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It's not technically culture war, but Hamas has just attacked Israel en-masse, overwhelming the Iron Dome with 5000 rockets and even sending raiding parties into Israel. It looks like Haman and/or Shabak haven't done their job at all, and Israel has been caught with its pants down.
For the culture war angle, I think the biggest question is of retribution. On one hand, Israeli public will now demand a reaction that makes the ongoing Hamas attack pale in comparison. On the other hand, what can Israel do to a very densely populated Gaza strip that won't be branded as a war crime or ethnic cleansing?
I’m on record as being a squish on the JQ, and by extension the IQ (Israel Question), relative to other users here who share some of my other political commitments. Yes, I’m aware of many of the most damning conspiracy theories about Israel’s skulduggery when it comes to its relationship with American foreign policy, and I even think many of them are 100% true. I have no illusions about Israel, or at least Israel’s leadership, as a genuine friend of the American or European people. I don’t want American boots on the ground to intervene in this crisis.
That being said, my approach to the Israel/Palestine conflict has always been “which side is more similar to me, and to people like me?” There’s no world in which the answer is the Palestinians. We can argue for eternity about whether or not Jews are white, whether Israel is a Western country, whether it’s in the best interests of people who care about the future of the West to strategically undermine Israel, etc., but compared to a bunch of dirt-poor third-world Arabs, it’s no contest. I want to see Israel embrace cruelty and brutality in a way that we have not seen any industrialized modern democracy do in 60 years, and I want it to be an example to the world of the kind of mindset that European and Anglosphere countries absolutely must emulate in the years to come. The world is about to become a far more savage place, and maybe the fact that Israel has always spiritually had one foot in the West and one foot in the Middle East means that it will have to be the first one to tear off that scab.
For optics reasons, I’m going to be intentionally vague about what precisely I’m imagining.
If optics was your goal, you would have left that sentence out altogether.
Optics are a spectrum, and this was as far along that spectrum as I was willing to publicly go. You’re correct that I could have gone less far, but I also could have gone farther, but didn’t.
A statement like:
has the effect of riling people up, and not being specific about why this mindset is necessary allows the speaker to evade questions he does not wish to answer. That does not fit the ethos of this forum. We are not called TheBailey.
I've always appreciated your posts, even though I don't share your motivations, because I like clear thinking and rational debate. I don't object to anyone advancing provocative claims, as long as they give others a fair opportunity to rebut. Your statement was provocative, but it was too vague for someone to argue against.
Right, there have been multiple times in the last month when I have begun to type out a far more clear explication of specific steps which I think need to be taken - the Lampedusa stuff in particular has stirred up some especially visceral reactions in me - but ultimately I’ve deleted all of them. I’ve said before that one of my goals when posting here is to soften people’s perceptions of white identitarians; to show that at least some of us are normal and reasonably well-adjusted people, able to clearly articulate arguments and to joke around and act like human beings. To show that we’re not just hate-filled, bloodthirsty, atavistic monsters.
This goal is sometimes at odds with the fact that there are certain problems which almost certainly will require violent and cruel behavior, and I fear that the time is rapidly approaching when such solutions will become urgently necessary. Explicitly advocating for such an approach, though, is counterproductive to my optical goals. Pretending to disavow such an approach, though, would be dishonest - especially when we’re discussing a very graphic and high-profile textbook example of precisely the sort of problem that would require that type of solution.
This leaves me in the uncomfortable and suboptimal position of having to pull some punches and to occasionally lack clarity. I’m perfectly willing to speak plainly and to pontificate at length about most subjects, but when it comes to discussing violence - particularly against identifiable ethnic groups - I do find that I have to walk a finer line.
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