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naraburns  nihil supernum  7mo ago (text post)   28976 thread views

Israel-Gaza Megathread #1

This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

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Is anyone else here pretty shocked by many on the Left's support of Hamas after these attacks? I'm not talking Biden type people on the Left, but DSA type leftists who support "The Squad". They are more or less saying that Israel deserved this. I really don't understand how you can see a bunch of men slaughter innocent civilians at a music festival, kill innocent civilians just going about their day, capture women and children as hostages, and parade dead bodies around on trucks and upload it to social media and not have sympathy for Israelis. Yet these people are more or less saying Israel deserved this and the real victims of this will be Palestine.

I don't think this is a strawman either. If you go on reddit or Twitter you will see this sentiment. I guess this is the inevitable outcome of the oppressor/oppressed decolonize framework so many of them have adopted. This is pretty blackpilling for me because I would have thought an action like this could shake them out of their biased worldview, but this has actually seemed to do the opposite and make them hate Israel more. It's also pretty unfortunate we have to share a country with these kinds of people and they can vote. I'm not saying you need to love Israel and can't be critical of it, but what happened is to me pretty obviously evil and barbaric, and a lot of people are making excuses for it.

Feelings of inferiority

By “feelings of inferiority” we mean not only inferiority feelings in the strict sense but a whole spectrum of related traits; low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self-hatred, etc. We argue that modern leftists tend to have some such feelings (possibly more or less repressed) and that these feelings are decisive in determining the direction of modern leftism.

Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.

From Industrial Society and Its Future.

He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.

But the same mindset did not hate the USSR when they were strong and successful.

An easier explanation is "The enemy of my enemy's friend is my friend (defeasibly)." It's not that leftists have any particular admiration for the Palestinians, Muslims, or whatever. Instead, their opposition to Israel is because Israel is an American ally, and America is seen as the enemy by modern leftists. It's the same with Putin and Ukraine: the average leftist does not like Putin, but they dislike Ukraine, because they see it as a friend of America.

If one wanted to continue the same train of thought, which I personally don't share, they might argue that all the communists who stopped supporting Soviet Union and became anarchists, Trotskyists, Maoists, New Left etc. did so because Soviet Union was strong and successful.

did so because Soviet Union was strong and successful.

The greatest losses in support came when it stopped looking strong and successful (Brezhnev era) no ?

I'm not actually sure what the exact point would be. A lot of people would have at least seen the Soviet Union as strong right to the very end. However, there was a steady drip of people from a pro-Soviet left to various anti-Soviet left positions even before that, and these were often connected to open displays of strength (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968 etc.)

A lot of people would have at least seen the Soviet Union

Who ? Soviets were clearly stagnating. It was obvious when despite what looked like an advantage in launches, they fell behind, didn't even manage to send people to the moon, their economy was growing far slower, etc..

Having your satellite states break with your political program so that you have to crush them militarily doesn't look strong, it looks weak. Not as weak as open defiance would have been though.

Soviets were clearly stagnating in hindsight, but at the time? Direct comparisons were few and far between, and the people who had a chance to make them certainly seemed surprised enough.

"Even the Politburo doesn't have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev," [Yeltsin] said. When he was told through his interpreter that there were thousands of items in the store for sale he didn't believe it. He had even thought that the store was staged, a show for him.

...

He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."

The Soviets didn't even manage to send people to the moon, but until they were at the brink of dissolution they also didn't even admit they had been trying. Walter Cronkite even bought the Soviet line, ''It turned out there had never been a race to the Moon.'' The fact that Soviet lunar lander hardware and a Saturn-V-scale launcher had ever existed was only revealed decades later, by accident.

Soviets were clearly stagnating in hindsight, but at the time? Direct comparisons were few and far between, and the people who had a chance to make them certainly seemed surprised enough.

Mainstream opinion didn't want them to stagnate, but it's usually shit and honestly, wasn't anyone who ever visited convinced of that ?

Warsaw Pact countries couldn't even provide cars to people who wanted them, couldn't keep facades of buildings looking reasonably good, couldn't provide the goods people wanted to buy.

If you compared 1970s lifestyles and prosperity in Austria vs Czechoslovakia, with both countries starting from basically the same starting line, it'd have been undeniable communism wasn't working well.

This wasn't as obvious before 1970, but after ? Famously, a demographer predicted the dissolution of USSR based mostly on health data.

Todd deduced that the Soviet Union had stagnated in the 1970s and was falling behind not only the West but its own Eastern European satellite states economically. In addition to this, low birth rates, a rising suicide rate, and worker discontent all were factors in an increasingly low level of productivity in the economy. Todd also predicted that poorly carried-out political and economic reforms would lead to a break-up of the Soviet Union with non-Russian republics seceding.

In the case of the anarchists and the Trotskyists, this requires ignoring a lot of what they said, without a clear justification.

Maoists did support the Soviet Union until Mao didn't. They also rejected China as soon as it stopped being Maoist and while it was still far from being a superpower, suggesting that ideology really was their big motivator.

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