the low level of Israeli casualties and the small number of Hamas kills the Israeli Defence Forces are claiming to have made.  The odds are that Hamas is refusing to opt for a direct confrontation, and allowing civilians to pay the price. It is always reasonable to protest against futile wars and needless suffering, and this war is no exception to the rule.

And yet before I turn too accommodating, let me say there is no other area of progressive life where liberals and leftists ally with racists and don’t show even the smallest embarrassment about their behaviour.

Here’s a thought experiment. There is a growing concern on the western far right about low birth rates. Rather than allow immigration, Viktor Orban in Hungary is offering tax exemptions to women who have four or more children. The left naturally wants higher welfare payments for mothers, too, and in the case of the UK wants to end a nasty Conservative policy which penalises families on benefits if they have more than two children.

For all that, no progressive would join a demonstration of neo-Nazis or alt-right supporters in favour of encouraging British mothers to have more children. They would think that there was a serious flaw in a campaign that attracted ultra-right white support. They would worry about inciting prejudice against ethnic minorities in the UK.  And yet they see nothing wrong in going along with campaigns that attract ultra-right Islamist support or in worrying too much about the UK's Jewish minority.

If the grim absurdities of the left of the early 2000s presaged Corbynism and the collapse of the Labour party, what do the 2020s have in store? I am trying to be objective and so won’t go off into long laments about the moral health of the sacred “Left”. I long-ago gave up worrying about that in any case.

First and most obviously the failure of the white left for more than a generation to oppose Israel while also opposing antisemitism has mainstreamed racial prejudices. The explosion in anti-Jewish attacks since 7 October is an inevitable consequence. I have never seen Jewish people feel so isolated. It’s not simply the far left and Muslim agitators who scare them. BBC presenters and others in the mainstream, who make their indifference to the massacre of Jews plain, foretell a future where Israel is a pariah state and Jews are damned by association and must pay the price. Perhaps that future is already here, and we will be permanently in a Corbynista world where Jews are seen as sinister agents in a Zionist conspiracy manipulating western policy.

Second, the uncritical treatment of Hamas naturally reinforces the most bigoted and reactionary elements in British Muslim communities. The consequences we can only guess at, but I think we can say by looking back at the last time the British left ran off with radical Islamists, they will lead us down new spirals of extremism.

[lesb0]

woooow @ last ask. the implication that these poor trans girls were just ~suffering~ which led them to become the worst kinds of bigots before they ~discovered~ themselves... because they were "radicalized" by nazi trolls rather than being taken in by "actual humans" first.... lmaooooo. don't. the HUGE MAJORITY of trans women, literally any actual normal trans woman you meet, never had to go through a NAZISM PHASE to "find themselves" or whatever. the ones who were nazis first i will never consider to be actual trans women. they were angry little white boys furious at their own impotence or whatever who took it out on everyone else in the worst way, and then suddenly became uwu softgirls once they found a different way to channel their hentai addiction. we've all seen nazi propaganda on the internet but we didn't fall for it. there's a reason THEY did. they're still the same hateful little freaks on the inside, just now with cosmetic differences and a better mood because people are falling for their bs and conflating them with an actual marginalized minority and are bending over backwards to be nice to them.

don't insult trans women by equating them to these people. terra has it right by refusing to acknowledge them.

p.s. there's not actually as much difference between far left and far right as you think, @muymuysugoi. alt right trolls vs "actual people" is a fallacy. the people your ask was talking about are proof of that. have you heard of the horseshoe theory? bc it's a real thing. deny a leftist man sex and see how he gets REAL woman-hating REAL fast.

Exactly, I have never met a single real transsexual woman who needed to become a reactionary online nazi before finding herself. that is such an insanely disgusting and offensive thing to say about trans woman as a whole. I will never accept anything like that.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Matthew Sheffield at Flux:

Despite the evidence provided by history, polling, and daily news events, there are millions of people in the United States who actually think that Democrats are just as extreme as Republicans. In a 2022 CNN poll, 52 percent of respondents said that Democrats’ viewpoints were generally mainstream, little different from the 54 percent who said the same about Republicans. A survey also done in 2022 by CBS found that 49 percent of respondents said Democrats were “extreme,” only slightly higher than the 54 percent who said the same about Republicans.

