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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   27742 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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Most states were founded on conquest or stolen land. The only variable is how far back in The mists of time this happened.

Most religions were founded by a scammer. It's just that the scamming usually happened before newspapers existed, so you can't look up Jesus and Mohammed's convictions for Fraud in the public record the same way you can Joseph Smith.

Israel is in a similar boat in that their conquest happened just a little too recently, so people engage in a lot of modernist rules-lawyering and isolated demands for rigor that really should also apply to the Turks before the British and the Romans before the Turks. Where's Israel's reparations from the Italians? Doesnt Mongolia owe everyone in eurasia a lot of blood money? You might as well call the Egyptians bad because their monuments were made without OSHA standards.

Most states were founded on conquest or stolen land. The only variable is how far back in The mists of time this happened.

Most religions were founded by a scammer. It's just that the scamming usually happened before newspapers existed, so you can't look up Jesus and Mohammed's convictions for Fraud in the public record the same way you can Joseph Smith.

Israel is in a similar boat in that their conquest happened just a little too recently

To a large extent I agree with this, but I think it's worth asking a couple of questions.

First, against what state was Israel's foundational conquest? The British? The British voluntarily withdrew from the area and recognized a Jewish state in writing. The Arabs? There was no Arab state there at the time. The Ottomans? The Ottoman empire collapsed in 1922, long before Israel was founded and for reasons largely unrelated to Zionism.

Second, what are we to make, for example, of the ethnic cleansing of Hebron? When the Jews were kicked out of Hebron, this wasn't some mythical event the details of which were lost in the mists of time. On the contrary, it's very well documented. And yet, anti-Israel types generally treat Hebron as "Palestinian Land."

So I think there's more in play than timing. As with most things, I think there's an element of who/whom.

First, against what state was Israel's foundational conquest? The British? The British voluntarily withdrew from the area and recognized a Jewish state in writing. The Arabs? There was no Arab state there at the time. The Ottomans? The Ottoman empire collapsed in 1922, long before Israel was founded and for reasons largely unrelated to Zionism.

This is not the gotcha you think it is, it merely implicates the British as well as the isreali state.

This is not the gotcha you think it is, it merely implicates the British as well as the [I]sreali state.

Well, in a hypothetical world where the British never came in but it was the Ottomans who left in 1948 and agreed to a Jewish state, would you say that this implicates the Ottomans as well as the Israeli state?

I'd say so yes, and the rest of the allies to our greatest ally. We are all guilty for letting things stand as they are, and for the meekness of the US bodypolitic, with our balls firmly held by aipac.

I'd say so yes,

So if I understand you correctly, in any situation where a state is founded with the consent of whatever power occupied its land previously, the new state inherits any moral culpability for the granting power's conquest. Right?

We are all guilty for letting things stand as they are, and for the meekness of the US bodypolitic, with our balls firmly held by aipac.

I'm not going to respond to this as I perceive it as an off-topic jab.

The difference is that Israel's conquests happened so recently in history that the survivors are still around and are still suffering from said conquests. So for the conquest of Gaul by the Romans, the moral aspects possess only an abstract distinction, where as for the peoples despoiled by Israel, the moral consequences are still very much in force - in the form of imprisonment, harassment, destruction of their crops and land, casual murder, and mass fatality events. Other events which caused and still cause negative humanitarian outcomes are also given attention and provoke calls for political actions. The Ukraine War, decolonization, America's various wars, and other such things of relevance to the West and its liberal-democratic institutions are or were treated in a similar way, because it is the consequences which chiefly matter, not matters of historical, abstract legalism.

Isn't that just the fault of all those surviving victims for not keeping the flame of butthurt alive in their hearts over the generations?

No because it's not the victims who create the political impetus for action but third-party bystanders in liberal-democratic states who react mainly out of consequentialist humanitarian impulses over ongoing harms perceived being committed.

I would say React mainly out of emotional incontinence and a desire to be an activist for some cause or other.

That appraisal merely works in what, in your own terms, could be referred to as emotional incontinence. A more neutral take would consider how the Vietnam War provoked a reaction similar to that taken in response to Gaza, over the huge civilian death toll (800,000 if I remember correctly) as well as footage of various acts of carnage and reports of atrocities taken by allied and co-national troops. These were affairs of significant consequence Americans were responding to and the most their emotional response could be accused of was being overly naïve and a touch simplistic (taking into consideration primarily first order effects while remaining blind to all secondary ones). Americans and civilians in other liberal-democracies have responded consistently in this style to various other events across the past hundred years, so that the response to Gaza would seem to be the same. In any case, what I am describing is the impulse behind concern over Gaza and other humanitarian disasters, which regardless of the 'emotional incontinence' involved would conflict with your initial appraisal of it coming down to historical legalism. Line up Gaza and all the other situations that have provoked this response, and the common factor is consequentialist humanitarian concerns.

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