I gather that the lectures will be recorded and that it is quite possible to remove from them any indications of the identities of the people listening to them. Let me emphasize that my concerns grew out of my anxieties, not out of theirs. For all I know, everyone planning to attend the study group would be happy to have his or her name published. I pursued my career during a time when it was almost impossible not to succeed. In the immortal words of Ann Richards, we were born on third and thought we had hit a triple. But these are times when grand jury members have their personal details posted online and members of the House Republican caucus who do not support Jiim Jordan for the speakership get death threat calls.
I will let you know whether I can make the lectures available, and if I can I will.
182 comments:
This is fantastic news! Looking forward to your updates! And thank you for all that you do!
That your first priority is to your students and not to making sure that your lectures appear in Youtube speaks very well of you and is a sign of your true vocation as a teacher.
You've written several books on Marx, which are readily available as well as your other Youtube talks about him, but from what I can see, very few people in our current neoliberal order of things show much concern for those whom they are in daily contact with, as you do with the students you will teach.
One of the worst features of neoliberal capitalism is how it converts almost all of us into
self-promoting entrepreneurs of our own egos and that you haven't become one of them is one more of your virtues.
Thank God that’s resolved. Jerry Fresia gave me an excellent idea: when I get my hands on the transcript, I’m going to use one of those on-line self-publishing places and turn it into an old-fashioned IRL book (you know, with this strange antique material called “paper”).
I’ve been meaning to do something like this with the Mannheim lectures, b/c I find it difficult to move back and forth when reading online.
Now we can return to our favorite subject. After being duly chastised last week for the sin of masculinism/sexism/objectification, I thought to myself “who is the anti-Taylor Swift?” it took me a few minutes but the answer is: Alison Goldfrapp!
Musical genius, grammy winner (I think), platinum seller, who just happens to be the world’s sexiest woman. If you’re tempted to google her, but DON’T b/c you won’t like her and then we’ll never hear the end of it.
For those who, in the excitement of last week’s exchanges, lost track of the score, here it is:
THANATOS 1, EROS 0
What am I talking about? A year or so ago I couldn’t help but notice that the war in Ukraine was received and discussed in exactly—EXACTLY—the same terms, emotions, and engagement as was the Superbowl.
Especially among liberals. Freed from their socially-self-imposed need to pose as “pacifists” they immediately became experts in tank warfare, the merits of F-16s as opposed to Su-29s, and of course potted history-by-analogy (a/k/a the children’s game of “Who’s the Hitler?”). Putin was Stalin and Hitler rolled into one, Zelensky was Tom Brady, the plucky Ukrainians themselves were all of them pure of heart, while every sinister, shifty Russian (and Belarusian) was the embodiment of wickedness.
There was no (and still has not been) any real discussion of how the US and NATO predictably brought about this state of affairs (by flatly stating in 2008 that Ukraine “will become” part of NATO), nor was there any consideration that righteous bombing (a/k/a humanitarian warfare … you know, where every M30A-1 bomb has a yellow smiley face painted on it) and wicked bombing have, on the ground, exactly the same effect.
Predictably, the Ukraine war will either resolve itself as the lines are currently drawn or (worse) will turn into a frozen conflict. Let’s assume that if a layman like me predicted this, so did the NATO and Foggy Bottom planners. We also knew that Americans would lose interest and go on to the next thing … Taylor Swift! (and Gaza.)
This time round (Superbowl II!) everyone has suddenly become experts in the law of genocide and Asiatic history. In this context, atrocities may be discussed literally ad nauseum, but comments regarding the sex appeal of Hollywood actresses are dismissed as inappropriate. Where is Herbert Marcuse when you need him?
"Where is Herbert Marcuse when you need him"?
Most of the German refugees from Nazism never really liked or fit into Amerika.
Adorno, Horkheimer, Thomas Mann and Brecht all went back to Germany after the war, in spite of the Holocaust. Adorno, especially, just could not take popular Amerikan culture.
Marcuse and Fromm stayed. Although they never really fit into Amerika, they inhabited a sort of Middle Europe of the mind, which was their refuge from Hollywood, the Superbowl
and liberals being experts on F-16's or whatever the plane used to kill the bad guys was called back in those days. B-52?
However, there is no more Middle Europe of the mind. The whole world was been globalized by Hollywood, Netflix, Amazon and Mark Zuckerberg except maybe Hamas, Isis,
Hezbollah and a couple of other fanatics and we don't want to go there for sure.
my error:
should be "has been globalized" not "was been". Sorry.
The plane you’re thinking about is the F-4U Corsair. As a 10-year-old, I was an expert on these but that was only because my Dad flew them and I was a 10 year old plastic airplane builder. Which is why I can’t help but picture the staff of the New York Times in a big room with Testors Cement all over their fingers and clothes, making war noises like the little boys and girls (of whatever nominal age) they in fact are.
John Pillette
I don't know who it was in the 2008 Bush Administration who flatly said that Ukraine will become part of NATO, but it seems a stretch to me to say that that statement caused Putin to invade Ukraine a dozen or more years later. What he's doing, it seems to me, is attempting to put "Mother Russia" back together again, what with Crimea and the attack on Ukraine. He sees himself as tsar Vladimir I, and dreams of establishing the Mother Russia of the tsars.
@ John Pillette
Not very long after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the media discovered that an historian named M.E. Sarotte had written a book called Not One Inch that discussed the relevant recent history (re Russia and NATO etc.) in considerable and quite authoritative detail, and she proceeded to be interviewed by a ton of outlets.
So your implication that "liberals" didn't give a sh*t about the relevant history and were just yammering on about tanks and planes (instead of salivating over the shape of actresses' thighs and bosoms and faces etc., as they should more constructively have been doing) is inaccurate.
It's useful in these situations to imagine the shoe on the other foot. What would happen if China were to announce that Mexico would henceforth be joined with it in a “Larger Chinese Economic Community” or some such? Would our foreign policy establishment recommend that we mass tanks on the border? Or would they, in the fear that the Chinese press might say that our president sees himself as James Monroe incarnate, recommend that we do nothing and instead applaud Mexico for its self-determination?
As for the issue of Crimea (Russia’s only warm-water naval base), what if Mexico, at China’s urging, demanded that we hand back San Diego—home to the Seventh Fleet, our main cyber warfare facility, a nuclear attack sub base, and a number of fast food restaurants—on the (entirely plausible ground) that we straight-up stole it from them not that long ago?
John Pillette,
Your analogies are completely unacceptable.
The United States of America is good and always acts from noble intentions. "We" may make mistakes and miscalculate, but "we" are the good guys.
China and Russia are evil, they seek power and to dominate other nations. They are authoritarian dictatorships, while "we" are the land of the free.
Ok, "we" are arming Israel and the IDF is slaughtering a lot of Palestinian women and children, but "they" harbor terrorists.
"We" are against terrorism and "we" do not support anyone who engages in terrorism.
In fact, if "we" support someone, by definition they are not a terrorist.
QED
As Sarotte, if I recall some of her statements in the media correctly, argued, the real missed chance was the Partnership for Peace and failing to integrate Russia in a more serious way into the post-Cold War European security order.
On Ukraine
I could never figure out how the Left was going to continue arming Ukraine without bipartisan congressional support until recently. Greece is one example. The U.S. continues to supply Greece with new military technology, so that Greece can take its older vehicles & jets and give them to Ukraine instead. I think the Greeks also throw in rifles, bullets, & 155mm artillery shells. The Greeks are the best at getting around barriers & walls like this one. Or so I've learned from Homer.
On Taiwan
Nobody should worry about China taking places like Taiwan until the Chinese create U.D.T. units for their military. And the U.D.T. training does not need to include Hell Week. They just need to be good combat swimmers. The Chinese cannot successfully land their Marines on a fortified beach until they have swimmers who can catalog beaches & blow up underwater obstacles with high explosives. The U.S. learned the hard way about this in the Pacific of WW2 that U.D.T. men are essential for grabbing real estate in the Pacific. The U.S. Navy decommissioned all U.D.T. units in 1983. They were turned over to the Seal SDV drivers.
"What would happen if China were to announce that Mexico..."
Did the Chinese send a telegram? While China (like Russia) is, and always has been, an imperial project, I assume some are unaware of Mexican nationalism. Besides Mexico did the calculus back in the day and thought better of it. Besides China has serious economic and demographic issues and there seems to be some corruption around military readiness.
"...what if Mexico, at China’s urging, demanded that we hand back San Diego..."
I assume that there would be considerable laughter from sea to shining sea. Besides Ensenada (just to the south in Baja is also a deep water port though both SD and E are often rather chilly due to the prevailing California current) BTW, it seems that Putin recently signed a decree that appears to question the legality of the 1867 Alaska purchase, o there's that.
LFC, Russia was minting money selling gas to Europe. Oligarchs were entrenched back in the USSR. Imperial Russia, the USSR, and the RF just couldn't quit imperialism. Russia is hopeless and this ends only one way. Perhaps Cato had a point - in the end there can be only one. It's good to be the one.
Regarding M.E. Sarotte, I don’t watch TV news so I missed her interviews. On the other hand, I couldn’t miss it when the New Yorker (which I do hate-read) did a hit job on John Mearsheimer, painting him as a Putin-lover. If you think that people like David Remnick embody the liberal consensus (I do), then “realism” is disfavored among our middle-brow opinionators. As ever, what they favor is “idealism”, a/k/a delusion.
John Pillette @12:21pm,
I can't make out which liberals you are talking about. In the second paragraph of your post, you seem, as you have in other posts in this blog comments space, to be talking about commentators in a general sense. But then in the last paragraph you write: "In this context, atrocities may be discussed literally ad nauseam, but comments regarding the sex appeal of Hollywood actresses are dismissed as inappropriate."
That last remark would seem to be directed specifically at those who comment on RPW's blog.
There was a real discussion about how Russia and Ukraine came to conflict and what the roles of the US & NATO were in that history. Plenty of sources were cited, and in some cases links were provided to additional discussions.
For example--
in these posts:
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2022/02/a-question.html?showComment=1645571910309#c8562304491674348926
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2022/02/a-question.html?showComment=1645587473266#c7077073380634615638
and in the rest of this thread of comments more generally:
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2022/02/watching.html
While we’re on the subject of the suppression of uncomfortable ideas, who else read the piece about Neitzsche in Jacobin the other week? After much hand-wringing as to the perennial popularity of our boy Friedrich among the very right-wing, the writer proposed the only acceptable solution to this problem: don’t read Nietzsche!
There was such a loud sigh of relief coming from everyone in Brooklyn that I could hear it where I live in California. Add FN to the list! That leaves me more time for Judith Butler!
I remember reading Thucydides in school (in 1985) and encountering this same sentiment: anyone who is capable of thinking thoughts like these is obviously a very VERY bad man and I want nothing to do with him! Ditto, V. Nabokov … and most writers worth reading.
W/r/t Eric’s point, he is correct. What I’m getting at is that discussions here about art (Eros) go nowhere, while discussions about atrocities (Thanatos) go on and on. The problem with this, as I see it, is that we can do absolutely NOTHING about Ukraine (or Gaza), while the experience of art is immediately accessible. This is where “optimism” is located, in the “will”.
@ John Pillette
I listen usually to the radio version (it's carried on public radio where I live) of PBS NewsHour (other than that I don't watch/consume TV news as a rule, though there might be very occasional exceptions). I don't own a working TV so any watching I do has to be done via computer. Beyond these statements, I don't have the time or inclination to engage further here right now.
While we’re on the subject of PBS, it seems to me that this station, and the NYT, the NYRB, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, the Guardian, and (to a lesser extent) the LRB all became difficult to listen to or read, and all at around the same time.
I can’t listen to NPR in the car anymore, b/c it induces uncontrollable eye-rolling and the risk of losing control of the vehicle is too great. The NYRB makes me clutch my head in un-simulated pain. The Grauniad long ago became a parody of itself. And so on.
Is it just me, or does anyone else feel the same way? That there's been a real, detectible shift in the prevailing ideology?
It never occurred to me that PBS would be available by way of YouTube. But now that I know I'm still not about to watch that instead of funny animal videos and "Tyrrell's Classic Workshop".
