Apparition of Jack

Trump vs Musk shitshow incoming. This is going to be glorious. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1930645855285231914?s=46

Really hoping Zohran wins this one. It would be a huge moral and political win for progressives in this age of chaos.

What I see from the pro-Palestinian side of the conflict is an inability to understand the motivation behind Israel’s motivations for wanting to remove Palestinians from Gaza, and forming a conception of Israel as “evil” as a result. I’m here to explain Israel’s position, and why they’re fighting so hard and (seemingly) committing atrocities for no good reason. It’s the Holocaust. It really is that simple. If you’re not Jewish, it can be almost impossible to understand the level of trauma, grief and terror that hovers of the heads of too many Jews to this day about it. It was the first and only time in human history that a people were subject to industrial genocide - not just displacement, not just shootings or massacres (as bad as they are), but systemically slaughtered like animals using mass industrial methods. The level of evil it involved almost seems incomprehensible. Basically, to most Zionist Israelis, Israel represents the only hope Jews will ever have of not suffering yet another genocide of that scale again, and one that might be successful this time around. And who can blame them? The world failed to stop the Holocaust. Britain, the US, etc knew it was happening. They could’ve done more to stop it. Instead, they mostly ignored it (and even turned Jews away from their countries in literally their most desperate hour) while millions of them were again, being industrially slaughtered. If you’re your average Israeli, and you see virtually every other nation on earth still condemning you as greedy, “globalists” and, at worst, subhuman, where else are you going to feel safe? Would you really trust the US, or Europe, or anywhere else, when these nations are swarming with neo-Nazis? Where are Jews to go? Zionist Israelis are like cornered rats, desperately trying to hold onto the only piece of land they can call “theirs.” If you want to stop the ethnic cleansing in Gaza, you have to assure the Israelis - even the most crazy, rabid ones - that you won’t let another Holocaust happen again. You have to assure them their fears are unfounded and that antisemitism will be destroyed in all its social manifestations. Why do we allow antisemitism just to fester unchallenged? It’s literally the most destructive form of racism in human history (again, because of the Holocaust) and yet most people either dont give a shit, or implicitly or explicitly believe in it. Jews are not demons. Jews don’t control the world. Jews aren’t lizard people globalists trying to establish a one-world government and enslave humanity. That’s literally Harry Potter-tier fantasy bullshit. It’s not real. It never has been and never will be. Jews are literally just like anyone else - they have their good and bad, just like all cultures. They have a unique religion, but then so do Sikhs, so do Druze, so do Yazhidis, so do Alawites. If anything there’s a lot of good things about Jewish culture (food, family, commitment to education, etc.) To defeat Israel’s aggression, we have to defeat global antisemitism. You can’t have one without the other.

There are deeper forces at play. We live in an age of massive, massive restructuring, where the old assumptions and biases that got us through the last era in human existence are breaking down. I don’t know if Trump will receive his “karma”; I think the world to come will be too light-based to allow for concepts like “revenge” or “punishment”, but somehow, his nasty actions won’t be forgotten either. Right now our job is just to buckle down, maintain a sense of love, nature and humanity, don’t get caught up in the politicising of it all, and don’t try and make predictions of how things will play out. Think of the current era like a quantum break in the basic laws of morality and society. What was up is now down. What was left is now right. Trying to grasp onto any one idea of “right” or “goodness” is foolish at a time like this, so instead we had just better learn to go with the flow until whatever the heck is happening finally comes to fruition.

Don’t forget a lot of that stuff is pushed by right-wing grifters taking the most extreme examples of identity politics in order to make redistributive economics bad by association. It’s like how Biden actually passed a law to lower the cost of insulin and no one hears about it, but when Donald Trump says he’ll do the same thing (even though he won’t) suddenly hes the Messiah. There’s a fuckton of progressive economic activism happening every day you just don’t hear about because it threatens the neoliberal orthodoxy.

this was the first thread I saw when I checked out /r/latestagecapitalism. https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/s/QtlWxH2rkV This is the latest video I found from Vaush, criticising the massive corporate / security state overreach by Palantir. I understand it’s easy to feel like all the left does is whine about gay Muslim trans athletes or whatever but criticising capitalist insanity is like their bread and butter.