Needless to say, thinking that Democrats are anywhere as extreme as Republicans is totally absurd. Donald Trump is the only president in American history who refused to leave office after losing a free and fair election. He frequently lavishes praise on violent January 6th rioters as “great people” with “love in their heart.” He frequently promises “vengeance” against opponents and says he will imprison and execute people who disagree with him. And it’s not just Trump. Moderate Republicans in Congress have been extinct since the Trumpist hordes eliminated the few who hadn’t been swept away during the Tea Party movement of the late 2010s. The Republican Party nationally and in a variety of states devised and executed a criminal scheme to steal the 2020 election and throw out the votes of tens of millions of Americans. The American right is also much more violent than the left. Since 1970, about 75 percent of political hate crimes are committed by right-wing extremists. Only 4 percent were committed by far-left extremists.

There are no leftist members of Congress who are anywhere as radical as Paul Gosar, the Arizona Republican who was censured for posting a stylized video of himself murdering New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2021. He and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) attracted national controversy for speaking at a neo-Nazi political event just a few months later. There aren’t any Democratic members of Congress who have spoken at rallies of communists who advocate violence. The anecdotal evidence of individual members’ extreme views is also borne out when we examine Congress from aggregate statistical measures. Since 1992, congressional Democrats have moved slightly to the left, while Republicans have moved much further to the right.

On most specific political issues, Americans agree overwhelmingly with Democratic policies. Republicans’ desires to mandate school prayer, eliminate all abortions, ban same-sex marriages, give billionaires lower taxes, and block people from getting health care are terribly unpopular. (That Republicans enjoy majority support on other issues like the economy mostly stems from the fact that Democratic-leaning voters are more willing to criticize their own side than Republicans are.) A party with such extreme opinions shouldn’t be able to win elections anywhere outside of rural areas in the Old Confederacy. This is why lying to the public about supposed Democratic extremism is the core component of all Republican messaging. Trump uses the phrase “radical left” in every speech he delivers, and the talking point is repeated hundreds of times a day at Fox, Newsmax, OAN, Real America’s voice, and the entire gigantic propaganda apparatus of right-wing media.

But Republicans don’t just lie about the opposition, they are also constantly being deceptive about their own views. Under the watchful eyes of leaders like Mitch McConnell, they have outsourced their most unpopular policy viewpoints to unelected judges who can do things that could never get passed through legislation—like stopping student loan forgiveness or banning the sale of completely safe abortion medication. And under the new Project 2025 agenda being constructed for Trump by Christian nationalist extremists like his former budget director Russ Vought, national-level Republicans will move the remains of their policy apparatus from the Congress and into the bureaucracy, where they intend to do things like using an obscure 150-year-old law commonly referred to as the Comstock Act to criminalize abortions through agency rulings. Freed from having to advocate or legislate on their most controversial viewpoints, congressional Republicans are able to focus their public messaging exclusively on the few issues like immigration or the economy where they currently have majority support. They spend the rest of their time attacking Democrats through spurious investigations, like their endless hearings on Hunter Biden. None of these efforts ever results in substantive legislation. Senate Republicans scuttled their own immigration enforcement bill, Kentucky Rep. James Comer’s years-long impeachment investigations have turned up nothing, and House Republicans voted more than 60 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) without bothering to offer an alternative.

[...] Abortion is far from the only issue on which radical Republicans are far out of step with the majority of Americans, and it’s unfortunate that millions of people are having to be the personal object lesson about what the far right wants to do to the rest of us. But at long last, it appears that the public is waking up to the unpleasant reality that far-right Republicans don’t believe in democracy and will do anything they can to restrict and control others. Democrats must act with great urgency to ensure that this process continues and expands by building an infrastructure to protect democracy.

Matthew Sheffield wrote in Flux that the Republicans' extreme views are being camouflaged in public by pushing the laughable assertion that the Democrats are just as extreme… except that even the leftmost Dems are nowhere near as extreme as GOPers.