John Pillette,
I googled "Jacobin Nietzsche" and all I could come up with is this article from 2019
https://jacobin.com/2019/01/neitzsche-heidegger-ronald-beiner-far-right
I myself would rather give up Jacobin than give up Nietzsche, who is one of my favorite writers and has been so since I first read Genealogy of Morals in college almost 60 years ago. In fact, the only artist that has stayed with me since the 60's besides Nietzsche is Bob Dylan.
Nietzsche is very "illiberal", to use Brian Leiter's term, but he is also incredibly insightful, witty and liberating.
Of the media sources you cite the only one I read is The Guardian (international edition).
There's no pay wall and I find it to be a good quick way to check out what is happening in the world from a standard progressive point of view. I don't look at the New York Times at all because, as I've said before, I clicked on it one day in 2016, as I then habitually did and there were so many article on the Russian threat that I thought I had been transported back to 1958 and I didn't enjoy 1958 much.
SW, I’ll have to take your word about 1958, but wasn’t that when Miles Davis assembled his classic “Kind of Blue” group? You could also get your hands on a 1957 fuel injected Chevrolet (283 hp!) for a pretty reasonable price. Not that it makes up for Jim Crow and all the rest.
I may have been conflating a few different Jacobin pieces. I suppose the magazine is probably harmless enough. And after all the kids need someone to tell them what to think. And of course I’m not the target market (too old). And it does make me smile when I see headlines in there like “Did You Know That the Rich Control Everything?!?”
Nietzsche and Gramschi I believe were discussing the same thing, liberation through the will, even in the face of catastrophe be it political or ecological or whatever.
I'm mystified by this talk about 1957 and 1958. Everybody knows that 1959 was the key year, that is, the year when the music died in February and Ornette Coleman played at the Five Spot in November.
s.w. you'd get more results if you actually went into the jacobin site and searched there for nietzsche
John Pillette: we can do absolutely NOTHING about Ukraine (or Gaza), while the experience of art is immediately accessible
We can agree to disagree.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFkmRp_G2uo
In other news
"The New York Times pulled a high-profile episode of its podcast 'The Daily' about sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 amid a furious internal debate about the strength of the paper’s original reporting on the subject, Times newsroom sources told The Intercept....
The critics [among the NYT's staff] have highlighted major discrepancies in the accounts presented in the Times, subsequent public comments from the family of a major subject of the article denouncing it, and comments from a key witness seeming to contradict a claim attributed to him in the article."
...
"New York Times leadership has long taken a reflexively pro-Israel stance.... The Times has also succumbed to pressure campaigns by a pro-Israel media watchdog to change or soften its coverage of Israel....
Emblematic of CAMERA’s [the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis—a pro-Israel group] influence at the Times is the fact that [NYT Executive Editor Joe] Kahn’s father, Leo Kahn, was a longtime member of CAMERA’s board.... And, according to the Times’s profile of [Joe] Kahn when he was elevated to his current post in 2022, he and his father often 'dissected newspaper coverage' together."
https://theintercept.com/2024/01/28/new-york-times-daily-podcast-camera/
In 1978 Billy Joel came out with an album called “52nd Street”, which one of my sisters promptly bought. One Thanksgiving I asked the assembled a question that had been bothering me: “why fifty-SECOND street?”
Bafflement all around. We all scratched our heads over this mystery. We were all in agreement that 52nd Street had nothing of interest on it. Was his accountant located there? It was one of the blandest streets in midtown … it seemed to me that naming an album “52nd Street” was like calling it “White Plains Shopping Center” or “Riverside Avenue Sunoco Station”.
My people, alas, were not Jazz people. They had all lived through the fifties, but God only knows what they had listened to back then (shudder to think). My Great Uncle Bill, as the one cool cat in the family, probably would have known the answer to this mystery, but he had died a few years before.
Eric,
Here's Max Blumenthal about the New York Times podcast and the October 7 sexual atrocities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paDjsRkhc28
A while ago you and I disagreed about Blumenthal. I said that I didn't trust him, but now I'm beginning to believe him.
The same thing has happened with Norman Finkelstein. When I first listened to him after October 7, I wrote him off as a crazy extremist and now he's become one of the sources I
most rely on.
It’s my understanding that Hamas invaded with overstuffed armchairs and comfy pillows for the old people, but what about the young women? I heard that they took them all out for malteds, but then never called them again (the scamps!) … but WHO can SAY what REALLY happened there (or on 9/11, or on the “moon” in 1969)?
Am I the only one who finds the desire to sift through and weigh the absolutely disgusting, like a forensic accountant or an amateur unpaid defense attorney, a little strange? Again, I’ll posit that this thanatonic urge is a real problem.
John Pillette,
Neither Max Blumenthal nor the two panelists in Rising deny that sexual violence may have occurred on October 7. What they question if whether Hamas systematically raped Israeli women, a narrative which has been used to justify Israeli brutality in Gaza.
Some of us may have genuine concern and empathy for others, including Israeli women who were possibly raped and Palestinians in Gaza who are being slaughtered by the IDF. I'm sure that my empathy could be psychoanalyzed by someone qualified to do that.
I would question your apparent need to mock others for their concerns about war crimes committed by Hamas and by the IDF. I'm sure that your mocking too could be psychoanalyzed: especially since no one mocks you, one might wonder as to the source of your aggressivity and your constant need to evince your intellectual superiority.
I’m not merely “mocking”, I’m mostly just observing, because I find it interesting and I think it says something about our culture. I’ve represented some repulsive people, but if it hadn’t been my job, I wouldn’t have touched any of these folks with a 20’ asbestos-covered bargepole. I do have some colleagues who feel the need to empathize to the point of valorizing their criminal clients.
There are all those women who fall in love with death row inmates, and of course Norman Mailer, who so wanted to find his Jean Genet that he helped spring a knife-wielding psychopath out of jail.
It’s also interesting to observe that a lot of the same crew (not any of us, I don’t think) that came up with notions of like “microagressions”, “safe spaces”, and “trigger warnings” are now so stout of heart that they can wade into this cesspool.
Also, I can’t be blamed if this whole thing lends itself to sick jokes. Regarding the distinction you are making above, please imagine the relief of the rape victim who is told, “Yes you were raped, but here’s the GOOD news … it wasn’t “systematic” raping, merely opportunistic raping! Don’t you feel better now?”
you're right, I think, about a penchant for mockery which verges on being abusive, which turns off some who might actually agree with him on at least some of the points he makes:
J. P. = M. S. transmogrified
AND ANOTHER THING …!
As for my alleged “superiority”, intellectual or otherwise, I don’t think that the making of simple observations qualifies as any kind of an intellectual operation. I’m simply looking at something and saying what immediately comes to mind. As Hume would have noted, it's sentimental, not intellectual.
As for the point made by “Anonymous” (BTW, these criticisms would be easier to take seriously if they weren’t coming by members of this tribe of internet ectoplasmic entities), I’m making fun of viewpoints, not the people making them. Anyone who wants to make fun of mine in the same way is more than welcome (in fact, I'd enjoy it, so bring it on)!
I don’t know where you the rest of you came from, but this is how I learned how to seminar. None of us ever took anything personally. Hurt feelings are as out of place here as boo-boos are on the soccer field. And I suggest that if you are taking it personally, then that is a mistake and shows that you have reified your position and have come to fall in love with it, stroking it like it’s a long-haired angora cat or something.
I think I should qualify something, which is that there were plenty of kids who did take criticism personally. They either went four full years afraid to say anything (as one of them told me post-graduation) or they dropped out after the first semester. Those of us remaining were abusive blowhards who loved hearing ourselves talk!
Pillette,
You didn't just mock or criticize people's positions. You psychoanalyzed them by questioning their motives, attributing a concern for what really went on on October 7 to a "thanatonic urge".
Maybe among you and your fellow ubermenschen there are no hurt feelings, but it may be that some of us over-sensitive souls do experience that.
If you intend to disregard the hurt feelings of others, you can expect them to react negatively, even if real men like you don't have hurt feelings like us sissies.
By the way, having been told before in this blog and in my personal life that I am too sensitive, I googled "can you be too sensitive?" and discovered that there is something called a "highly sensitive personality" and that it is not considered by psychologists (whom I'm sure you will mock) to be a pathology or a disorder, but simply a way some people are.
It’s funny you should mention that, b/c I’m aware of that test; have taken it myself; and too am “highly sensitive”. Just not in intellectual matters, I guess. Being a lawyer probably would have beaten that out of me anyway. And I’ve had parents teachers and priests calling me a pain in the ass for some 45 years now, so there’s that.
As for psychology, this too is part of our intellectual tradition and therefore fair game. Then again, I’m such a throwback I myself have been psychoanalyzed (yes, with the couch and everything) so I don’t think this is off sides. See, e.g., Minima Moralia, and (of course) Eros and Civilzation, where Adorno and Marcuse do this kind of thing throughout. Not to mention Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Hume.
What sort of learning goes on in a seminar filled with abusive, mocking blowhards? Were I in charge of such a seminar I'd promptly disband it--unless, of course, the purpose of the seminar was to create such types so that they might fit into some awful niches in the larger world where such behaviour was mandatory or at least an advantage. God help us. Is that where Trump and his ilk got their start?
The Finnish comedian Ismo has a routine wherein he ponders the American use of the term 'ass'. He notes that saying an 'x-ass something' means 'x something'; for example, a 'big-ass pizza' is a big pizza. My experience suggests something similar with the characterization "a seminar filled with abusive, mocking blowhards"; that's another way of saying 'a seminar'. I first came to that characterization after attending graduate seminars in Art History, Philosophy, and Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. I remember talking at that time with a graduate student in philosophy at Columbia. He said it was the same there, and when we talked thereafter we routinely referred to 'seminar behavior'. There's even less reason to take such bluster personally than there is to take it seriously. What struck me as most distinctive of philosophy seminars was the use of macabre examples: poisoning the well (Anscombe in Intention); bisecting brains or putting them in vats; killing folks with runaway trolleys; pondering whether to save one's drowning wife; etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiLnnuiCzuo
About the issue of justification.
I think it's useful to distinguish between two questions:
1) Does anything -- any sequence of actions by Hamas -- morally justify the kind of response that the IDF has carried out in Gaza? The answer to that question, in my view, is: No. The IDF response cannot be justified, period, because it is too destructive, too indiscriminate, too cruel, and, in the old language of customary international law, it shocks the conscience of mankind. (A vivid essay from October that I saw yesterday brings all this into sharp relief. Will link later.)
2) What are the (purported) justifications that the govt of Israel has offered in defense of its actions in Gaza? These, istm, roughly are:
-- Hamas (and/or those that crossed the border w them) killed a significant number of Israeli civilians (plus Thai nationals who were there as temporary workers).
-- Hamas has said it would repeat Oct. 7 and is committed to Israel's eradication. Eliminating Hamas, Israel claims, is accordingly a matter of core natl security.
-- Hamas's attack, Israel claims, was brutal and included sexual violence and other atrocities.
If one takes away the third (purported) justification, Israel would still be left with the first two (purported) justifications, and the IDF would likely be doing what in fact it has been doing.
If you think, as I do, that the IDF's response as it has unfolded is unjustifiable, then it does not matter, from the standpoint of the normative (i.e., moral) question of justification, whether Hamas, and/or those who crossed the border with them, raped zero women, one woman, two women, twenty women, or a hundred women. It does not matter from the standpoint of justification because nothing can justify what the IDF has been doing, i.e., creating an enormous humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of civilians including entire families, leveling much of the housing stock, scarring a whole generation of children, etc.
More generally, I would suggest that the issue of sexual violence, while it is important in certain respects and therefore should be investigated thoroughly, is not important for the most basic issues here. The Oct. 7 attack, imo, was a terrorist attack, irrespective of whether it included sexual violence or not. What the Israeli military was justified in doing in response to that terrorist attack does not vary according to whether there was sexual violence or not. International law, as far as I'm aware, does not contain a principle that says: X can permissibly respond to Y's terrorist attack more harshly or more indiscriminately if Y's attack included systematic rape and sexual violence. So from the standpoint of the basic legal issues here (and, at least arguably, the basic normative ones as well), whether the Oct. 7 attack included sexual violence or not is largely, or completely, irrelevant.
