This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
No specific news item for this culture war post, but perusing the comments on the various Iran war takes, I'm consistently baffled by people's attitudes towards Israel that I think are willfully uncharitable and blind to the history of the Middle East in general.
First, there's this idea that Israel is the primary/principle cause of all instability in the region, and that if we suddenly removed all the Jews and gave back the land to the Palestinians, we would have peace. This is absurd. The violence in Lebanon between shiites/sunnis/christians, the question of the Kurds, and the Sunni/Shiite Cold (I guess hot now) war are all conflicts that have their origins long before the founding of Israel. Heck if Israel wasn't there to focus hatred on, the Arabs would probably fight among themselves even more.
Secondly, it's extremely impractical, if not impossible to remove 6 million Jews from land they've now lived on for (at least) three generations. A second Nakba to correct for the first Nakba doesn't exactly seem just to me, and it's not like many of those Jews can actually go back to where they were from before emigrating to Israel. The Arab countries forcibly expelled all Sephardic Jews in 1948 after Israel won its independence (also weird how this was totally okay but Israel actions during the 1948 war are "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing". Israel also hasn't actually lost a war yet, and they won in 1948 without any outside help except for some weapons for the Czech Republic, so this would be an extremely hard sell to a population that really doesn't want to leave.
Thirdly, it's not like Israel hasn't tried to find a peaceful solution to the Palestine question or with its neighbors. Rabin actually signed the Oslo accords (before he was assassinated) and it looked like the Palestinians would be able to move towards self governance. Unfortunately, every government the Palestinians have elected have made it their central platform to destroy Israel, so it's somewhat logical that Israel decided that they couldn't self-govern (similar logic to why Israel and Iran are fighting). When I was living in Israel in the summer of 2019 (not a Jew, just doing research), it looked this might be changing, but unfortunately October 2023 changed all that. In terms of its Arab neighbors, Israel has repeatedly given up territory for peace. Of course unfortunately neither Jordan nor Egypt want the West Bank/Gaza (and also refuse to treat second, third and even fourth generation Palestinian refuges as citizens).
Fourthly, there's a (somewhat true) idea that Israel has an outsized influence in US politics. But the US also has an extremely outsized influence in Israeli politics. Up until the mid 1970s, Israel was heavily socialist country that had far more ties to the Soviet Union than the US wanted. Market liberalization similar to what happened under Reagen/Thatcher destroyed the Israeli Kibbutz system economically (among other things, I have a very long essay on my blog about this) that completely destroyed the Israeli left. Netenyahu is the logical result of this.
Fifthly, the claims of Israeli genocide in Gaza seem to be greatly exaggerated and very selective when it comes to comparisons of other actual genocides going on in the world right now (Sudan). I've been hearing claims of genocide for at least ten years now, but somehow there are more Palestinians in Gaza now than there were then? If the Israelis are trying to genocide the Palestinians they're clearly not very good at it (might be more effective to give out birth control). Claims of apartheid are more fair, but are no different from how Palestinians are treated in Arab countries. Why the special criticism of Israel?
Maybe making a Jewish state in the Middle East wasn't a great idea. So what? We live in the world where that's been the case for nearly 80 years and it's not going away without another ethnic cleansing. Israel does cause a lot of chaos and conflict in the region, but 90% is in direct response to its neighbors wanting to destroy it and kill its entire population. Why is the answer to somehow endorse that, rather than admit that maybe its time for the Palestinians to give up claims to land they haven't lived on since WW2, and the population of the Middle East to accept (as their leaders by and large have) that Israel is here to stay.
I find the idea that one genocide is bigger than the other is somehow capable of disqualifying the smaller one as a genocide as pretty facially ridiculous. As is the claim that genocide requires complete elimination of the targets or that somehow high birth rates also are disqualifying. This is not a genocide thread nor do I think it should become one, but you should do yourself a favor and don't include a bullet like #5 if you aren't going to be serious about it. The question of outsize attention to Israel is pretty self-evident despite this all, I think even the most strident pro-Palestine Westerners would probably even agree if pressed that Israel gets more political attention than you'd normally expect (for different reasons of course, but the point stands).
Now obviously I agree with your central thesis; I'm the one who believes in a sort of international statute of limitations, which is about 40-50 years, after which holding grudges is stupid and mutually harmful (most of the instigators are dead by then anyways and anyone in power now very rarely would have been in power then). In that light it's obviously dumb to think that Israel should just go away. And if you look within that window, Israel's efforts at peace have been much more lackluster. Unfortunately the spate of assassinations and other developments around the turn of the century are at least partially responsible. I still personally believe that despite a lack of goodwill all around for the last 2+ decades, it's incumbent on Israel as a nominally free democracy to 'be the bigger man' and at least gesture at a solution, but it feels like there isn't even lip service paid to the idea anymore.
