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Notes -
Iran - US - Israel War Flareup
“Israel says it has launched attack on Iran, as explosions reported in Tehran”
“The US has begun Major Combat Operations in Iran” - Donald Trump (headline flashed up just now on my phone, no link yet)
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More to follow but thought I’d post quickly for any commenting.
Mods, can we get a mega thread on this? Else I fear it will be like the Charlie Kirk thing, or just devolve into dozens of bare links which you will have to keep moderating.
The Charlie Kirk assassination was rather obvious culture war fuel. A Middle Eastern shooting war, while obviously a rather serious development, does not necessarily prove to be culture war fuel. What exactly would the culture-warring be about anyway?
The one thing I can surely say is that in my native Hungary the local Blue Tribe, which supports the main opposition party almost without exception and is otherwise heavily influenced by the US Blue Tribe in every other thing, is, due to the historic legacy of WW2 and the Cold War, largely supporting not only Zionism as such but also the project of Greater Israel (i.e. Israeli control over the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Southern Lebanon, if not more), and in this they are not a bit different from the government that they otherwise hate with a burning passion. And for this reason I rather doubt this will be fodder for any local culture-warring.
Can you explain further? Do you mean to say that the Hungarian Blue Tribe (Tribe of Kék?) supports Israel due to civilization guilt about the Holocaust? If so, where does the legacy of the Cold War come into it
During the Cold War the Soviet Bloc countries took the official stance of anti-Zionism after the Six Day War of 1967 and openly lent support to the PLO, Syria, Iraq and (until 1973) Egypt (the Arab side in the Arab-Israeli conflict, essentially), all in the name of anti-imperialism and national liberation. This had a couple of cultural consequences. One was a general anti-Arab sentiment under the surface among oppositional/dissident social groups. Another phenomenon connected to the latter was that groups of the democratic opposition took on an attitude that was at least not anti-Zionist or even sympathetic to Zionism, considering Israel to be a member of the Western liberal democratic global alliance that they were hoping to transition their countries to. This is a sort of Randian narrative about Israel being part of Western enlightened civilization and her Arab enemies being against it.
This is maybe something many normies didn't notice either inside or outside Central Europe, but sometimes it appears on the surface. (In 2003 for example, when the governments of these former Soviet Bloc countries seemed to be rather keen on supporting the Iraqi adventure in service of the US neocons and the Israel Lobby.) The democratic opposition included both liberals and nationalists but this difference didn't become obvious until years after the transitions of 1989. The liberals generally held onto their Zionist sympathies with increasing resolve as they observed the nationalists parting ways with them in this regard. This is not to say that Western pro-Palestinian leftist activism has no cultural influence in Central Europe at all, especially not after Oct 7, but their relevance appears to be rather marginal even within leftist social spheres. They can only gain small traction against decades-long trends.
This is in short the Cold War legacy I mentioned.
With respect to the Holocaust, it's rather the opposite of guilt, if that makes any sense. The short story is that Hungary was allied to Germany in WW2 as a member of the Tripartite Pact (while having a relatively large Jewish minority). We can draw a parallel with the Italians here, who also allied with the Germans because both wanted to undo the perceived shame and injustice their nations suffered at the end of WW1. The Italians defected from the pact and agreed to a ceasefire when the Allied forces reached their shores in 1943 and eventual German defeat seemed inevitable.
The Germans understandably assumed that the Hungarians are likely to follow suit when the Red Army reaches their borders, and at one point it became clear that this is just a matter of time, so they occupied Hungary in a swift preventive operation in March 1944 and forced the government to step down. (Unlike Finland, Romania and Bulgaria, Hungary was thus unable to switch sides in WW2.) The deportation of Hungarian Jews, who did face legal discrimination but not genocide up until that point, was started a few weeks later and it was only the swift degradation of the Axis situation on the Eastern Front (as well) in summer 1944 that prevented it from being completed. The official figures say roughly half of Hungarian Jewry (400 thousand) fell victim.
All this later generated the right-wing nationalist interpretation that this particular aspect of the Holocaust was the sole responsibility of the Nazis and the Hungarian nation is blameless, because without the German occupation it was never going to happen. This is more or less the official line of the current right-wing government as well. The dissenting liberal leftist narrative is that the authoritarian rightist regime that made an alliance with Hitler was itself virulently anti-Semitic, passing anti-Semitic laws that were becoming ever more extreme after 1938 but also date back all the way to 1920, tolerated anti-Semitic propaganda, generally normalized the hatred of Jews, made Jewish conscripts do forced labor in the army and operated state agencies that were so full of Jew haters that they swiftly and efficiently carried out the deportations the German occupiers ordered them to without saying a word. And when the nation had her first and last free elections under Soviet occupation in November 1945, the results made it clear that the majority of voters support parties that have also been in parliament during the deposed regime. In other words, they displayed no willingness to clearly part with the shameful past.
I won't go into even more detail about this, suffice it is to say that this is a local culture war dispute that has been done to death, people have been repeating the same narratives for decades, nobody is giving one inch, the whole tiresome subject gets creatively brought up over and over in different contexts, and culture warriors are feeding off one another's outrage. The legacy of the Holocaust is that every Jew who's politically active is a liberal leftist, and everyone who's of the Blue Tribe in general (in US terms) promotes the narrative that anti-Semitism has been a huge cultural problem with a terrible legacy, the country is full of Jew-hating shithead goyim unwilling to face their sordid national past, not taking any responsibility, not coming to terms with the Holocaust etc. I guess it's akin to US Blue Tribe beliefs about anti-Black racism and the legacy of slavery. And since these people generally disbelieve that anti-Israel tendencies can stem from anything but ignorant anti-Jewish prejudice, they are generally more likely to be pro-Israel.
Huh, thanks for the explanation!
I guess I’m a tad surprised that the Hungarian Blue Tribe, presumably unlike the Red Tribe, considers itself heir to the liberal dissident opposition to Soviet rule.
I would have thought that opposition to Soviet hegemony and repression would have cut across tribal lines; if anything I would have guessed blood-and-soil type Red Tribers would be even more likely to tout their anti-Soviet bona fides, given that the Soviets forcibly suppressed all forms of ethnic and nationalist sentiment!
Alternatively, I would have guessed that, like their US counterparts, the Blues (or at least their extremists) would be sympathetic to communism and eager to be mouthpieces/useful idiots for (in this case deceased) communist regimes and their policies, with plenty of anti-US/anti-Western whataboutism thrown in for good measure (cf. Hassan Piker)
It's pretty common in less-religious parts of Eastern Europe for soviet nostalgia to be conservative coded. Eastern bloc regimes were socially moderate, paid their pensions on time, kept the streets clear, and made sure employment rates were high- eastern Euro boomercons mostly have not been the beneficiaries of their EU integration driven economic growth.
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