John Rapko, you may find this article of interest. It recalls one of the more memorable displays of Trump's fragility, and it shows an additional function of "-ass". :)
I’m afraid Ismo is missing one of the finer points about informal American English usage: our intensifiers. A “big-ass pizza” is not simply a big pizza. It works like this:
a) Small pizza;
b) Medium pizza;
c) Big pizza;
d) Big-ass pizza;
e) Big-ass fucking pizza.
Likewise, calling someone a “fucktard” distinguishes that person from the mere “retards” (i.e., everyone else in the seminar).
I forgot to add this: given that (a) this is simply the white-boy version of playing the dozens; and (b) that white liberals offended by black kids playing the dozens must be racist; if necessarily follows that if you’re offended by this, you must be a racist. Proceed at your own peril, all you politically correct types!
John Pillette--Thank you for the clarification and further analysis of the use of the term 'ass' in American English. I recall that Frank Kermode in his memoir Not Entitled expressed puzzlement about American vernacular after encountering it during WWII in Iceland. He archly observed that the Americans seemed obsessed with linguistic references to the buttocks. I think, but am not sure, that he was noting the recent emergence of the term 'asshole'. As for your acute reconstruction of the gradient from 'small' to 'big-ass fucking', I can only note dialectal differences: Frankie Boyle says that the Scots use the term 'fucking' to indicate that a noun is coming.
@ james wilson
I don't think Trump got his start in a seminar of any kind (despite managing to graduate from Wharton).
FYI, from Wiktionary: "Through the euphemism treadmill, the term retard (which originated as a then-neutral substitute for the terms that had previously designated those with disabilities, namely idiot, imbecile, and moron) has come to be offensive [...]. In a 2003 survey by the BBC, retard was voted the most offensive word relating to disability, followed by spastic."
So, sure, it's kinda fluid and arbitrary (hence the "euphemism treadmill"), but all in all, I think it really is best to take people at their word when they assure you that such-and-such expression pertaining to such-and-such marginalized/minority/vulnerable group (particularly if it's a group to which they themselves belong, or are qualified to speak on behalf of) is very disrespectful to that group.
In this case, it's better (at least for ordinary descriptive purposes) to adopt the expression "person with a disability," or just to ask the person what their own preferences are. (Sometimes people are okay with or actively prefer e.g. "autistic person", but I think it is generally understood that "people-first" language is at least well-intentioned.)
But what to call someone when you really do mean to mock or belittle their intelligence? "Fool" and whatnot don't really pack the same punch. But maybe there'll come a day when it's considered bad taste to insult people for their intelligence at all, though obviously, it'd be a big ask to phase that out (unlike phasing out the R-word).
There are the rules of polite conversation, and then there are the ways that people actually talk among themselves. The latter is vulgar, often offensive, but unlike “polite conversation” it can actually be funny. In “Veep” Vice President Selina Myers (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is forced to apologize for using the term “retard”. What does she call the representative for the mentally challenged (behind his back, of course)? A “fucktard”. It should be noted that this person is not actually himself mentally challenged, he’s just an NGO do-gooder whose job is to shake down public figures who use bad words, which is part of the joke.
Selina Myers may be a bad person (or simply just a grasping politician), but I’m afraid that that is the way that people actually talk among themselves. Of course, Armando Ianucci (Alan Partridge, In the Loop, etc.) is Scottish, and they are famous their enjoyment of “offensive” English (also see Kelman, James). I don’t think an American would ever allow himself or herself to write like this. We are too anxious to show each other what good and decent people we are.
Pillette,
Actually when I talk to friends, I'm much more careful not to offend their sensibilities than when I talk to people I don't know, say, the banker teller or the cab driver, but even there I try not to offend their sensibilities.
I don't believe that because I'm "anxious to show..what good and decent people" I am, but simply because I care about others and about not offending them, unless they have gone out of their way to offend me first. You can psychoanalyze that of course.
Maybe I'm not funny and I don't try to be funny. By the way, if I make jokes about someone, I tend to make them about myself, which I'm sure you can psychoanalyze in some way, but it just may be that I hold myself to more stringent standards than I hold others.
Hummm!
https://maritime-executive.com/article/china-and-russia-get-a-free-pass-through-houthis-red-sea-blockade
aaall,
Of course.
The Houthis are attacking ships from nations that aid Israel such as the U.S and the U.K.
Neither China nor Russia aid Israel.
I bet they're not attacking South African ships either, if there are South African ships in the Red Sea.
LFC, I'm happy to see my attempted humour did not go uncriticised. What would I do without your scrutineering.
Since I am, as it happens (like my namesake the signer of some Declaration and an important member of some subcommitte of some Convention), a Scot, I find it fascinating to be told that people of my ilk indulge in language of a certain sort. But I think you'd need to be a Scot of a certain generation to understand the Scottish class system, its educational system, and its very rapid transition to secularism from theocracy, to begin to comprehend the writings that have issued mainly from Glasgow--we on the eastern side of the country tend to think and write differently. See, e.g., Ian Rankin, Val McDermid (who has written a great mystery novel centring on the last Miner's Strike.
LFC: If one takes away the third (purported) justification, Israel would still be left with the first two (purported) justifications, and the IDF would likely be doing what in fact it has been doing.
That may be the case. I don't doubt that the Israeli leadership would want to do what they have been doing. But it might be much more difficult for them to do so without the nearly unanimous and uncritical support they have been receiving from the US, Europe, etc until quite recently. And that support has been bolstered by the atrocities claims.
At least that would seem to be what one might expect the assumption to be of the parties managing the propaganda part of the military effort. If the Israelis (or any other group) believe they are engaged in an existential conflict, and they believe that managing the narrative is a key component of winning a military conflict, why would they hold back on the propaganda?
This seems to me a classic case of propaganda in furtherance of achieving military & political aims.
These are from just days ago.
(1)
"WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, January 19, 2024, U.S. Representatives Josh Gottheimer (NJ-5), Jared Moskowitz (FL-23), Brad Schneider (IL-10), Kathy Manning (NC-6) released the following statement on Israel:
'On October 7, Hamas terrorists brutally raped, burned, beheaded 1200 innocent people, including nearly forty Americans....'"
https://gottheimer.house.gov/posts/release-gottheimer-moskowitz-schneider-manning-statement-on-israel
(2)
Wednesday January 31st, 2024
"WASHINGTON — Today, U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.), member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, was joined by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in introducing legislation to cut off all U.S. funding to the United Nations (UN) until the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is permanently shuttered and the Secretary of State can certify that no UN employees in UNRWA’s current jurisdiction support terrorism.
'We need policies that stop terrorism, not promote it,' said Senator Tim Scott. 'Not a single cent of American tax dollars should go toward the beheading of innocent babies, rape of women or murder of civilians.'"
https://www.scott.senate.gov/media-center/press-releases/senators-scott-cruz-introduce-bill-to-cut-off-u-s-funding-to-the-un-until-unrwa-is-abolished/
(my emphasis)
Recalling George HW Bush's propaganda effort for the Persian Gulf War...
"With public support for the war still weak, the Bush administration contracted conservative strategist Roger Ailes to fashion public justification for the war. Shortly thereafter, Bush's rhetoric incorporated the vocabulary of primitive savagery when discussing the actions of Iraq in Kuwait.... [The Iraqi regime] was a force that knows no respect for humanity, attacking the most defenseless of all human creatures, premature babies. To augment his case for war, the president turned to tales of 'rape and assassination, of cold blooded murder and rampant looting....'"
Eran N. Ben-Porath, "Rhetoric of Atrocities: The Place of Horrific Human Rights Abuses in Presidential Persuasian Efforts"; Presidential Studies Quarterly 37:181 (2007)
___
"...Hill & Knowlton [the Kuwaiti-tied PR firm that produced the false Nayirah incubators claim] selected her as a persuasive witness to this atrocity, and it was all part of a campaign to turn Saddam Hussein, at least in the public consciousness, into Adolf Hitler. And the feeling was that they couldn’t sell the Gulf War without this. In other words, they had to cheat to win....
You’ve got to remember, in 1990, '91, we're only—what?—15 years after Vietnam. And there’s still this very, very bad feeling in the country ... that we were conned into Vietnam ... and we weren’t going to get conned again into another phony war or a phony pretext. And so, it was clear that Bush was going to have to get congressional authorization for invading—for liberating Kuwait....
[N]umerous representatives and senators cited the baby incubator atrocity, which was false—it never happened—as a reason for voting for the Gulf War resolution. In other words, these are people who said, 'Well, look, we could figure out other ways to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait—economic sanctions, negotiations.' ... [T]hese people said, finally, 'Look, if he’s really Hitler, if he’s really capable of having an army that slaughters ... hundreds of babies...' [T]hen, well, you know, reasonable people can disagree about how to enforce international law, how to prevent countries from invading other countries, but we have to draw the line at baby killing....
And none of these things are new. In other words, if you go back to World War I, you’ve got Belgian babies were being bayoneted by the Germans. I mean, it’s an old—it’s an old propaganda trick. So, killing babies has been used before."
-- John R. MacArthur
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/5/how_false_testimony_and_a_massive
___
"Similar unsubstantiated stories appeared at the UN a few weeks later, where a team of 'witnesses,' coached by Hill & Knowlton, gave 'testimony' (although no oath was ever taken) about atrocities in Iraq. It was later learned that the seven witnesses used false names and even identities in one case. In an unprecedented move, the US was allowed to present a video created by Hill & Knowlton to the entire security council."
-- Tom Regan
https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0906/p25s02-cogn.html
(my emphasis)
s.w.
The Houthis are attacking ships from nations that aid Israel such as the U.S and the U.K.
According to US Sec Def Lloyd Austin at a news briefing today, the Houthis are attacking ships from a bunch of countries, many of which do not support Israel or have much of anything to do w the war. Not sure why Austin wd be lying about that.
LFC,
From what I can see, the Houthis are attacking ships as a way of pressuring other nations to pressure Israel to end their invasion of Gaza.
They may attack ships of any nation which they characterize as "Western imperialists" or "pro-Zionists", but as aaall points out above, they are not attacking Russian or Chinese ships, since, I imagine, they do not consider Russia and China to be pro-Israel, unless you believe, as some seem to, that the international communist conspiracy is back on the scene and is behind the evil terrorist acts of the wicked Houthis, probably directed by Fidel Castro himself.
As for Lloyd Austin not lying, I'd say that Austin and the Biden administration in general have lied so much that they've simply forgotten that there's such a thing as telling the truth.
In reviewing professor Chomsky's Fateful Triangle, one cannot avoid but feel disgust at the way Palestinians have been treated but even more for the American media for providing cover all these past 6 decades . The book of 937 pages is replete with documentary evidence. For those that read it completely, is there anything to be wary about? Otherwise what moral difference is there in the way Germany treated Jews right before implementing the "final solution"? I recall that the Nazis at first wanted to cruelly get rid of Jewish people but not necessarily annihilate them. Here is a link for those that have not read it:
https://goodtimesweb.org/documentation/2012/Noam-Chomsky-Fateful-Triangle.pdf
@ MAD
As far as I'm aware, Israel has not enacted anything quite equivalent to the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 (google it). Also, Israeli Arabs (i.e. non-Jews of Arab or Palestinian descent/ethnicity living in Israel), while facing some discrimination, are, afaik, allowed to practice professions (and run businesses). Also Arab Israelis do not have to wear special identifying marks on their clothing when they walk in the street (unlike Jews in Nazi Germany). Also Arab Israelis, afaik, are not excluded by law from universities. So those are a few differences between Israel's policies and the policies of Nazi Germany toward Jews in the years leading up to WW 2.
This of course does not at all excuse Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza or its overall approach to the I/P conflict, etc.
Check out Israeli marriage laws:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_Israel#:~:text=Israel's%20religious%20authorities%20%E2%80%94%20the%20only,converting%20to%20the%20same%20religion.
Not as bad as Nazi Germany, but hardly what most readers of this blog would favor.
@LFC
I think it is silly to expect that specific policies should match(what should Palestinians put on their shirt, the crescent moon?). What matters more is the degree of cruelty and the deliberateness of the measures. While there are numerous examples of this with respect to Palestinian citizens of Israel, what is more urgent is the abuses suffered by the population of the West Bank. There are too many examples in the book to cite but here are some common features heavily backed by documentation:
arbitrary arrests, torture of prisoners, illegal beating, lynching and killings by Settlers or IDF that are not prosecuted or barely given a joke of sentence, constant collective punishment aimed at starving and making the population poorer, and on and on.
