naraburns nihil supernum
6mo 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.
I think there’s a more innocuous way that this helps the dissident right, which doesn’t involve summoning the specter of anti-semitism. It’s as simple as: “look at this people proud of their bloodline, who make their ancestry the focus of their relationship with God Himself, who never dwell on any historical guilt on their part (such an idea is anathema), who impugn the whole world’s history with the guilt of hating them without cause, who have legislated in Israel to keep a portion of their bloodline pure forever, who deny the atrocities they committed in the founding of their Lebensraum (PDF warning / bottom of pg 83) (so boldly in fact that they accuse the victims of atrocities in the same breath), whose lawmakers call for ethnic cleansing without blemish to their reputation.”
Rather than leading to a hatred of Zionist Jews, this would lead to a love and admiration of them as an exemplar of behavior for Western conservatives.
It can be both. Sometime, a white racist says that black people are racists too, and it means two things: (1) they are racists, because there is no such thing as human rights, equality or whatever, everyone just fights for his own people; (2) they are racists, so it's better for us to be racist against them, because they are dangerous to us. Those two claims are complementary. But there are still holes in that theory, the first one beeing how you establish the boundaries between your people and the rest of the world, and the second one that the existence of bad people is no argument against morality.
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Notes -
I think there’s a more innocuous way that this helps the dissident right, which doesn’t involve summoning the specter of anti-semitism. It’s as simple as: “look at this people proud of their bloodline, who make their ancestry the focus of their relationship with God Himself, who never dwell on any historical guilt on their part (such an idea is anathema), who impugn the whole world’s history with the guilt of hating them without cause, who have legislated in Israel to keep a portion of their bloodline pure forever, who deny the atrocities they committed in the founding of their Lebensraum (PDF warning / bottom of pg 83) (so boldly in fact that they accuse the victims of atrocities in the same breath), whose lawmakers call for ethnic cleansing without blemish to their reputation.”
Rather than leading to a hatred of Zionist Jews, this would lead to a love and admiration of them as an exemplar of behavior for Western conservatives.
It can be both. Sometime, a white racist says that black people are racists too, and it means two things: (1) they are racists, because there is no such thing as human rights, equality or whatever, everyone just fights for his own people; (2) they are racists, so it's better for us to be racist against them, because they are dangerous to us. Those two claims are complementary. But there are still holes in that theory, the first one beeing how you establish the boundaries between your people and the rest of the world, and the second one that the existence of bad people is no argument against morality.
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