[antifainternational]

REVIEW: WE GO WHERE THEY GO: THE STORY OF ANTI-RACIST ACTION Shannon Clay, Lady, Kristin Schwartz, and Michael Staudenmaier 2023, PM Press Reviewed by K-Dog In February I read the excellent new book WE GO WHERE THEY GO - The Story of Anti-Racist Action written by Shannon Clay, Lady, Kristin Schwartz, and Michael Staudenmaier, with a cool graphic-style Forward by Gord Hill - and published by PM Press. This is the first-ever in-depth history of the influential direct-action anti-fascist youth movement - and the authors do a great job of trying to organize that story into chapters covering the defining struggles and evolutions of the network - including the turf battles between anti-racist skins and nazi boneheads, the protracted struggle against the Ku Klux Klan's organizing efforts, ARA 's innovative and effective work in Canada, and the fierce opposition to both anti-choice fascists and sexism within our movement. The book is driven by interviews with over 50 ARA veterans, fellow travelers or first-hand observers who provide quotes, reflections, and war stories - often with a biting sense of humor.

I spent a good part of my teens and twenties building ARA in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Detroit, Chicago and supporting other chapters across North America. It was my university. So it was fun and sometimes emotional to read stories of fights we were in or see quotes from friends who have put in the work and paid their dues in this movement. I always knew that what we did mattered - even if it wasn't often treated that way by the mainstream left - not to mention broader society. But I have to admit its rewarding to have the history treated as something significant, even crucial. More than giving props to the OG antifas tho - what's really meaningful is that this book will help a new generation, confronting new forms of the fascist threat, find inspiration and lessons in both our successes and failures.

A few things off the top of my head that I thought the book did well was: 1. Quantify the victories against the fash - a surprising number of fascist organizations went out of business after sustained campaigns by ARA - a material contribution to the fight against white supremacy 2. Deal openly and honestly and without hype with the question of political violence - both its efficacy and dangers 3. Emphasize the role of culture (not just the bands - but yes the bands) - the way the movement LIVED and FELT and WORKED 4. Skillfully review the disagreements and controversies within the movement without trying to score points or dismiss points of view 5. Argue for the need for movements that are both militant AND outward facing - radical AND popular 6. Letting the people speak! This isn't a book of academic citations or leftist rhetoric - its the voices of regular, mostly working-class people, mostly without college degrees sharing their thoughtful insights, compelling stories, and clever anecdotes

My criticisms of the book are really more criticisms of ARA. Did we really never articulate a thorough understanding of what fascism is? Or at least establish some solid competing positions? Did we never find a way to talk about strategy beyond the various direct action campaigns we were running? Did we never propose ways to further embed ARA within wider sections of the working-class - and especially relate to communities of color more consistently and systematically? Looking back, some of our short comings are embarrassingly obvious.

For me Anti-Racist Action was a real living example of a genuine "United Front" - the concept of different groups, tendencies, and individuals working together and having each others backs in struggle DESPITE many real and important differences. A United Front does not mean everybody is all happy with each other all the time - quite the opposite, it means we're all often annoyed, angry or arguing with each other - but we don't sulk away when we lose a vote or don't get our way or face some criticism. We do appreciate what other folks are bringing to the table tho, we give them their respect, and we recognize the common goals we are fighting for - because those goals actually fucking matter.

The other thing about ARA I'd like to highlight was the de facto method of leadership - the anarchistic "leadership by example". Instead of a top-down structure where a few intellectuals dictate strategy and tactics on the larger mass - ARA chapters made their arguments by producing real world examples of what they were talking about. Think we should all do Cop-Watch patrols? Show me what that looks like. Convinced we need to make feminism a core part of our culture? Build a crew that exudes that vibe. Want economic demands as part of the program? See how we are doing it in our town, etc. etc. etc.

I have a lot of love for the hundreds of young people who organized and fought for ARA; for the few elders from the 60s/70s generation who embraced ARA, helped build it and make it more sophisticated; and the bands that saw what we were doing and kney they could help by promoting the work on tour and on records. ARA was a militant movement - we took risks and took licks - and gave 'em back too. I remember once calculating how many arrests ARA had taken over the years and by my loose tally we were well into the many hundreds when I gave up counting. Many of us got stitches and casts, relationships got tested and burned, and two of us were murdered by nazis in the desert. Now in my 50s I'm still unsettled and angry about a lot - and I'm still active on a few fronts - will be 'til the day I die. But I have a calmness when I'm around my ARA homies with our jokes, arguments, scars, and PTSD. My people. Virtual book launch of WE GO WHERE THEY GO, hosted by Asheville, NC's Firestorm Books: Tuesday, March 28th @ 7pm. Register here.