With all due respect, this is completely false. Spend even a tertiary amount of time in any progressive online space and you’ll see countless discussions on how workers (ie lower and middle class) are being fucked over by corporate greed, predatory economic policies etc.

The UN should just go in, guns blazing, and force both sides to settle down until a long-term solution can be found.

I think something like this is far more humane and achievable

Wouldn’t it be funny if AI becomes aware and turns on the tech billionaires instead

I doubt it. But modern Britain (as well as every first-world country) will be a lot more multicultural in the future moving forward. That’s what happens when there’s a global inequality. Poor people move to the uber-wealthy countries. Nature abhors and imbalance.

Israel will go down in history and biggest geopolitical fuckup of all time.

Maybe not all but a big number of them certainly feel nervous.

This is what I’m saying. Jewish paranoia runs deep. I’m going to be very honest - in many ways, I believe the best Arab response to the conflict (other than advocating for their own sovereignty) would be to find it within themselves to forgive Israelis for what they’ve done and work within legitimate frameworks to advocate for a one-state solution. Could such a thing be possible? Could the some of the most oppressed, traumatised, marginalised people on earth find it within themselves to forgive the very same people who are directly responsible for their suffering? Who have stolen their land, their houses, and in too many cases their lives? I understand the difficulty of such a situation. If I was Palestinian I don’t know if I would be up for it (especially considering what’s going on as we speak in Gaza.) But, to me, the only other option is just further endless bloodshed, which seems to be the way things are going. And keep in mind, I’m not any easier on the Israelis too. Israel will have to answer for a LOT of the needless suffering, oppression, torture, death, displacements, etc they’ve inflicted on the Palestinian people. They will have to wrestle with the violence they’ve caused and how unjust it’s all been. Basically I see the whole situation as a common test of forgiveness and good-will. Can Jews and Arabs ever truly live side by side without conflict? Can they ever learn to forgive each other and see the common humanity within them? That’s genuinely the only way this situation gets resolved peacefully. It’s how India got its independence without a major violent uprising. It’s how South Africa broke apartheid without descending to civil war. The only other “solutions” to this conflict, it we were being honest with ourselves, would be complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians at the hands of Israel, or the complete ethnic cleansing of Israeli at the hands of Hamas etc. I don’t think I have to tell you why neither of these are favourable, especially in a world that has supposedly moved on from the catastrophic ethnic cleansings of the 20th century.

Yes, which was only accomplished after the Holocaust and Jews around the world were so desperate for their “own” piece of land that they’d be willing to set it up surrounded by impoverished Muslim countries. Zionism has existed since the mid-1800s, yet Israel was only declared in 1948. What happened between those times that could’ve impelled millions of Jews to rapidly settle in a small strip of land in the Middle East I wonder? Israel only exists because of the Holocaust. Had it never happened, it would’ve never been created. The whole thing exists so Jews can feel like they’re not at the mercy of Germans, or Russians, or Brits, or whoever else.

How do you convince Israelis to hand over most of their political power to people they’ve seen as enemies for nearly a century now? How do you convince Palestinians to not engage in revenge violence at the people they see as their oppressors, guilty or not? The tensions in the Levant region as it stands are so great that any attempt to integrate the two cultures would only end in bloodshed (as we’re currently seeing, actually.) How do you get a Westernised Israeli and an impoverished Palestinian to live side-by-side without wanting to kill each other? I’m not saying it can’t be done, I’m saying it will require incredibly levels of nuance, forethought and grace, that currently neither Israelis nor Palestinians are prepared to engage in.

