naraburns nihil supernum
7mo ago
(text post)
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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Notes -
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.
From Industrial Society and Its Future.
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.
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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