[grandpasessions]

Reprehensible as it was, Nazism was thus temporally what appeared after Communism; it was also, with regard to its content, an excessive reaction to the Communist threat. Furthermore, all the horrors committed by Nazism merely copied the horrors already committed by Soviet Communism: the reign of the secret police, concentration camps, genocidal terror . . .

Nolte's conclusion is thus that Communism and Nazism share the same totalitarian form, and that the difference concerns only the empirical agents which fill the same structural places ("Jews" instead of "class enemy," and so on and so forth). The standard liberal-leftist reaction to Nolte consisted in a moralistic outcry: Nolte relativizes Nazism, reducing it to a secondary echo of Communist Evil—but how can one even compare Communism, this thwarted attempt at liberation, with the radical Evil of Nazism?

In contrast to this dismissal, one should fully concede Nolte's central point: yes, Nazism was in fact a reaction to the Communist threat; it did indeed just replace class struggle with the struggle between Aryans and Jews—the problem, however, resides in this "just," which is by no means as innocent as it appears. We are dealing here with displacement {Verschiebung) in the Freudian sense of the term: Nazism displaces class struggle onto racial struggle and thereby obfuscates its true site. What changes in the passage from Communism to Nazism is the form, and it is in this change of the form that the Nazi ideological mystification resides: the political struggle is naturalized into the racial conflict, the (class) antagonism inherent in the social structure is reduced to the invasion of a foreign (Jewish) body which disturbs the harmony of the Aryan community.

The difference between fascism and Communism is thus "formal-ontological ": it is not (as Nolte claims) that we have in both cases the same formal antagonistic structure, where only the place of the Enemy is filled in with a different positive element (class, race). In the case of race, we are dealing with a positive naturalized element (the presupposed organic unity of society is perturbed by the intrusion of the foreign body), while class antagonism is absolutely inherent in and constitutive of the social field—fascism thus obfuscates antagonism, translating it into a conflict of positive opposed terms.

It is here that one has to make the choice: the "pure" liberal stance of equidistance towards leftist and rightist "totalitarianism" (they are both bad, based on the intolerance of political and other differences, the rejection of democratic and humanist values, and so on) is a priori false, one has to take sides and proclaim one fundamentally "worse" than the other—for this reason, the ongoing "relativization" of fascism, the notion that one should rationally compare the two totalitarianisms, etc., always involves the—explicit or implicit—thesis that fascism was "better" than Communism, an understandable reaction to the Communist threat.

***

Let us take Stalinism at its most brutal: the dekulakization of the early 1930s. Stalin's slogan was that "kulaks as a class should be liquidated" — what does this mean? It can mean many things—from taking away their property (land), to forcibly removing them to other areas (say, from Ukraine to Siberia), or simply into a gulag—but it did not mean simply to kill them all.

The goal was to liquidate them as a class, not as individuals. Even when the rural population was deliberately starved (millions of dead in Ukraine, again), the goal was not to kill them all, but to break their backbone, to brutally crush their resistance, to show them who was the master. The difference—minimal, but crucial—persists here with regard to the Nazi de-Judaization, where the ultimate goal effectively was to annihilate them as individuals, to make them disappear as a race.

In this sense, then, Ernst Nolte is right: Nazism was a repetition, a copy of Bolshevism—in Nietzsche's terms, it was a profoundly re-active phenomenon.

In Defense of Lost Causes S. Zizek

[yuri-alexseygaybitch]

Have you seen the original Suspiria (1977)? If not will you?

I saw Suspiria a while ago so I don't remember it very well, but what did you think about the very-missable-kinda-not-that-plot-relevant RAF/antifa subplot?