It's worth noting that at least many of the liberals I know usually tend to blame the post-WWI-ish semi-arbitrary drawing of boundaries as the "original sin" of Middle East instability. As the argument goes, there were large pre-existing rivalries and grudges, etc. but because ignorant Western boundary-drawing ignored them, yet at the same time enforced them and gave them weight, these conflicts were nearly inevitable. This is, to be sure, at least a little ironic given some of these same people are very pro-integration including internationally, but 'I think everyone can get along in multicultural societies' isn't actually a core liberal belief, it's mostly just useful feel-good messaging that occasionally gets press-ganged into a political point. (Even some neoconservatives adopted a variant of it for a while there)
Anyways, I probably should spend more time looking for other countries, but for example this survey in Saudi Arabia last year found: 40/33/16/9 split in very negative/somewhat negative/somewhat positive/very positive attitudes toward Hamas. 41/19/27/11 for strongly/somewhat disagree/agree that "the Palestinians will be able to defeat Israel someday". Although with that said, attitudes toward normalization and stuff like the Abraham Accords are viewed very negatively still, they equally DGAF about Iran relations improving.
My point is that even the population in the region basically know Israel is here to stay even if they remain unhappy about it. Internet comments, once again, != reality
Overall a very solid comment. There is one particular point which I think actually goes a bit deeper into how most westerners view states/governments/counties, which I think is relevant to analyzing the middle east:
I think an assumption of the liberal view, really the dominant implicit western view, is that states/countries should be commonwealths. By that, I mean states should represent both the desires of the population and act in the interests of the population. A clear implication of this view of what a country is is nationalism: if the government is supposed to represent the people, the people have to be a community/nation. This can be defined in different ways: ethnocultural nationalism in historic Germany is one way and civic nationalism in the US and France another way (simplifying things). There are other ways to define a nation as well, and most nations are a mix of definitions to a degree.
Popular sovereignty was historically not how most states worked. In general, the modern view that sovereignty came from the people started with the Atlantic Revolutions from 1775-1825. There were historic exceptions, such as many Greek city states and the Romans, but the Enlightenment is where the modern ideology proximately arrived. In both Christendom and the Islamic world, relevantly including the Ottomans, sovereignty came from god to the sovereign. The Sultan was just your boss, and unless you overthrew him that was that.
Ironically enough, this allowed a lot more cultural diversity than the commonwealth model gives. In the commonwealth model, since the nation is sovereign you have to define the nation and, to a greater or lesser extent, force everyone to identify with the nation and culturally adhere to certain national values. "We have made Italy, now we must make Italians." is a great quote about this. Same with the French eradicating their minority languages in the 1800s. If the Sultan/King is your boss, you don't need to go through those steps; just pledge loyalty to them, and you can identify/care about whomever you want. The millet system in the Ottoman empire was a great example of this; the different religions basically got to live in parallel societies, so long as they submitted to the Sultan.
This was the environment that most of the middle east came from. It went from loyalty to the sovereign, be it the Ottoman Sultan, Iranian Shah, or whomever, to trying to make commonwealths out of these states. The problem was simple: with few exceptions, the peoples of the new nations hated each other way more than they had any incentive to cooperate. While you got some 'successful' nation states, like Turkey and Iran, most states really are just some subset of the population, such as Saddam's tribesmen in Iraq or until recently Alawites in Syria, basically dominating the rest. Rhetoric aside, you have the old 'separate communities united by loyalty to the Sovereign' with the sovereign being a local potentate. I'll also note that the creates of the 'successful' nation states often involved horrific violence: Turkey being the obvious example.
Tying all of the above together, the liberals are correct that much of the middle east is an example if failed nation building. The issue with their viewpoint is that it assume the nation/commonwealth model is the best and universal model, when really that's not the case. Creating a nation is hard, involves forced conformity into the national ideal, and often involves pretty savage oppression and violence. Instead of a commonwealth government, maybe the better path would be trying to find the least offensive ersatz-king and promoting them would be the best way to promote the welfare of both middle easterners and those who deal with them. Nationalism/popular sovereignty actually demands a lot of a people, psychologically, materially, and socially, and for most of the middle east it seems the juice just ain't worth the squeeze.
This is a segue, but I think the lesson here also applies to the west to a degree. Many groups want to simultaneously tear down culturally the notion of a shared community, while still asking the inhabitants to consider each other as part of a shared community and act accordingly. I think this contradiction causes a lot of the political and social conflicts we see in the west today, although tbh wealth anesthetizes things over so it may remain a relatively minor deal.
Well, some wish to build a sentiment of worldwide community for the Human Race - the planet Earth as one big commonwealth, with countries and borders as an administrative tool not different from a country itself dividing itself up into Länder or counties or regions with varying degrees of local government.
You might think this is utopian, but it's not a contradiction - and I think this was genuinely the dream of many in the late 20th century, explicitly or implicitly, with the infrastructure of the EU and UN as steps towards implementing such a thing. The hope was that national identity would simply become irrelevant to fostering civic spirit as progress and globalization and the Internet built up a sentiment that we're all in this together. People would genuinely become citizens of the world in their hearts, and vote for the good of their countrymen as a special case of voting for the good of Homo sapiens in the same way that you vote for the good of your town as a special case of voting for the good of your country.
I think, then, that the current malaise results from resurgent (or simply stubbornly-not-fading-away-on-schedule) nationalist sentiment making itself known loudly enough in various parts of the world that what was once merely optimistic now looks genuinely unreachable in the short term.
The reason I feel it's doomed is because a shared group identity, a "us", can only exist in a contrast against a "them", otherwise it's amorphous and fails to inspire. Which is why I believe a united earth will only realistically happen when there will be something else for it to be contrasted against, be it other human colonies or aliens.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link