This is an excerpt about the Koening Memorandum:
"for measures to “thin the concentrations of existing Arab population,” reduce employment and educational opportunities for Arabs and otherwise encourage their emigration, undermine their organizations by covert means".
Here is another excerpt:
"Reuters reports that at the trial, Maj. David Mofaz, the deputy military governor of Hebron at the time of the alleged atrocities, testified that “Israeli soldiers were given orders to harass and beat up Palestinian residents” and that they
“viciously struck and kicked defenseless young Arab prisoners.” He testified that “he personally was ordered to beat up Arabs by the West Bank military commander,”but he knew that “the orders came from higher up, from the chief of staff.” He said that “the army had orders to harass the West Bank population in general, not just those involved in anti-Israeli demonstrations,” giving examples. An Israeli captain testified that he had personally beaten Palestinian detainees and that “Israeli
soldiers routinely beat up Palestinian detainees on the occupied West
Bank with the knowledge of senior officers. "
Another one:
"The report continues, detailing how prisoners are beaten, tortured and
humiliated, how settlers are permitted into the prisons to take part in
the beating of prisoners, how the settlers brutalize the local inhabitants
with impunity, even in the case of a settler who killed an Arab, whose
identity is known, but who is not arrested"
more:
"A soldier reports that 30 12-13 year-old children were
lined up facing a wall with their hands up for five hours in Hebron one
very cold night, kicked if they moved. He justified the punishment
because they are not “all innocent lambs as they look now, with their
hands up and their eyes asking pity... They burn and they throw stones
and participate in demonstrations, and they are not less harmful than
their parents.”
last one:
"Apart from beating of Arab detainees and civilians, charges included forcing people to crawl on all fours and bark like dogs, laud Begin and Border Guards (who were allegedly responsible, though not punished), slap one another (children were
ordered to slap their parents), along with other punishments that work
well with Arabs. Maj. Mofaz ordered soldiers to write numbers on the
arms of prisoners on the Day of the Holocaust, but the military court
accepted his defense that this order was only given in jest (though it
was carried out)."
@s. wallerstein,
Reading Chomsky's book and other accounts, I find it hard to argue that Nazi Germany was worse (with the huge exception of the final solution implementation, which Hitler decided upon since he knew the war was likely a lost cause) than what Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank have gone through. For starters, Palestinians have had to endure so much cruelty for more than 80 years now.
MAD,
Israel is normally compared to apartheid South Africa. That seems like a more apt comparison than Nazi Germany.
The Final Solution began before Hitler realized that the war was a lost cause. The Nazis began to shot Jews in mass from the invasion of the USSR in June 1941 on and the Wannsee Conference occurred in January 1942 and there the final solution was decided upon. That's months before the battle of Stalingrad, after which even Hitler must have realized that the war was lost.
@ MAD
This is nonsense. The idea that Hitler only decided on the Final Solution when he thought or suspected the war was lost w the failure to reach Moscow does not square with the fact that the Holocaust by bullets, as it is called, was already well under way, w the Einsatzgruppen doing mass shootings in the conquered/overrun areas of E Europe and eastern USSR (as s.w. has pointed out).
The late Arno Mayer argued a version of the thesis in his book _Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?_. Mayer was a distinguished historian but he was simply wrong about that, as other scholars noted at the time.
You should read more about the period. The historiography is massive.
P.s. Take a look at R.J. Evans, _The Third Reich at War_, w a very long bibliography. Omer Bartov on the Eastern Front, and Raul Hilberg for the classic history of the Holocaust. Mary Fulbrook's recent _The Bystander Society_ also.
So SWallerstein
You are drunk with loose analogies. Is it a fact that the Afrikanaars risked everything for peace with their enemy? I voted for Rabin and did something to improve the world rather than repeat stale cliches from the internet that aren't even true cliches.
The Palestinians had a choice: peace or Jihad- they chose jihad and unfortunately they are not any good at it without resorting to massacre of civilians and sheer terrorism
LFC,
You raised the question of who is justified in their conduct of the war. First, I think there is no doubt that Israel was attacked and therefore justified in responding. Second, Israel can not be completely responsible for the death toll in Gaza for the simple reason that to use civilians as shield is itself a war crime.
There is no doubt that Iran has been supplying a series of terrorist proxy groups to try to create a balance of power in the region more conducive to its expansionist goals. About 10 years ago they decided to pursue a two part missile production strategy. First, to make cheap, easy to assemble missiles to distribute to their proxies, and a second track to make more sophisticated longer range missiles and they now have a missile that can reach Israel. We are seeing this play out on the news every night.
Iran is as we all know supplying drones and likely other matériel to Russia, and I would suspect though I have no way of knowing, they are working hard to produce a nuclear weapon to put on its new missile.
We know Iran opposes the potential deal with the Saudi's and others. I heard an interview with the Saudi foreign minister who said that a settlement of the Palestinian question is/was a condition of the deal.
I find the discussion of genocide and war crimes to be disconnected from reality in a serious way. Both sides are guilty as a matter of historical reality. It appears that only the Shia side of this conflict interested in the complete destruction of Israel, which is a stated aim of Hamas.
This situation is escalating rapidly. Houthi missile attacks on shipping have created a situation where prices will increase due to higher shipping costs incurred to avoid the death of crews and sinking of ships. I saw interesting reporting on the missile strikes on two vessels in which the warheads failed to explode. The Indian navy is now patrolling the are in support of the U.S., English and French assets. From what I see, it is only a matter of time before there is regional war among a group of failed states with a serious potential for the use of nuclear weapons.
I have no dog in this fight, only a conviction that all the blather over who did what to who and who is committing genocide is disconnected from the reality of this conflict. This is a religious war, and they have alway been genocidal in intent. When Cromwell brought his armies to Ireland they massacred half population of many towns that resisted. Think of the great Rodin sculpture The Burghers of Calais depicting 6 burghers who sacrificed themselves in order to lift the English seige.
I think it is good to keep in mind the following: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Pensee’s, 1670
@ CJMulvaney
I will respond later on.
@LFC
Why do you keep dodging question/argument? I asked whether there is a significant moral difference in the treatment of Palestinians vs Jews before the final solution. In a side remark inside my response to s. wallerstein raising again the same question, I perhaps made a claim that is pretty debatable as to when the final solution start. I can grant you the point (as well to s. wallerstein) as I have not read on ww2 and holocaust in many years. But what does this have to do with my question/point?
I do appreciate the references which I will make sure to save and read after I am done reading all the books regarding the Palestine-Israel issue I've accumulated. But please can you now address the question or will you go on a tangent again?
@Christopher
While I do not deny the poisonous effect of religion in this conflict, I think we should clarify what we are encompassing by using the term religion. From my reading of the early history of Israel, the zionist leaders were very secular but in their thinking, writings, speeches and actions we can find endless evidence of a fascistic, racist and violent ideology. This ideology which they sought to impose on the Jewish population can arguably be put under the umbrella of religion. It is also important to note the systemic policy of Israel since at least the early 70s of sabotaging moderate and secular Palestinian leaders. There is a lot of evidence of Palestinian intellectuals, professors being physically harassed, threatened and imprisoned or not be let back in. If we only focus on the Islam vs Judaism aspect of the conflict then we risk losing perspective as to why we ended up with that matchup and why we cannot seem to get around it. The sad reality is that all major leaders of Israel whether religious or not have never accepted the Palestinians' right to exist as a separate nation. You can find memoirs, speeches, etc that abundantly prove that claim. Yet with American media, one is misled into thinking that its the savage arabs that just cannot accept Israel's right to exist and so much other babble.
MAD,
You put me in the strange position of defending Israel, albeit against your claims that their policies towards Palestinians are equivalent to those of the Nazis towards Jews pre-Final Solution.
So be it.
First of all, I tried to read Mein Kampf many years ago and all I recall is a virulent anti-semitism. I doubt that the most anti-Palestinian rightwing Zionist settler feels the same degree of hatred towards Palestinians that Hitler and the Nazi leaders felt towards Jews. Certainly, no public discourse of any Zionist leader evinces the same pathological hatred that Hitler expressed towards Jews. That hatred leads to the Holocaust.
Second, Israel is over-reacting to the October 7 atrocities carried out by Hamas, but they are over-reacting to horrid war crimes committed by Hamas.
The Jews never did anything to the Nazis: the Nazi hatred of Jews is inspired by their own psychopathologies, not by any Jewish violence towards them. Even going back to the first Zionist colonists in over a hundred years ago: their violence towards Palestinians was matched by Palestinian violence towards them. I'm not justifying Israel or Zionist violence, but it's not pure psychopathology as is that of the Nazis.
@MAD
I had missed your reply to me @11:43 a.m., sorry. I've now read it.
I have no interest at all in defending anything Israel has done on the West Bank (which is what your examples deal with), which it has occupied in violation of intl law since 1967. Apparently some of those quotes come from a military trial or court martial (which is not something Nazi Germany's army wd have done, i.e. wd not have tried one of its officers for his actions directed vs Jews). I think I will bow out of this thread for the time being.
P.s. I'll put the point a little differently: I'd be surprised if there are records of any army officers in Nazi Germany, at any point during the Third Reich, bring tried or disciplined by the Wehrmacht or any organ of the Nazi state for any actions they took against Jews, Slavs, Roma or other groups that the regime viewed as its enemies.
Typo correction: being not bring
Well if Nazi Germany had been subsidized by the billions on a yearly basis and by and large been protected by the media of most Western nations then a tap on the wrist for some official would have been not surprising as a little price to pay in exchange.
@ Christopher J. Mulvaney
Belatedly in reply to your comment, I think this conflict, while it has a religious component among several other (and probably more important) components, is not analogous to the religious-inflected wars in early-modern Europe (e.g., the Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648). But I don't want to go down this particular byway right now.
You write: "First, I think there is no doubt that Israel was attacked and therefore justified in responding. Second, Israel can not be completely responsible for the death toll in Gaza for the simple reason that to use civilians as shield[s] is itself a war crime."
These statements don't, I think, get one very far. Obviously Israel was justified in responding in some way. What I was taking issue with is not the fact that it responded, but the way in which it has responded. Second, I agree that Israel is not completely responsible for the death toll in Gaza, but that doesn't absolve it of considerable responsibility. As I wrote in a post at my blog on Jan. 29 (emphasis added): "The terrorist attack of Oct. 7 and the way in which Hamas embeds itself in the civilian population do not allow [i.e., justify] a response of the kind the IDF has mounted, not mainly because that response is 'disproportionate' but because its character, to use an old phrase from customary international law, shocks the conscience."
In other words, the human-shield factor is relevant but not, imo, exculpatory when it comes to making judgments -- which admittedly contain an element of "outsider-ism" -- about the response. It's worth noting btw that there are elements of the Israeli population and electorate, still small elements but nonetheless present, that are protesting the govt's actions in Gaza.
"So the Palestinians in a sense also did not harm the Jewish settlers. They were defending their territory as any self respecting human being would."
But not even Carl Von Clausewitz would condone beheadings, baby murders, other dismemberment injuries & deaths, & rapes. Clausewitz believed the motive of war is to defeat the enemy's military to achieve one's political goals through such martial means.
fyi:
https://harpers.org/archive/2024/02/israels-war-within-bernard-avishai/
Michael Llenos
First, you're responding to a comment by MAD about what the Palestinians did "in the 40s, 50s, and 60s" -- if you look at the context of the sentence you're quoting.
But putting that aside and focusing on the Oct. 7 attack, it did indeed involve the deliberate murder of civilians and was a terrorist attack. However, as Eric has pointed out repeatedly, there does not appear to be any evidence of the beheading of babies, though this was a claim made in the aftermath of the attack and one that apparently continues to be repeated by some U.S. politicians. One should try to describe events as accurately as possible, even if it does not change Oct. 7's basic character as a terrorist attack.
Clausewitz, writing in the wake of the Napoleonic wars (in which he served in the Prussian army, iirc), was talking about interstate war. I don't think he addressed terrorism (did he?), or asymmetric conflict, as one might call it, or related matters.
The Oct. 7 attack, as I said, was a terrorist attack, doubtless experienced as horrific and traumatic by many of its civilian victims; however it presumably had political goals (though what they were might be open to some debate).