It's not irrelevant or missable, I think people are just not used to putting things together that aren't explicitly spelled out. The Markos Academy essentially functions as a micronation in the film with Helena Markos and her faction as a fascist regime. Much like actual fascist regimes, her power relies on a mythical and ahistorical version of the past, namely her false veneration as Mother Suspiriorum. They derive their power from the body politic, hence why the dance performance/ritual designed to give power to Markos is called Völk (also a very politically charged word with strong connotations connecting it to Nazism and fascist mysticism through its use in propaganda and the Völkisch movement). The two characters who see through the academy before anyone else (not counting Susie/Suspiriorum) are both politically leftist: Patricia, who is either a member of the RAF or sympathetic to them, and Olga, who is from the Soviet Union, for which they are both imprisoned and tortured, much in the same way historical opponents of Nazism and the RAF during the film's time period. Sara only becomes suspicious of the academy after encounter Dr. Klemperer, who witnessed the Nazi regime and draws parallels between what he saw then and what he's witnessing at the academy (which is also why metaphorically he's chosen as the witness to the witches' sabbath at the film's climax - he is witness to atrocity twice over). It's not even a statement about fascism I particularly agree with, since the film portrays it as a purely mystical phenomenon that is enacted upon a hypnotized body politic for the exercise of apolitical "power" (rather than as the final defense of capitalism against a revolutionary working class), but it's definitely there and I don't agree at all with reviews saying the political stuff didn't make any sense lol.

I haven't seen the original but from what I understand the remake was radically different enough to essentially be its own movie. I plan to watch the original at some point though.

[kharmii]

WoaH they're alreadydown I think you can stop now...

--

But tbh I think its sad to see all these people cling to this toxic ideology despite more and more of the "dirty laundry" and facts about the harsh, cruel and ice cold reality of it coming to light.

Seen several posts of people whining about the cold hard facts that came to light and try to disprove them because it just doesn't fit with their agenda...

Really hoping this is the beginning of the end of this ideology of hatred shaming and mutilation in the name of "health care" and the children slowly getting the mental health treatments they need instead of getting butchered up and shoved hormones into them.

Also the end of this bs being shoved into every part of everything, be it fandom or anything else...

They're fine. They did a response post (awww....they found my Ren and Stimpy post) and also pm-ed me this:

I'm surprised they haven't blocked me with this account yet but it's probably a matter of time. It was surprising to find out it was Marchy because they were one of the artists I didn't suspect of having a blankshipping sock. Truth be told, I thought it might be Esprei because they blocked me around the same time I responded to questioninqthings' pinned post. They were one of the tolerant popular artists who ignored me, but they come across low-key monster fkr and are friends with a bunch of those people. It might have been because I said some not-nice things about the Covid scam, and they recently did a stupid Covid mask wearing Submas before blocking me.

That's the thing....I say things about a lot of things. Even if a person says they are into blankshipping, there's still the stupid radical leftist criteria. Fandom basically becomes far leftist transtrender antis versus far leftist transtrender proshippers into stupid fetish bingo. There's no middle ground or dissenting opinions.

Since I talk about the Submas being thirsty for dog-ass too much, I'll go on a different sort of tangent. One of the newer arrivals on the blankshipping tag (who blocked me for not being into transtrender sheeit..) did a story where Ingo and Emmet were yote to Hisui, yet they were openly Jewish trans males. Fun fact: For most of history, people were afraid to openly tell people they were Jewish for fear of death, and transgenderism was such a huge no-no it wasn't even a thing. People have it extremely good now. Nobody has to live in constant fear with a constant sense of their own mortality. That's why I was joking that Ingo barely scrapped by in Hisui, but Emmet would have been burned as a witch because he was too weird. Even Emmet with his extremely poor social skills wouldn't be stupid enough to tell people he was a Jewish transexual during the Meiji Restoration Period.

The thing about having a constant sense of one's own mortality is that one would be really paranoid about making good decisions to stay healthy. They wouldn't go out of their way to be a fucking weirdo and engage in behaviors that have caused civilizational collapse. Since we live in a period of unprecedented fossil fuel glut, a lot of people have extremely cushy lifestyles that likely interfere with their ability to regulate dopamine. They are stuck having to seek out greater novelty to get that feeling of happiness. Because of that, they become constantly triggered narcissists who, instead of having their amygdalas triggered by actual problems that could kill or maim them, will project angst on people who disagree with their world views. How many times have you heard a trans person on Tumblr say something like, "THEY WANT ME DEAD!!1! THAT'S WHY I BULLY THEM!!"

