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Notes -
The Eurovision Song Contest was held this evening, which I haven't watched in about twenty years. A friend of mine suggested that we watch it, but was unsure if she'd be able to host, as her flatmate was insistent on boycotting it in light of Israel being "allowed" to participate. In the end her flatmate was out of the house so we were able to watch it in her flat.
I'd assumed that, given the absence of her anti-Zionist flatmate, we'd be able to enjoy the Eurovision as the trashy, campy experience that was intended, without politics intruding. I was mistaken: my friend, her boyfriend and one of her friends insisted on turning off the stream during Israel's performance and made innumerable derisive comments about them during the night. I'm a coward who wants to keep the peace so I held my tongue for the most part.
Israel received modest double-digit votes from the national juries, but after the audience vote, they rocketed up to first place with an astonishing 357 votes, total. In second place was Austria with 258 jury votes, and in the end Austria clinched it. (I honestly cannot say who deserved it more as, as previously mentioned, they turned off the stream during the Israeli performance. I found the Austrian one a little annoying, and if it had been up to me, based on the performances I actually saw, I would have given it to the Germans.)
I was rather dismayed with how quickly my friend retreated into semi-ironic conspiritorialism: saying that the Eurovision would have to investigate their voting procedures next year to ensure no ballot-stuffing was taking place, or attributing Israel's massive success among the audiences as the result of concerted, strategic voting efforts by "the right". (The idea that foul play must have been involved seems to be a consensus opinion, if /r/Ireland is any indication.) The possibilities that a) normie Europeans legitimately liked Israel's performance on a musical level more than the other countries; or b) normie Europeans voted for Israel for political reasons because they're more sympathetic to the Israeli cause than the Palestinian - seem not to have occurred to her.
I am growing increasingly dismayed by the level of ambient nominally pro-Palestinian (but really anti-Israeli) sentiment in Ireland, but it's comforting to be reminded that it's quite the outlier among European countries.
Things took an even weirder turn when Armenia performed and the conversation turned to the Armenian genocide of the 1910s. My friend's Turkish boyfriend, who'd been enthusiastically participating in the Israel-bashing, suddenly became rather defensive, explaining how it wasn't a genocide but merely ethnic cleansing, and anyway forced marches are completely different from genocide, and anyway how do you even establish intent to exterminate a particular ethnic group, and it's hypocritical of European nations to accuse the Turks of genocide when they've done things that were just as bad if not worse* (it was a real mask-off, vino veritas moment, and even my friend seemed to be a bit taken aback by how worked up he got). I felt like saying - it's a bit rich of you to accuse Israel of genocide on the basis of their having killed ~110,000 Palestinians in the span of 75 years, but dismiss the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians in one year as "mere" ethnic cleansing. My girlfriend, who's nowhere near as sympathetic to the Israelis as I am, admitted that I had a point here. I hate to say it, but the "it's antisemitism" theory seems to have greater predictive power than many of its competing alternatives.
*On this point I agreed with him: the Armenian genocide is at least as reprehensible as, to pick one example, Belgian conduct in the Congo.
Could you elaborate on this? I've been seeing a lot of arguments lately to the effect that the Belgians weren't nearly as bad as they're made out to be, e.g. those "hands chopped off" pictures are something the natives did to each other and the Belgians actually tried to stop. So far when I look such things up I first find that the official story is everywhere, but when digging deeper it falls apart. At this point I don't know what to believe.
On the other hand (jeez no pun intended) I can very easily believe that it's massively overblown for to cast colonialism in the worst possible light.
It’s funny how practically every poster on the Motte suddenly turns into SecureSignals when any other tragic mass killing in human history is mentioned. “Only 200,000 Congans died at worst! Mostly from typhus!”
Well, at this point I think it's an observable truth that the history of colonialism is generally presented in, to put it charitably, the least-charitable possible light.
That isnt my experience. Colonialism is frequently presented as one/all of.
Yes it was extractive, but still more competent than the natives.
Yeah, but we civilized them.
They killed themselves in civil wars after we left anyway.
Worst of all, even in 2025, Colonial powers have little remorse for their actions.
France still lays claim to the 150 million in Haitian ransom. The British refuse to accept blame imposed on Churchill for the Bengal famine. The portugese inquistion was famous for grotesque torture in Goa. The Spanish straight up genocided the entire now-world despite knowing it was their germs causing it. Not many apologies to go around.
Yes, they werent as effective as communists or nazis at killing. And they werent as comically cruel as imperial japan. But, these were still fairly fucked up periods for the colonized nations. IMO, Pretty close to slavery.
[citation needed]
The first microscopes capable of seeing "animalcules" date back to 1674, and as late as ~1850 we still have people like John Snow and Ignaz Semmelweis still fighting an uphill battle with their controversial theories of "cholera can spread in drinking water" and "doctors should wash their hands in between examining corpses and delivering babies".
Back in the 1500s understanding of disease was so bad that we still don't even know which diseases were responsible for the majority of New World deaths. The earliest massive plague was smallpox, but the dozen-odd plagues of "cocoliztli" are still named by that generic Nahuatl (Aztec) word for "pestilence" because nobody knows which of a half dozen candidate germs were the actual cause.
For that matter, some diseases spread so much faster than the conquerors who first transmitted them that we don't know how bad the death toll was! In hindsight we believe that a lot of European colonist reports of "gosh, look how beautiful this unspoiled wilderness is" in North America were from people describing recently-carefully-tended forests whose caretakers had just been devastated by epidemics.
This isn't to excuse any of the colonists' deliberate crimes, of course. After the rest of his Patuxet tribe had been killed by an epidemic, the proper way to treat Squanto should have been sympathy and charity, not abduction. Some of the colonized nations' treatment was "Pretty close to slavery", and some was literal "we'll take you to the slave market to sell now" slavery.
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