Anyway, the fact that "not even Clausewitz" would have approved of the Oct. 7 attack seems sort of bizarrely irrelevant. You could probably pick many writers on strategy and war and say "not even X" would have approved. "Not even" Jomini, "not even" Mahan, "not even" Sun Tzu, "not even" etc.
@Michael Llenos
From this silly comment I am to assume that you: did not read the full exchange, and maybe are engaging in deliberate obfuscation. Here is the entire paragraph:
"The Palestinians had no choice but to attack back in the 40s,50s and 60s. Would anybody just let some group to take their land? With hindsight, of course it would have been smarter if Palestinians had made significantly different decisions in the first decade or so after Israel's founding. So the Palestinians in a sense also did not harm the Jewish settlers. They were defending their territory as any self respecting human being would."
s. wallerstein argued that the Nazi hatred of Jews (as opposed to the Zionist hatred of Palestinians) was different in that it had no basis because the Jews had not committed sins against the Germans. It's obvious for anybody that has read a bit on the subject that early Zionist leaders had deeply racist ideas about the Palestinians. The hatred towards Palestinians over the decades since the founding of Israel has increased exponentially to the point where they were regarded as "two legged beasts" because they did not easily submit to the Zionists. It is in that sense that Palestinians are not responsible for this racist hatred. They were defending their lands. Only cowards would just submit.
The dehumanization and suffering of Palestinians in the occupied territories have gone on for decades. At no point in my comments did I even hint at the October 7th attacks. Since you recommended some youtube clown's views on the palestine israel issue some days ago, I recommend you read Chomsky's Fateful Triangle linked below:
https://goodtimesweb.org/documentation/2012/Noam-Chomsky-Fateful-Triangle.pdf
s.w., are you using some concept of "solidarity" with the Palestinians in Gaza to justify the Houthis attacking shipping transiting the Bab el Mandeb?
MAD,
As I said yesterday, you leave me in the weird position of defending Israeli Zionism.
I read the racist statements of the Israelis you quoted yesterday and they are lamentable as is any racist statement. However, I bet that they are not so different than that of many white working class males in the U.S. talking about immigrants who are willing to work for lower wages than they are. I live in Chile and I've heard countless racist comments from working class and low income self-employed people (the haircut woman, the cab driver, the woman who sells household products in the open-air market) complaining about "unfair" competition from immigrants from poorer Latin American countries.
If the immigrants were to leave tomorrow, the people who complain about them would not mention them again. So too if the Palestinians were to decide en masse to leave Gaza and the West Bank and immigrate somewhere else, Israelis would find a new topic of conversation and someone else to vent their hatred on.
That is, in the case of immigration there is a struggle over jobs and in Israel-Palestine there is a struggle over land. I agree with you that the Palestinians were "already there" when the Israelis arrived and so had some kind of prior right.
The difference with Nazism is that the Jewish threat that Hitler was obsessed with was not about jobs or land. It was a pathological completely irrational hatred and that led him to exterminate the Jews, even at the cost of the war effort. A more rational dictator like Stalin liberated prisoners from the Gulag and sent them to the front to die in combat.
Can we agree at least that the Zionists are more like Stalin than like Hitler? That is, motivated by a certain "normal" political rationality.
aaall,
I'm explaining what the Houthis are up to, not justifing it. There is no justification, in my book, for attacking cargo ships with unarmed sailors on them.
LFC
[Anyway, the fact that "not even Clausewitz" would have approved of the Oct. 7 attack seems sort of bizarrely irrelevant.]
Clausewitz believed that war was a continuation of politics & "political goals". Many pacifists & those of less draconian war persuasion than Clausewitz would disagree with that belief. I'm trying to say that a warmonger like Clausewitz wouldn't do & stand for what those terrorists did no matter how political you say they were.
MAD
[They were defending their lands. Only cowards would just submit...]
You're right. It is good to defend one's territory from threats. But the Jews were kicked out of their land originally by the Romans. And they have ancestral origins in Canaan/Palestine much farther back than the Palestinian timeline. The archeological record proves this. Jewish pottery with Hebrew writing on them goes back over 2,500 years. Unlike any Palestinian archeology.
--Here is an analogy. You live in a village in Rohan. You and your family flee because of an invasion by the King of Harad which threatens your lives. Two years later an attack from Gondor's troops liberates your village from Harad. Ten years after that the King of Gondor gives the green light for Rohan's forces to reclaim your village. Quickly you and your family return to your village only to soon find out that it's houses are being occupied by the people of Harad and that they are also busy tilling the fields nearby.
--So who really owns that village and its surrounding lands? It's one big political mess. Marcus Cicero Tully, in his On Duties, believes there should be a mixture of compensation and arbitration. I believe personally that that's the only way to be fair. But if we're judging this case by seniority you must admit that the tribe of Rohan lived there first.
LFC,
Thanks for your response. My citing European religious conflict is only to emphasise the consequences of two religious ideologies fighting over which deserves to continue to exist will it seems inevitably lead to what we now call genocide. I used the Irish example not just because I am of Irish descent, but British genocidal policies lead to the reality of most Irish not having enough land to grow anything other than potatoes. With the great luck of having a crop failure and disease depopulate Ireland, the Brits consciously decided to not provide food aid. It was, as some Brit said, the case that Ireland was better off without the Irish. It was genocide before we had a name for it, and it was policy carried out in different ways over centuries.
Hamas knew how Israel would respond. Missile fired from the launching sites buried in an intersection will inevitably lead to counter-battery fire being returned to that spot. The tactical response is legitimate and the death toll among civilians is exactly what Hamas knew would be the result. It would incite the Arab street, ramping up tensions & contributing to an increasingly dangerous escalation
I find Hamas' tactics to be of a uniquely barbaric type of terrorist political action. To cause a conflict which predictably would cause a disproportionate causalities among the civilian population whose interests they putatively represent is to my thinking a truly barbaric shock to the conscience. I got some push back several weeks ago when I referred to Hamas a death cult. It is no matter how you look at it, a profoundly warped psychopathology.
Thanks again for your response
On the matter of Zionism. I think that anyone who looks into the history of Zionism will discover pretty quickly that there were different strands or varieties of Zionism and that Zionists disagreed among themselves. Some Zionists were secular and leftist in orientation; others more religious (though many Orthodox Jews were simply anti-Zionist). Attitudes toward the Palestinians also varied.
It is very possible to construct an argument against Zionism (of many or all varieties) without reaching for analogies that don't fit. The analogy to Nazism does not fit and neither, imo, does the comparison with Stalin. I think almost any historian reading that would be dumbfounded.
As s.w. suggests, it's important to realize how deranged and pathological Nazi racialist ideology was, how indebted to eugenics, and how bizarrely contradictory. On one hand Hitler saw the Jews as an enormously powerful group; he thought that "global Jewry" in alliance with the Bolsheviks in an amalgam called "Judeo-Bolshevism" was aspiring to control the world, and succeeding. On the other hand he thought the Jews were filthy, subhuman untermenschen who were polluting the "pure" Aryan "race" and had to be physically removed from the fertile land they were occupying in E. Europe and sent far, far away, and if that seemed to take too long or proved v. difficult or impractical (or perhaps regardless of whether it was possible or not), exterminated. Nazi racialist ideology took ideas about eugenics and a hierarchy of "races," ideas that were not uncommon in the West in the early 20th century, and turned them into an intricate, contradictory, delusional farrago, a cascade of nonsense in which "global Jewry" was cast not only as a villain but as an existential threat of gargantuan proportions to 'the fatherland' and the Volksgemeinschaft. In the scale of its delusions and the virulence of its obsessions, Nazi racialist ideology may well be unique in modern history.
@s. wallerstein
I think we would both agree that say in the case of Chile or US, that if a mob of people would go on a pogrom of immigrants, that they would be prosecuted relatively severely. Meanwhile in Israel, these sorts of things were either ignored or promoted by the authorities in the occupied territories. Perhaps I am biased from my readings of the situation in the 60s, 70s and 80s. I haven't read enough about how things changed in the last 20 years. But rom several accounts I have read from the past century, the daily lives of Palestinians in the occupied territories were so terrifying, sad, and humiliating to the extent that I could only compare it to the experience of Jews in the late 30s.
I am not 100% sure that Nazi Germany is the best analogy which is why I was curious about other's views. Perhaps a extreme version of Tsarist Russia would be a better analogy. In either case, it seems to me that the issue is that the incredibly violent oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories is ignored even by those of us who claim to sympathize with them. I had read from time to time about certain injustices but I just had no idea how deep the savagery and cruelty that Palestinians have faced as part of their daily lives.
@Michael Llenos
Some questions:
Claim of land should be based on archeological records from 2000 years ago?
Who are supposed to be the claimants, genetic descendants or religious ones?
If I convert to Judaism can I take a piece of land from a Palestinian with a title? What if some Palestinians' ancestors were Jewish but they are currently Muslim?
If I find pottery from my ancestors under your basement or near it can I come with a shotgun and kick you out of your house?
How far do we have to go back?
Europeans who lived for more than 1000 years in Europe have more right than people already living there for more than 1000 years?
Is not your proposal really just a bad justification for European colonialism?
@s. wallerstein
the anonymous at 8:32 pm was me.
@LFC
and let's not forget that many Jewish people and leaders distrusted Zionism. See Balfour Declaration by Jonathan Schneer. I think pages 274-276 might be interesting to you in Fateful Triangle:
https://goodtimesweb.org/documentation/2012/Noam-Chomsky-Fateful-Triangle.pdf
MAD
If you disregard one way to claim land, then you must disregard all others. For I don't see how one group can dismiss those claims that are reasonable just because they weaken one's case. But according to that philosophy then might makes right. And right now Israel dominates the region of Israel & Palestine.
Of course, you may say that Hamas and its Palestinian followers don't believe that might makes right. And yet this entire time since the late 1940s the Palestinians & their organizations have been trying to wipe the Nation of Israel off the map.
Obviously, Hamas & their Palestinian supporters don't want any peace deal.
It is my belief that the land should be shared. That there should be a two state solution. Something that many Palestinian leaders historically don't agree to. This is an inevitable consequence of being proxies of Iran.
Persia needs to rise from its ashes once more and change the way business is conducted in the Middle East.
@Michael Llenos
Hamas and other religious extremist groups might want to wipe Israel off the map but they were not the original leaders of the Palestinians nor are they the only ones. What was not (and is still not) reported in the Media(as opposed to the PLO blunders)is the vast documentary evidence of the rejectionism of Israel. We kept hearing for decades the same babble about Israel's right to exist (a nation with one of the most powerful armies who is not going anywhere) while the Israeli government did everything in its power to prevent a Palestinian state for decades. They consistently sabotaged and attacked moderate Palestinians and intellectuals. They did not want a stable Palestinian society forming, they were terrified of moderates ruling over the Palestinians. Why do you think Israel invaded Lebanon? See pages 275, 354-358 in Fateful Triangle and also the link below.
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/20/divide_and_rule_how_israel_helped
MAD, there's support for your point of view at the essay I posted previously (but M.L. still won't get it):
https://harpers.org/archive/2024/02/israels-war-within-bernard-avishai/
@ Anonymous
Thanks for linking the Avishai piece here; I'm looking forward to reading it.
"Thanks..." Interesting piece - framework for that heel turn.
"If you disregard one way to claim land, then you must disregard all others."
Why? Ever consider estoppel? Res judicata? Why do you believe history began 3,000 or so years ago?
I see Speaker Johnson and Minister Ben-Gvir are doing Biden and the Dems a favor by giving him bill to veto and praising Trump.
s.w., I see Chile and California have similar problems. I hope you are unaffected.
aaall,
Thank you for your concern.
I'm in Santiago, about 100 kilometers from the fires.
The death toll has reached 99 and there are many missing people.
Nostalgia
Ann Richards, who also said George HW Bush "was born with a silver spoon in his mouth," got the quip about being born on third base from Jim Hightower.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4891685/user-clip-hightower-born-base
"Every one of these guys who you see come flying off the mountaintop, talking about pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and doing it the old-fashioned way.... Well, what is it Jim Hightower said? They're born on third and think they hit a triple."
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/02/us/the-1994-campaign-texas-playing-good-ol-girl-card-against-son-of-ex-president.html
We've talked about problems with Wikipedia articles a bit before.