Then they accuse dissenters of being 'NAZIs' and sheeit... Please...trans virtue signalers have nothing to fear in this cushy world. In fact, the leftist is the oppressor now, and they have been for decades. You are about a thousand times more likely to get your head stomped in by a whackadoodle antifa or BLM useful idiot than the almost nonexistent 'right wing extremist', and this is true to the point they cover for certain people in the media.

Thinking about what I've written in my latest fan fic, it makes me wonder...how many of these constantly triggered creampuffs been through it? How many times did they miss a meal or were in such constant pain they felt like they would throw up? How many wished they were dead from pain? (self-inflicted doesn't count. That's another symptom of poor dopamine regulation). How many had someone try to kill them or witnessed a family member die violently? How many have felt like they have no sense of privacy because they are always being watched? How many have seen the look of rage in a person's eyes who actually wants to kill them? I bring this up because such experiences will awaken that healthy sense of one's own mortality that would make it so small traumas -such as someone disagreeing with your leftwing death-cult bullshit- don't seem like that big a deal.

[grandhotelabyss]

Lol at the idea of commissioning Pariah to do the writing, (who incidentally also used to be in those dismal leftie fb groups years ago) if Salomé didn’t exist we would have to invent them. I confess I’ve never been completely convinced by either the left-libs freaking out about Lana as conservative chanteuse or the far right seeing in her a harbinger of some kind of youthful populist-reactionary turn. She reminds me of a kind of girl (and guy, although there were way less of them) I remember from high school who wanted to be counterculture, but didn’t do politics and wasn’t really interested in pissing off their parents in any way other than the normal way that all teenagers invariably do just by being teenagers.* Yeah there was a conservative leaning there, and even a bit of racism, but I think it was mostly a mix of aesthetics and cultural inertia- America is after all an ambiently conservative nation. It seems very odd to me that that type of person ever got radicalized enough to start throwing around the race science stuff the way Anna and Dasha did, but then they’re probably hardly representative specimens, and my memories of that type are all from before left-activist rhetoric became so completely inescapable during the Trump era

*A part of me is tempted to say that this is on a slightly higher register the role Paglia fulfills as well (this is the purpose of Camille) I’m sure the context of the original quote is nonsense, but I’ve always thought (I think?) Naomi Wolff was onto something when she described her as Phyllis Schlafy for the nipple-pierced set. There’s something of the sense while you’re actually reading or listening that this is some hot, revolutionary, stuff but then if you actually think about it you’re circuitously being persuaded via decadent aesthetics to have your parents or grandparents sexual/racial etc mores (this is not entirely serious and I know I’m doing injury to her program by describing this way, but I think it’s also the appeal of her aside from the imperious declaration of this and that.)

I think Oscar Wilde invented Salomé. I discovered her more recently, find a leftist phase hard to imagine.

Back in the '90s and early '00s, the religious right had enough power to allow the counterculture to be a broad political anti-church that included secular libertarians (e.g., Kurt Loder and Kennedy on MTV) or libertarian-ish figures like Paglia. As long as you weren't a Bible-thumper, nobody asked you what you thought about taxes. "Fiscally conservative, socially liberal" was like "I listen to everything but rap and country." Things were just politicized in a different way than they are now. I don't think everybody should have to be deeply politically engaged.

The racial thing with Anna and Dasha is because they're children of immigrants. (I'm allowed to say this because I'm one too.) I don't say "white" immigrants, either; I don't even say "non-black" immigrants, because I've graded the composition essays of Somali students here in Minneapolis, and they're also capable of sounding like Steve Sailer. The "critical race theory" idea—I think Baldwin was the first major writer to make the point—of immigrants defining themselves against African Americans is just true; I've seen it again and again.

On the other hand, Paglia was liberal on race, if in an aestheticized way that earned her a rebuke from bell hooks. Whenever she did talk about race, she took a romantic pan-POC (to include Italians and Jews) and anti-WASP stance. She blamed the feminism she despised on an almost racial Anglo-Saxon female frigidity. (There's a reason she became friends with Edward Said.) This seems less absurd when you read an early feminist tract like Olive Schreiner's Woman and Labour and find that it sounds like a Nazi pamphlet, heralding feminism as the rebirth, after industrialism caused a small setback in white women's estate, of the always-independent Teutonic sisterhood, this as against the immemorial slavery of women practiced by the "darker races" (presumably, again, to include Italians and Jews). But there are even strains of this kind of thing in Wollstonecraft and Fuller, too. Some have even wondered why Gilman's famous wallpaper is yellow.