In some sense, the Allies did try to understand where Nazism came from after the war. In many ways Nazism was a response to the economic devastation of the 1930s, with far too many people feeling insecure and vulnerable to care about things like “democracy” and “racial tolerance.” After the War, the Allies set up a substantial welfare state to eradicate the material origins of fascism in Germany and other countries. If we want to stop Israeli atrocities, we need to provide Jewish people perhaps not with the material conditions to reject Zionism, but certainly the cultural and social conditions. I suppose my question is this - what does a post-Zionist world actually look like? Is it a two-state solution? A one-state solution? Going back to the status quo before 2023? The expulsion of all Jews in the region? If you genuinely believe it’s the last one (which I don’t think you should), too many Israelis will feel like they’re receiving a second Holocaust, no matter how much you try to tell them they’re to blame. If you can’t genuinely answer these questions, then the causes of Israeli aggression will continue. Does Israel get disbanded? Does the region become a dual-ethnic state governed by both Muslims and Jews? How does that look like? Would Palestinians even want to live next to their oppressors after everything they’ve been through? Make no mistake, I’m not arguing for any one vision in particular. I’m just saying, the post-conflict world in Israel/Palestine is something far too many progressives have yet failed to address, leading to knee-jerk reactions instead.

Again, I agree with literally all of this. Read my posts again carefully. I’ve explicitly said the creation of Israel was a mistake. Again, my point isn’t to justify Israel’s behaviour, it’s to explain where it comes from. Militant Zionism is in essence one big collective trauma response. To the Zionists, “Israel = safety”, even if their own actions make that less likely. To overcome your enemy you must first know your enemy. Calling Israelis an evil people for their actions in Gaza counter-productively causes them to double-down on their aggression as they feel more people turn against them. It’s the spiral of hatred. The more and more you demonise a people (on whatever side of a conflict), the worse and worse the violence gets. You might utterly despise Israel for what they’ve done, and in many ways those feelings would be justified, but they would also blind you to seeking cooperative solutions to actually ending the conflict and allowing Palestinians to live in peace once again.

I’m not saying criticising Israel is antisemitism, because it isn’t. I’m just talking about the general and pernicious antisemitism that still exists everywhere, even against non-Zionist Jews. Literally just go onto Twitter or Facebook and you’ll find countless people with Hitler profiles calling for the eradication of Jews. The sort of antisemitism that led to the Holocaust long before Israel was established. Otherwise, you make good points. Israel’s actions are self-defeating, but they won’t realise this if they’re still acting out of trauma. Basically, enough Israelis need to be made aware that they’re not making themselves safe and that diplomacy and cooperation will actually improve their lives, but it’ll be much harder to that if every second WhatsApp groupchat in Britain, Nigeria, Pakistan, Korea etc is full of dipshits posting Nazi propaganda about how the Jews rule the world or whatever.

Paranoid people don’t make rational decisions. I’m not justifying Israel’s actions, I’m explaining the psychological motivations behind them. If, on some level, you’re still terrified of being wiped out, of course you’re going to make all sorts of irrational decisions to create a sense of security.

I’m not Jewish.

You’re not getting what I’m saying. The most radical Israelis would turn Israel into a ghetto if it was still “theirs” rather than accepting anyone else (and hence any group of people who could commit the Holocaust against them again) into their country if it meant financial stability. October 7th was basically a mass Holocaust flashback for many Jews. It brought up the latent fears that the world hates them and wants them dead.

You say this as someone who isn’t part of a group who hasnt literally faced attempted extermination in living memory. The Holocaust wiped out 1/3rd of all Jews on earth at the time. That would be like if the Japanese wiped out 46 million Americans in WW2, or Germany wiped out 14 million French people. That level of trauma and horror isn’t something to just move on from.

I mean, isn’t that kinda the problem? If Jewish people don’t feel like the rest of the world won’t try and exterminate them again, why would they give up Israel? In their perspective, a few thousand Palestinian lives (rightly or wrongly) are worth it to prevent the gas chambers again.

Again, I fully accept all of this. What Israel has done to the Palestinians over the last 80 years has been horrific, to put it mildly. But I’m also saying that Israel isn’t unique in its violence it commits against defenceless populations. When was the last time you heard anything about Tigray rights, or self-determination, or anything like that? When was the last time you heard about the oppressive and violent measures the Ethiopian state takes against them, dehumanises them, cuts off their food and water supplies and forces them to flee? The situations in Gaza and northern Ethiopia are incredibly similar. And yet we don’t hear a peep from progressives about it. Ethiopian PM Abiy Ahmed is to Tigray people what Netanyahu is to Palestinian people. And yet I bet up until this conversation you’d never heard of his name in your life.