Ann Richards is remembered by many older Democrats as a progressive (for Texas, anyway). Many younger folks who may never have heard of her, are likely to consult a source like Wikipedia for information about her if they encounter her name.
Her Wikipedia article includes this statement:
"In 1993, Richards signed into law the re-codified Texas Penal Code which included anti-homosexual Section 21.06, the state's 'Homosexual Conduct' law which states: '(a) A person commits an offense if he engages in deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex. (b) An offense under this section is a Class C misdemeanor.' In 1990, Richards had campaigned in Houston to repeal the law. But, as governor, her signature criminalized same-sex sexual relations in Texas."
If you search Google for "Ann Richards" "homosexual", one of the links that appears in the first page of results at the moment is an essay from the Bartleby.com students' homework assistance platform that appears to draw from information in Wikipedia. The essay, which begins with "Texas governors are not as powerful as some people think," includes this:
"Ann Richards was the second female Texas governor.... Ann Richards was also known for her anti-homosexual mentality. She signed a law that made homosexuality illegal."
As I recall, Richards was widely considered far more supportive of gay and lesbian rights than other prominent politicians of her generation, her signature on the Texas penal code revision that included an anti-gay provision(s) notwithstanding. She appointed an openly gay attorney as a judge, causing an uproar in conservative Texas. In fact, many have attributed her defeat by George W. Bush in her campaign for re-election after her first term to a Karl Rove whispering campaign that Bush & the Republicans ran with, alleging that she was a lesbian.
Ann Richards line about W was:
"Poor George, He was born with a silver foot in his mouth."
Prof Zimmerman,
Yes, ofc.
"Poor George. He cain't help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth."
How about this? Poor Joe. He can't help it. . . .
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/senate-border-bill-block-funds-gaza-aid_n_65c13314e4b0dbc806adb1ef
Although, Richards said that Bush père was born with a silver foot in his mouth, in the '88 campaign. It wasn't until several years later that she took on W.
With W's manifest imbecility, it's easy to forget just how inarticulate and gaffe-prone the elder Bush had also been. John Stockwell reminded us that we should never make the mistake of concluding from HW's struggles with the English language that the former CIA director did not know exactly what he was doing in all his deviousness.
Anon, Joe's doing just fine. Legislation in a democracy is often messy and compromise is necessary (Ukraine and Taiwan are critical, the rest, NSM)- I assume things are different in your country. A number of contributors consider UNWRA compromised. There is this though:
"An additional $10 billion is earmarked for humanitarian assistance for civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, Ukraine and other populations."
https://www.axios.com/2024/02/05/senate-border-deal-final-text-ukraine-israel-taiwan
How would you deal with the posers, grifters, and traitors that make up the current Republican mambers of the Congress?
Oops, s/b "members."
I'd put them into the same limbo as all the other poseurs, grifters, and traitors (??) in all the other political parties.
"Poor Joe" was born into a working class or at least lower middle class family....
No silver feet in the Biden household.
Now, I don't much like the "working class roots" trope in American politics... but let's at least get the facts about Biden's background roughly correct.... He was not the son of anyone with a name anything like "Senator Herbert Walker Bush."
Does the president's family background really matter?
The most leftwing president in U.S. history was FDR, who came from a wealthy household.
To SW:
That was my point about the folly of the "working class background... man of the people" trope in American politics... It does not matter if you come from "just folks" if you are a jerk..... Case in point: that "hillbilly," JD Vance.
David Zimmerman,
It doesn't matter anywhere.
The right called "Salvador Allende" "el pije Allende" meaning that he was an elegantly dressed rich kid.
Gabriel Boric, the current Chilean president and the most leftwing one since Allende although not as leftwing as Allende, is constantly depicted by the right as a prep school kid who has "never worked a day in his life".
To SW:
I agree: Claiming that one has working class cred does not cut it anywhere. You cite interesting examples from Chile.
" Claiming that one has working class cred does not cut it anywhere."
Presuming that this assertion is valid (and I note that the initial assertion of a similar claim was restricted to the USA), isn't it at least an interesting question as to why it might be so? Is it that the working class has disappeared everywhere? Or is it something else that's been going on to, say, eliminate working class identity while all sorts of other identities, some of them quite questionable, flourish?
As to the validity of the assertion, should one not be a bit more careful with the anywheres? I can, I think, think of some situations/groups where "working class cred" counts for something.
anon,
The point is, I believe, that being a decent person and behaving like one does not depend on one's class origin or race or gender or sexual orientation.
It's a fact that belies all forms of identity politics.
It's Bertrand Russell's "fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed". Which of course does not entail the superior virtue of the oppressor by any means.
Thanks for your response, s.w., though I still think my questions have some value.
As to your point about decent people behaving decently regardless of their origins, I wouldn't dispute that as an ideal. But to pose another question, aren't even decent people constrained to act in indecent ways by the institutions/circumstances they are enmeshed in? (As I hope a not too tendentious example, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people who think Biden is at heart a decent person trapped into supporting the indefensible in Gaza? And don't we actually often enough end up being unable to tell the dancer from the dance?) But then the question arises, who are most likely to end up being entrapped in institutions/circumstances which give them power over the lives of others?
I think we can accurately say that Biden is the furthest left the presidency has been since FDR. He has governed as a Keynesian, something neither Clinton nor Obama were able to do.
As to working class cred., Biden had it and burnished it when he went to the UAW picket line. Remember that Trump tried to match that with a trip t a non-union plant and paid $20,000 to rent the space while the cheering faithful held up fake union signs. It worked for Biden and for Trump the action failed miserably. Working class cred can arise from family origins and get lost through adult actions, or like FDR the family may be ruling class but the politician may be pro working class.
As for JD Vance, I can think of nothing to say about him that is printable.
Maybe Keynesianism has been part of the problem?
“Chase Burghgrave: You state at the beginning of your book that leftism actually went through two reinventions in the last century, first from socialist to Keynesian, and then from Keynesian to neoliberal. Why did you think it was important to analyze both of these reinventions within leftism?
“Stephanie L. Mudge: The short answer is that the second reinvention [neoliberalism] couldn’t have happened without the first [Keynesianism].
https://jacobin.com/2018/08/left-political-party-economists-neoliberalims-keynesianism
“In Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism, Mudge looks at left parties in advanced capitalist countries over the last century and shows how the experts aligned with those parties pushed them in the direction of spin doctors and markets. In the process, left parties’ ability to represent the interests of their own working-class constituencies was eroded — and ordinary people were shut out of the halls of power.” [Stephanie Mudge, UC Davis sociologist and a co-editor of Cambridge Studies in Historical Sociology. ]
When it comes to domestic policy, I basically agree w/ Christopher M. about Biden.
Foreign policy however has been a much more mixed bag, to put it mildly, IMO. Biden's stance on the Gaza war has been conditioned by his strong personal and even emotional connection to Israel. He has not had the same empathic connection to the Palestinians. This is not an original observation by me; I'm repeating what two people, with otherwise non-identical perspectives on the Mideast, said on the NewsHr last night. I think it is a correct observation. That said, any U.S. president wd have tilted toward Israel for domestic political reasons among others, and bc Israel is a longstanding US ally (albeit w.o a formal treaty. But there are degrees, and Biden has tilted more than some others might have. And one result is that he is facing a revolt by Arab-American voters in Michigan and elsewhere.
anon,
I had to go to the doctor, so I didn't answer you earlier.
Biden isn't a decent person in my book. His support of genocide in Gaza rules that out completely. He's a hawk, an imperialist.
The world is full of decent people who don't appear in the news. Of those who have appeared in the news I'll cite Salvador Allende who tried to achieve socialism through democratic means and Gorbachov who was big enough to let go of an empire.
Given what the Amerikan empire represents in the world. I don't see how an Amerikan president could be decent, although some day we may find an Amerikan Gorbachov.
Maybe Bernie Sanders would have been a decent man as a president.
Anonymous,
Between redistributive economic policy and a creative federal-state funding process for SSA programs FDR's Keynesianism made meaningful progress. Neoliberalism, from my perspective as an administrator of Human Services programs came with Clinton and welfare reform. When funding changed to a block grant, states had no incentive to maintain low-income folks welfare funding during economic downturns. That, I think, is one of the factors that made the the 2008 crash so difficult and had a role in today's fascist politics. Resentment - government failed on top of 30 years of stagnant wage growth to produce any relief but for corporate capital which paved the way for Trump.
Also, and names are escaping me at the moment, there were a significant number of leftists in FDR government. In the political realm, anonymous is correct. Politics became the realm of spin artists, pollsters, outsourcing all the essential things of political campaigns, including the candidate's ability to think on their own. In essence, politics became marketing. When I participated in political activity in the '80's the ability to merge voter lists, polling data, census date and marketing research became technically possible. The commodification of politics.
"Also, and names are escaping me at the moment, there were a significant number of leftists in FDR government."
Hopkins, Ickes, Wallace, Perkins, Eleanor (of course), etc. Did I mention Perkins?
There have been only eight years in all of U.S. history in which serious social democratic things could happen, so there's that. The Nixon years were somewhat of an aberration as environmental things were still somewhat bipartisan (we could have had universal child care but Buchanan and Schlafly fixed that and universal healthcare almost happened but...). Inflation and stagnation (recall the '70s bear market) ginned by Vietnam and the 70s oil embargoes empowered neo-liberalism.
Rather then being an imperialist warmonger, Biden (and his advisors) are guilty of being over-cautious when dealing with conflicts in which one of the parties has nuclear weapons. This has bedeviled appropriate responses with both Israel/Gaza and Ukraine/Russia.
LFC, while there isn't a treaty, there is 22 U.S. Code § 8602 - Statement of policy:
"It is the policy of the United States:
(1) To reaffirm our unwavering commitment to the security of the State of Israel as a Jewish state. As President Barack Obama stated on December 16, 2011, “America’s commitment and my commitment to Israel and Israel’s security is unshakeable.” And as President George W. Bush stated before the Israeli Knesset on May 15, 2008, on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, “The alliance between our governments is unbreakable, yet the source of our friendship runs deeper than any treaty.”.
(2) To help the Government of Israel preserve its qualitative military edge amid rapid and uncertain regional political transformation.
(3) To veto any one-sided anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations Security Council..."
OTOH, I see the S&P is almost at 5,000, so there's that.
aaall,
Isn't it a little absurd to write a statement of U.S. foreign policy into the U.S. Code? Foreign policy, while Congress has an important role in it, is traditionally an area where the President has a lot of discretion. See U.S. v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp. (U.S. Sup Ct. 1936). I think, fwiw, that 22 USC 8602 is of dubious validity, in terms of the how the govt typically functions and perhaps in other terms also. It's certainly something a President could deviate from if he/she wanted to w/o legal consequence, I wd think.
typo correction: "the how" s/b "how"
whatever happened to Washington's warning against permanent allies?
LFC,
I don't think signing that law was a little absurd, maybe just unusual. Executive and legislative branches have overlapping powers,eg., the president's role is to conduct foreign policy, but what that policy may be is not solely up to the executive. Passing a law that a President signed restricting policy on Israel is not surprising. Also, legislative appropriations can compel or restrict executive branch action. We've become so accustomed to congress ceding power to the executive that we forget that it has significant power in the foreign policy realm through legislation and money.
I have been thinking about the phrase you quoted with respect to the death toll in Gaza -- "shocks the conscience." I have long been familiar with it but I think my conscience has been shocked to the point nothing shocks it anymore. The mass of historical violence over the past several hundred years is simply beyond comprehension. The extent of genocide committed by European colonization and exploitation of indigenous population is alone almost incomprehensible. Add in the death toll of suppressing colonial revolts and independence movements up through the use of chemical weapons in WW1, firebombing Dresden and Tokyo, nuclear bombings. Not to mention the eerie resemblance of the current period to the early 20th century. Sorry to go on so long
My thoughts on this align with Benjamin's IX Theses on the Philosophy of History:
"IX
My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back.If I stayed timeless time,
I would have little luck.
Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit,
ich kehrte gern zurück,
denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit,
ich hätte wenig Glück.
Gerherd Scholem,
‘Gruss vom Angelus’
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
I should have apologized in advance for being so depressingly pessimistic.
Christopher M.,
The passage from Benjamin is striking; I'm familiar with it from its having been quoted by others. For instance, Benedict Anderson quoted it in his Imagined Communities (1983; revised ed., 1991). I have not really read Benjamin himself.