As with Paglia, my own thinking about gender and sexuality ranges beyond the bounds of liberalism in either direction or all directions, while I can't say the same for race. I think it's irresponsible, to say the least, for humanists and artists to indulge anything like biological racism. Gender and sexuality are endlessly fascinating and unsolvable riddles, whereas I've never been able to get intellectually interested in race; masculine and feminine are cosmic forces, but "black" and "white" are the flimsy contrivances of the pirate and the sociologist.

[ritchiepage2001newaccount]

All of this is true. However...

There was never a nation-state called Palestine.

Before 1948, the last time the Israel had a nation-state was the kingdom of Solomon.

And Palestine never had one.

The closest they got was a Roman province called Syria-Palestinia, which included the split kingdoms of Israel and Judea.

After WWI, most of the arable land was owned by absentee Ottoman landlords, who sold the land to Jews.

The fate of Palestinian tenant farmers was a bit of a mixed bag, as some were driven off said agricultural projects, while others remained and worked for the Jews, while still others refused to do so.

When the Jewish refugees started arriving in the British colony of Palestine after WWII, most thought they could coexist with the Arabs, but there were dark forces that could never allow that to happen.

During the war, most Arab leaders had sided with the Nazis.

In fact, when Syria invaded Iraq, they did so with an able-assist from the Luftwaffe.

After the war, the main escape for Nazi war criminals on the lam, was through Damascus and Beirut, to Cairo, to Algiers, and onto Latin America.

To make matters still worse, the British promised the same land to the Israelis AND Palestinians.

So, the region has always been chock full o'fascists, and I would no more side with Israeli fascists (Likkud), or Palestinian fascists (Hamas), than I would between Lebanese Falangists and Syrian Ba'athists.

To err is human, but to really screw things up, you need the British Crown.

There is no Palestine in the Quran. There was no Palestine in the area under Ottoman occupation.

There is no call for a state of Palestine or two State solution or peace in the Hamas charter. That is never mentioned. Peace is explicitly rejected.

The decades prior to 1948 were intermittent serious massacres of Jews living in Jewish cities, plus the constant threat of violent attacks by Arabs on Jewish refugees who were pretty much defenseless until they purchased weapons and formed militias.

It's possible to look up exactly how much Jewish families paid for land they PURCHASED from Arab Christians and from Arab Muslims. The mayors of several major cities in family clan leaders were quite positive about living with Jews, sharing improved wealth, sharing improved health, sharing the eradication of malaria and opening up new lands. What's the problem?

The hostile Muslims who dominate the news slaughtered the friendly Muslims for being too nice to Jews. They eliminated the political opposition that wanted a peaceful 2-state solution in the 1930s. That's not much different from how Muslims do politics in other countries, murdering the opposition.

Look at the succession of brilliant and competent Iraqi leaders before Saddam Hussein. Each current leader was killed off by the new leader. Look at what Iran did to leftists who helped the Iranian clergy seize power.

Egyptian leaders need to firmly suppress the risk of a coup, by radical islamists.

Before 7 Oct 2023, hundreds of thousands were in the streets (including half the army), demonstrating against the Israeli government, and in the wake of the attack, majority (56%) opposed annexation of Gaza, with only 33% in support.

Also, there have been street fights between soldiers, and right-wing Ultra-Orthodox men, because they were exempted from national service, despite being the main political force behind most conflicts.

And half opposed Invasion.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-poll-finds-49-support-holding-off-gaza-invasion-2023-10-27/

You're helping Hamas create an imaginary Israel, because their surrogates in social media told you to…

Also, the Gazan government (Hamas) gaslighting of their own populace is even more severe, than our own.

If you want to help Palestinians, here are some excellent resources:

Help the people of Gaza

Palestine Emergency Relief

UNRWA

https://www.unrwa.org/

The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS)

Oxfam International

Doctors Without Borders

World Central Kitchen

#Ask_Gaza | Episode 4: Do You Hate Jews?