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That passage by Benjamin on Klee's Angelus Novus in the his last essay must be the most quoted bit in 'theory' (cultural studies/art studies/neo-Marxist accounts or critiques of cultural phenomena/etc.) in the past half century. I hadn't seen it cited recently, but the brand new book I'm reading now (the anthropologist Tim Ingold' The Rise and Fall of Generation Now) makes sustained use of it.--It's hard not to think it's a bit over-rated, but pretty much everything in Benjamin is worth reading at least once. The enormous amount of academic writing on him is largely dispensable, due, I think, to its hagiographic tone and repetitiveness. It seems to me that the best and most sustained account of the passage and the essay as a whole is in Michael Löwy's monograph. For Benjamin as a whole, Howard Caygill's book is pretty interesting, with its unusual focus on Benjamin's early work. The only bit of secondary literature to which I regularly return is the discussion of Benjamin and/vs Adorno in Michael Rosen's On Voluntary Servitude, an outstandingly interesting and (it seems to me) largely overlooked book.
Insofar as the subject of the voluntary servitude to ideology has come up, allow me to beat a dead horse. The more I look at the Gay/Stefanik showdown at the Congressional Corral, the more comical it seems. Here we have the President of our most elite educational institution—and a tenured professor of Government, no less—who can’t seem to recognize an irredentist political slogan when it is actually biting her in the ass.
Is this because she has spent so much time so deep in the labyrinth of currently-fashionable nationalist ideology that it has come to seem like simple common sense? Or is she simply incompetent? Or some combination of both?
Moreover, even though Gay isn’t a lawyer, as the president of Harvard I would have assumed that she, or someone in her office, would be aware that the law of evidence allows the use of reasonable inferences. Is it reasonable to infer genocidal intent from the use of an irredentist slogan? Well, it’s certainly not *un*reasonable, especially given the explicit program of the elected Palestinian government.
As for the appeal of irredentist sloganeering and nationalism generally, the interesting thing is the vicarious aspect to it. Here we have a bunch of upper-middle-class college kids dressing for resistance, chanting slogans, and enjoying the fun of nationalism—somebody ELSE’s nationalism. All while decrying other nationalisms. The wrong kind of nationalism. Finally, if being “left” or “progressive” means backing the right sort of nationalism, then these two terms have lost all meaning.
John Pillette: As for the appeal of irredentist sloganeering and nationalism generally, the interesting thing is the vicarious aspect to it. Here we have a bunch of upper-middle-class college kids dressing for resistance, chanting slogans, and enjoying the fun of nationalism—somebody ELSE’s nationalism. All while decrying other nationalisms. The wrong kind of nationalism.
Which kids are these?
Eric, I’m as bemused as you are by J.P.’s latest remarks. I seem to recall that I once found what he had to say quite interesting. But more and more I detect derision and even hatred in several of his posts in recent times. I’m generally uncomfortable with derision and hatred, even in cases where many seem to feel they are appropriate. But John’s targets often seem misplaced and undeserving of so much venom.
John Pillette: Is it reasonable to infer genocidal intent from the use of an irredentist slogan?
No, it is not reasonable to infer that, and that is the answer Gay and the other univ. presidents should have given.
Stefanik is beneath contempt, imo.
I have no problem with derision when it comes to Stefanik. She is a worthless demagogue and the worst kind of opportunist, and she is openly campaigning to be Trump's v.p. candidate.
Ahem. The narrow question is, is the inference [river to the sea = call for genocide] “reasonable”—that is, would it be allowed in court? The answer to this question is “yes”.
Inferences may be rebutted of course, but simply calling the person making the argument “beneath contempt” is not a rebuttal. Must Do Better!
Moreover, as chains of inference go, this one is pretty short at a mere two links. Given that the academy has gained notoriety in recent years by the acceptance of lengthy chains of inference, especially in area studies, claiming that the use of inference is now somehow invalid is clearly tendentious.
My point is that a person in Gay’s position (and every lawyer finds him or herself in this position all the time) must *grasp the nettle* and respond with a coherent argument, not with the claim that use of the inference is wicked.
As for the class make-up of the Ivy League, it’s well understood. They keep records on this stuff don’t you know. I submit that these kinds of ideological shit-storms tend to occur at the fancier places is no coincidence.
As for “derision”, may I suggest you try it yourself? It’s fun to write and even more fun to read! Of course, you have to accept that sometimes your own ox may get gored by it, but that’s part of the fun.
John Pillette,
(1) No, that is not a reasonable inference, regardless of whether it would be allowed in a court proceeding.
(2) I recall kids building shanty-town shacks on college campuses as part of the protests demanding university divestment and the ending of the US government's support for the South African apartheid regime.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1986/05/06/shantytown-protests-on-the-campus/eee4b159-74fa-485f-8007-1e10d7cea919/
Would you have had them turn a blind eye because they were not directly affected by what was going on in South Africa? Should the NY Times have buried stories about persecution of the Jews by the Nazis because it was happening in a far-off land and did not directly affect most of their American readers?
As for the different kinds of nationalism, you’re right, I forgot about this. My kind of nationalism proceeds from virtue and pure motives, while the everybody else’s kind of nationalism proceeds from wickedness and dishonesty. Maybe I forgot because I never took Poli Sci 101 (I did take Thucydides 101, though).
[T]hese are struggles within the professional-managerial class. So that Harvard, for example, is a ruling-class institution in terms of shaping the elites who go to Wall Street, who go to Silicon Valley, who go to the Pentagon, who go to the State Department....
For the most part, indigenous peoples, Black folk, brown folk, we didn't gain access to this space until the 1970s as a result of the mass rebellions....
By the time you get a Black president, like Claudine Gay, who was the Dean of Faculty when I had my second class—
I had a first class with Larry Summers. I had been University Professor [with tenure] in 1996. He arrived in 2001. The first thing he did was...he met with every department other than Afro-American studies. And when...Skip Gates called him and says, 'Hey, what's going on?' He says, 'You all have been the public face of Harvard for too long. This is a new era.' So that's already an attack on Black folk.
Then he calls me in...and attacks me, saying my left-wing politics, associated with Hip-Hop, that's an embarrassment and so forth.... I decided to leave....
So when I returned, under Larry Bacow....
[T]here you had the struggle over the Palestinian situation. You had Palestinian students who didn't have a faculty adviser. I became their faculty adviser.... We would have difficulty trying to find space in rooms for the events.... It was clear there was a bias.
There were two professors...who were voted unanimously for tenure, but who had very strong critiques of Israel's occupation. Both denied.
So I said to myself, well, let me just push for my own self just to see what it would be like to get tenure [the second time]. I've already got University Professor, that's like 19 professors out of 2,000. But I had been away for 20 years.
They say, there's no way you can get tenure.
I say, wait a minute. Is it my age? No....
Is it my politics around Black people?
Is it my politics around the class issues, with Bernie [Sanders]? No....
Ah! It's the Palestinian issue. That's what it was. And I raised that issue, and the clash took place. And I left.
Now, keep in mind, Claudine Gay, she is the Dean of the Faculty at that time.
I give her a call. I never get a call back from her. Cause I know she's afraid, she's scared, she's fearful. And that's her boss—her boss is the one I am clashing with.
Now, what has happened is, some of the same forces now push her out. Even though early on she was on the inside and had held my situation at arm's length.
...
We know plagiarism had very little to do with this. They were looking for anything.
Laurence Tribe, who is a celebrated constitutional lawyer, he plagiarized Peter J. Abraham's book "Justices and Presidents." Nothing. Nothing.
...
There is a vicious attack on any persons who raise their voices critical of Israel, especially at this moment. You mention the word 'genocide,' you mention the word 'apartheid,' you mention the two words 'ethnic cleansing'—you are in a world of trouble! (my emphasis)
^ Cornel West discussing the Gay affair with Nick Estes on the Red Nation podcast about a month ago.
Brian Leiter on how the university presidents should have answered Stefanik
https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2023/12/the-presidents-of-harvard-mit-and-penn-were-much-too-nice-to-the-republicans-in-congress.html
J.P. J. Swift you ain't. Try harder!
I did read and enjoy Brian Leiter’s take on this, but as a strategy what I think would have worked better was an extremely long-winded and elaborately—to the point of parody—formally courteous academic response, replete with definitions of terms, footnoted asides, parenthetical digressions, and so on. By the time she had finished nobody would have remembered what the question was. In other words, Gamesman, sorry, “Gameswomanship"! (see: Stephen Potter.) If you saw the movie “Frost/Nixon” you’ll recall that Nixon pulled this number on David Frost, leaving him grasping at straws.
John Pillette
this is my last comment here for a while, have other things to attend to.
If you look at the transcript, you'll see Stefanik asks about or references the word "intifada" just before she asks the question that got all the attention.
It's obvious what Gay should have said. She should have begun by saying: "Congresswoman, I reject your premise that uttering the word 'intifada' is equivalent to calling for genocide." And then gone on to explain why. E.g. the word "intifada" means "uprising" etc. And then Gay should have said something like: "Of course, any actual calls for genocide of any group are morally reprehensible, but whether any particular string of words violates our bullying and harassment code is a technical legal question." And then elaborated.
Because remember: Stefanik asked specifically whether calls for genocide violate policies on bullying and harassment.
P.s. The poor response to Stefanik's trap was partly the presidents' fault and partly the fault of the law firm that prepared them for the testimony.
The notion that Gay could have responded at appropriate length assumes that that awful congressperson would have allowed her the space to respond so.
I'll confess I didn't go over the transcript with a fine-toothed comb, but in any event the "discourse" immediately turned to the use of this slogan. So maybe Gay better than I'm giving her credit for ... but still, she's the PRESIDENT of HARVARD for Christ's sake! Oughtn't she have kicked ass in this thing?
But let’s leave Stefanik out of it (I certainly don’t care for her myself). There are a lot of wealthy liberal Jews who regard this slogan as offensive, even if they don’t think it’s “genocidal”. Are these people “beneath contempt”? Remember, it’s 2024, and this group is a VERY important part of the Democratic party. Leaving “morality” to one side (I know most people don’t like doing that, but real politics is an amoral realm) is it worth alienating them right now?
BTW, I don’t think it’s use in this context qualifies as genocidal, but that’s because I don’t think that the people now using it are capable of this kind of sustained analytical thought. They’re just kids who are enjoying the thrill of vicarious nationalism. Enjoying being young and silly is part of going away to school.
By the way, I don't see why protests by upper middle class university students are any less valid than protests by working class university students or by third world university students or by trans African-American discapacitated (if that is the correct word) students.
These are ethical questions and anyone can have an opinion on them and whether one's opinion is what I and others would call "decent" (I began to use the word "decent" when I read Orwell, who uses it a lot, as a upper middle class student many years ago) has no relation to one's class background or ethnic origin or sexual orientation or gender or lack of gender (do non-binary people have a gender?, I don't know).
These protests are just as valid or invalid as any other protests. What I am saying is that vicarious nationalism is vicarious in three ways. These kids (the ones I'm talking about, anyway) are not Palestinian, they are not Muslim, and they are not declasse. Nobody else thinks that this is remarkable?
This urge to valorize and villify is made much easier when that group is entirely separate from the world you inhabit. It allows you to think of them as exotic and of the situation they inhabit as not being rooted in some concrete reality with religious, political, and economic axes, but as taking place instead in some abstract realm where “reality” is instead determined by the cosmic melodramatic rules of good and evil.
But aren't there lots of--or at least several--"VERY important" parts of the Democratic party? I'm thinking of the divisions in Michigan, for one. And aren't they all competing for the party to prioritize their concerns vis-a-vis the Palestinians/Israelis? Surely that's what makes it a political matter of some difficulty. Although at the moment, as I think Eric has suggested, one side tends to be completely marginalized.
By the way, Sheldon Wolin has some thoughts relevant to this subject: "As a member of an interest group, the individual is given an essentially anticivic education. He is taught that the first duty is to support the self-interest of the group because politics is nothing but a struggle for advantage. In contrast, the citizen has to decide what to do, not in a setting where each has the same interest as the other, but in one where there are differences that have to be taken into account, and, ideally, incorporated into the decision. The citizen, unlike the groupie, has to acquire a perspective of commonality, to think integrally and comprehensively rather than exclusively. The groupie never gets beyond "politics," the stage of unreflective self-interest."
John Pillette,
A lot of the students & young men and women who helped organize black voters to vote in the Jim Crow South in the summer of 1964 were not black and were not from the South. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner come to mind.
First of all, college students today, given internet, are a lot better informed about the world than we were in the 60's when we protested against the war in Vietnam and racism.
From 1985 to 1989 I worked in Codepu, a Chilean human rights organization, against the Pinochet dictatorship.
Along with another guy, a Chilean, we put out a monthly bulletin in English called "Chile Codepu Report" informing about the human rights and political situation in Chile.
We were Codepu's international department and thus were in contact with groups which solidarized with Chile in the U.S. and in Europe. A lot of the stuff that these groups said about the Pinochet dictatorship was exaggerated or just plain false: for example, I recall one claiming that Chile under Pinochet had the highest infant mortality rate in the world which was untrue.
Things in Chile were bad enough. There was no need to exaggerate.
However, their support for our cause was welcome.
I made friends with one woman from the U.S. who supported our cause and we are still in contact 40 years later. With the years she has become much more sophisticated and knowledgeable about Chile and it's been a pleasure to accompany her on her journey.
You have to start somewhere in life and I imagine that kids today who protest Israeli war crimes in Gaza in simplistic terms are, in many cases, beginning a journey of political protest in good causes that will last their lifetime and that they will learn the complexities of the world as they grow. That seems very positive to me.
I’m not talking about those kids (the ones in the early sixties), I’m talking about these kids here today. The analogy doesn’t hold. For one thing, Jim Crow wasn’t going on in some foreign land, it was happening right here in America. And for that reason, it was disenfranchising fellow Americans, not exotic foreigners. Likewise, the issues and calculations of a Realpolitik foreign policy didn’t enter into it and cloud minds through absent discussion. And finally, it was pragmatic and substantive in a way that the mere “Activism” of today is not.
But what do I know? I’m a cranky old Naderite who just can’t muster enthusiasm for these kinds of things. I think if you run the numbers, you’ll find that the sort of Instagram-friendly activist-ism that I’m talking about has a pretty poor batting average. And trust me I already KNOW that I’m a sourpuss, defeatist, quietist, etc., etc. because nearly everybody I’ve ever talked to about this has told me that.
This most recent line of comments is something I've puzzled about for decades without coming to a stable view. One of my closest friends was very active in the anti-apartheid movement and lived to stand on stage with Nelson Mandela at the Oakland Coliseum; at other times it seemed like activism at a very great distance was a way of awarding oneself a Get-Out-Of-Moral-Jail-Free card. It seems to me that both JP and s. wallerstein capture important aspects of the ethical reality. I can't get JP's remarks at 4:47 out of my head, but I really have to get back to work. As an antidote to melodrama and moralizing, I'd suggest these: our Palestinian brothers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5hR4OZZIBQ; our Israeli brothers (starting at 3'55"; I'm the guy in the back far left with the big hat) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P0hzAYtlj8
I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but what I am hearing is: Those people are not like us. They are foreign. They are exotic. Their concerns are not our concerns. So, in the main, most people like us would not take up their cause except to make a fashion statement or demonstrate our moral superiority.
But another way to look at the situation is that those people are people. Many of us see our own humanity in them, despite the physical and cultural distances. We can't sit idly by or go about our business as usual while aware of their suffering.
I am reminded of MLK's Letter From Birmingham Jail--worth a read if you have not read it, or if you have not read it in a while. Especially the section with:
"I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly." [essentially the same message as in that YouTube song I linked to above: None of us are free if any is in chains]
and the part about his disaffection with the white moderate, "who is more devoted to order than to justice."
Let alone the fact that the USA has been subsidizing Israel's atrocities for decades while dishonestly calling for peace and two-state solution.
Young people have a huge advantage (disadvantage for the US government) in that they haven't been brainwashed for decades my the media. Social media is full of disinformation and stupidity but at least is not controlled. Many young people are seeing some raw stuff. Of course it would be better if they had an historical background about the whole issue, but where can they get it from? from the media that has protected Israel for decades?
Where is Professor Wolfe??
Doogie,
I was wondering myself, but I assume that he is wholly occupied with his Marx classes and hasn't the time to post here.
STILL HERE?
American solidarity with the Palestinians, like American solidarity with the labor movement, was a niche position for most of my life. From the late 80's until about 2-3 years ago, if you advocated in the United States for the dismantling of Israel's Apartheid state most people thought you were at best a fringe weirdo, at worst a Nazi. And if you supported organized labor you were at best economically ignorant, at worst a communist. That was the era when these positions were countercultural and that was the time to adopt these positions if all you were interested in was projecting a countercultural identity.
Today this is no longer the case: young people see that the boomer generation ruined the planet via conspicuous consumption and stole young people's futures via neo liberal wealth transfers to themselves and warmongering across the globe under the pretense of human rights interventions. Young people are pissed off about the social and economic injustice that has been inflicted on them, and they empathize with the oppressed in Palestine and their brethren stuck in dead-end jobs here in the states with little meaningful hope of buying a house or raising a family at a comparable standard of living to that of their parents. The youth's protests against Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is not some abstract make-believe undergraduate seminar cosplay - it's a rational response to the horrors that have been inflicted on them and their own futures, which generates sympathy for the oppressed and a rejection of the perspectives and policy priorities ruling generation and class.
Ridiculousicculus, while I sympathise with much of what you say I also have to admit, as someone who just preceded the so-called "boomer" generation--and as someone who almost always finds generational claims suspect--I can't really see much virtue in blaming that particular set of people of about my age, give or take a decade or so, as being responsible for the ills of the world. Admittedly there were those of that same age set who didn't trust anyone over 30, an equally silly worldview. Still, aren't we, most of us, all victims of the same basic processes. And weren't there those of us in many historical periods who did our best--though obviously not well enough--to challenge these processes? Putting it very pessimistically, those same young people you're presently pointing to will likely face the same sort of generational recriminations from some of their grandchildren that you express here.
@ Ridiculousicculus
Young people, or more precisely a portion of them, have always been inclined to sympathize with the oppressed. When I was in college in the late 1970s, I participated in demos calling for the university to divest its holdings in apartheid South Africa. Those were not small events. At some places there were shantytowns set up and so on. A half-decade or so before I was a college freshman, there were of course the large protests vs. the Vietnam War.
The current protests on the sit. in the Mideast can be seen as a continuation of this sort of activity. While young people may have some resentments vs. the "boomer generation," the idea that these protests are an indirect expression of those resentments seems to me less than persuasive.
p.s. It's also, of course, a "structural" consequence of putting a bunch of young people together in a physical setting where their main obligations are studying and in some cases part-time work, where most of them don't have to worry immediately about mundane things like paying rent or mortgages and utility bills, and all the other mundane things that many people have to worry about once they finish their formal schooling and enter the workforce.
LFC,
And in the case of college students who will become middle class or upper middle class professionals it's because in college all one owns can be put in a couple of suitcases.
However, once one buys a home or an apartment, one tends to be become a bit more concerned about property rights.
And while one is hardly Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or even an old-fashioned millionaire, one accumulates a bit of capital in the bank and maybe mutual funds and one wonders whether one would like to see it all expropriated in the name of the general welfare. Etc., etc, etc.
LFC - my post was mostly in response to MS/JP's 4:47 suggestion that student protests reflect some kind of abstract "vicarious nationalism" rather than a response to real-world concerns that have a direct impact on young people. I don't think the protests are an "indirect expression of [anti-boomer] resentments." I think young people have over the last 2-3 years become more conscious of the economic and ecological peril they're facing, and that consciousness is contributing to a "moment" where they're rejecting the policy positions held by those who have emperiled them and breaking from the status quo on issues like Israel/Palestine.
Rodiculousicculus
A last point - it's not just college students out there protesting, although they get the attention because colleges and universities are institutions with wealth and cachet and are easy to attack. Lots of young protesters are graduates or never even went to college. And you see plenty of old-timey Peaceniks, like I imagine many of the readers of this blog to be, too.
Ridiculousicculus,
Ok, I think that could be one element or factor. There are probably multiple causes here (or in the lingo, it's "overdetermined").
One of the main differences today is that reporters and Palestinians in Gaza have been able to send out videos & photos that people over here are able to directly see via social media. The corporate legacy media gatekeepers have been cut out of the loop. If the only news getting out was coming from CNN, Fox, and the NYT, the sort of sources that older folks rely on for their news, reactions would likely be very different.
Careful, LFC. Professor Wolff has strong feelings about the term "over determination" 😉 https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2017/04/overdetermination.html?m=1
JOHN R. MacARTHUR: But live televised war, yes, in the sense that you have these long press conferences...run by Norman Schwarzkopf...the overall commander of the allied forces..., who turns out to be a brilliant PR man.... He’s got a television set, set up on the stage in Dhahran, showing allegedly precision-guided—precision missiles hitting their targets every time....
And the day before, actually, they showed pictures of them, of the United States Air Force, allegedly blowing up Scud missile—mobile Scud missile launchers....
[T]hey had to have results. They had to show that they were taking out the Scud missile launchers. And so they claimed to have knocked out 11 of them. After the war, Scott Ritter and Mark Crispin Miller did some good reporting and refuted this, said that no Scud missile launchers were blown up....
But the point is, is that in real time, the press, the media, could not challenge anything that was said. Here’s the video. Here are the generals with their pointers. How can you argue with this? And there’s nobody on the ground, no reporters in the field, who can verify anything or contradict anything. It’s not easy even under the freest circumstances in wartime to confirm or refute what the government says. But there’s zero chance in this war. So the American public gets the impression that it’s a clean war, a sanitized war; we’re hitting every target."
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/5/how_false_testimony_and_a_massive
Eric @8:51
My main sources have been WaPo, PBS NewsHour (audio and sometimes video versions), occasionally ATC and The World (PRI) or BBC (all radio), and a smattering of other sources (often linked on blogs), and I feel I've gotten pretty much as accurate a view of the conflict as someone at this distance (and not in privileged official or think-tank circles) can get. I doubtless haven't gotten all the wrenching individual stories one would get on social media, but in terms of being able to reach a conclusion about the conduct of the war I feel that I've gotten adequate information. (I don't have cable TV, and while I have an NYT digital sub, I tend not to use it much for reportage.) So I think one can get a roughly accurate picture w/o using the social media platforms (Instagram, FB, X, TikTok, etc.) In terms of reporting I'd single out Leila Molana-Allen, whose reports as a special correspondent for PBS NewsHour, esp. in the first days and weeks of the war, were excellent.
P.s. That said, I'm sure younger people are using the social media platforms and that they got some first-hand accounts from them. I'm just saying it isn't a necessity.
@LFC
Most sources are not fabricators but they act as filters of what is really going on. These filters are designed to defend specific interests. Those who are informed about American policy and know even something historically accurate about the Palestine Israel conflict can distinguish what is factual useful information and what is propaganda in favor of Israel. The majority of people do not have that ability and so, without independent sources such as social media, would come to have a very warped view of the conflict as most older Americans do.
Hamas's very existence is a crime. On 10/7 (an assault which Palestinian civilians and the UN joined) Hamas took innocent Israeli civilians and for the sake of argument innocent Palestinian civilians hostage
And you all didn't give a
Hamas is guilty and you are guilty of being fellow travellers with Hamas.
Oh what did Professor Wolff say? It only matters what side you're on.
Think about it, if what you do here can be called by that name
Anonymous @ 10:08 a.m.
You're lumping all the commenters here into one basket when in fact there have been disagreements on various points. So among other things, you're guilty of misrepresentation. I'll leave it at that. Except to say that in my comments I repeatedly made clear that I view 10/7 as an indefensible act of terrorism. I suggest you actually read the comments before pronouncing judgments, if they can be called that.
LFC,
Right.
And between support for what Hamas (a terrorist and fundamentalistic group) did on October 7 and support for Israeli atrocities and war crimes in Gaza there are numerous positions and I believe everyone who comments here or almost everyone has tried to position themselves between those two atrocious alternatives.
The problem isn't "which side are you on", as Professor Wolff once suggested, referring to struggles between left and right in a basically democratic nation such as the U.S., but the fact that neither side in this ugly conflict is acceptable to any decent thinking human being.
@Anonymous
Go back to Breitbart
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