- cross-posted to:
- tankie@lemmy.ml
- palestine@lemmy.ml
- palestine
- cross-posted to:
- tankie@lemmy.ml
- palestine@lemmy.ml
- palestine
I took this comment and made a post with it
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Many claim that last stage of genocide is “denial”
But i think last stage of genocide is “normalization” - genociders convincing peopke that what happened was just a fate or inevitable or even normal.
Look at USA. Mfs dont deny their ancestors genocided natives, they claim it was “normal flow of history” and “it just happened”
It is basicaly taunting those that survived - “look, we are so powerful we can admit our evilness without consenquences”
Look at USA. Mfs dont deny their ancestors genocided natives, they claim it was “normal flow of history” and “it just happened”
“At least we can talk about it.”
Endless talk, maybe a hollow apology, never full reparations and return of sovereignty.
Maybe some sports teams in the future that feature cartoon representations of the annihilated peoples.
But only if their team name is also a slur.
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Exactly.
But when non-europeans uses their might and kick out empire (like in Haitian revolution) they instantly flip and critize their “cruelty” and “savagery”
Look at USA. Mfs dont deny their ancestors genocided natives, they claim it was “normal flow of history” and “it just happened”
It’s so normalized that an entire genre of media celebrates it.
I point this out when people act apathetic about past genocides. Not attempting to actively combat injustices in the past still haunting today is to give the greenlight for more like it to happen.
Okay but have you considered using previous genocides as both an automatic immunity from criticism as well as a cudgel to whip up support for current and future genocide???
Checkmate, libs!
Israel is what happens when you take Amerikkka, boil it to concentrate and distill its essence, and replace christian fascism with jewish facism. A settler colonial state that has a founding story of fleeing religious persecution that steals land and murders and expels the inhabitants. What one am I talking about here?
It’s still good old fashioned Christian fascism that’s powering Israel’s genocide. It may be a few ethnonationalist Jews with their finger on the trigger, but the gun in their hand and the unlimited supply of bullets come from white American Christians that believe Jesus will personally come down from heaven to wipe out every Jew once they’ve finished off the Arabs. Israel is just the condom the the US uses to fuck west Asia. It’s a glorified forward operating base.
But that’s a bit reductive. Yes Christian fascism is a significant reason for Israel’s existence and power, but so are material geopolitical goals.
I ask you to perhaps consider if maybe fascism could have possibly co-opted both Christianity and Judaism rather than the other way around?
For sure. Religious ideas are a product of the material circumstances around them. Christianity didn’t make the US a nation of white settlers, it was a nation of white settlers that adapted their inherited European Christianity to their own conditions of modern imperial conquest. The same can be said of Israel, where the settler colonial character of the state is making a real effort to redefine what Judaism means and adapt it to their political goals of “national rebirth” and “ethnic purity”: fash shit.
What I was trying to get across in my original comment wasn’t that the religious character of US or Israel was the dominant factor in explaining their behavior. I was trying to communicate that Israel isn’t just independently replicating the colonial success of the US with Judaism substituted for Christianity. The US usurped the entire world imperial mantle from Europe. That’s not something the Israeli state is going to do.
Even if the entire settler population of occupied Palestine were uniformly and consciously committed to the state project of replicating American Indian removal, they don’t have the independent means of doing that. An independent Israeli state acting with this level of regional belligerence would get crushed by every neighboring state, and wouldn’t have the internal productive capacity to carry out its campaign. They’d have to integrate to survive, and minoritarian ethnonationalism would become extremely unpopular under those conditions. The growth of “Jewish fascism” within the Israeli state isn’t the driving force behind the state’s behavior, it’s just the ideology that grows to fit the artificial conditions (infinite outside resources and absolute external military protection from international interference) they find themselves in.
The US state interest in creating these conditions are, at the end of the day, primarily material: it’s a forward operating base to project military hegemony on a resource rich region. The Israeli settlers are filling the role of military contractors for the US. The Israeli settlers can believe whatever they want about their own agency in the process so long as they continue to accomplish US objectives without producing US military deaths.
Most US settlers aren’t conscious of this, and also don’t share the Israeli settler priority of creating an artificial Jewish ethnostate for its own sake. I think the reason US settlers who aren’t conscious of the empire’s material objectives can be counted on to invest culturally in the Israel project in a way that they never will for Ukraine or other imperial FOBs is rooted in characteristics fairly unique to the development of the dominant forms of American Christianity: Americans don’t support Israel because they have a unique love for Jews. Jews have always been fairly low on the American ethnic and religious hierarchy, and still are when separated from the Israel project. The cultural reason you can have a country full of people that hates Jews but loves Israel is because the dominant forms of American Christianity developed a doctrinal need to bring about the apocalypse by sending the hated Jews to die killing the hated Muslims. It’s not the root material cause, but I do think it’s considerable factor in explaining the lasting cultural investment in the Israel project by US settlers that historically have no love for Jews, and don’t have this level of lasting cultural investment in other imperial FOBs.
i mean, bibi is essentially sitting in jerusalem with one hand on the genocide dial looking back at the us to see how high he can turn it up before biden freaks out
The only way Biden would freak out is if Bibi suggests killing Biden himself
Unfortunately it looks like he’s got near unlimited headroom.
yeah, i think the only reason they don’t go quicker is out of fear that someone will finally start to care
God damn.
Struggling to see what the point of morality is when you’re just standing alone. Really makes you think like you’re the one in the wrong, but I guess that’s what happens when you’re trying to convince those who believe evil is the default state of human nature
But you’re not alone. Most of the world stands with Palestine. Even if the governments are too weak to do anything materially, or they’re too connected with Israel to do anything, or if the people protesting are ultimately stuck marching on their own streets - the majority of the world undeniably support Palestine, and many even support its armed resistance.
I have to get the fuck out of the United States
If by morality you mean endless philosophizing devoid of action, yes that is pointless. Famous Marx line about the point being to change the world, not only interpret it.
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Seeing the discourse in Canada and Australia is awful. Absolutely no acknowledgement of settler-colonialism. They have subreddits (I know, I know) for the countries and some posts were comparing what happened in Canada and Australia to Palestine and it seemed most people could not accept that setter-colonial countries have a stained history.
There are land acknowledgements, then in the next sentence there will be without skipping a beat, condemnation of the people of Palestine. One comment I saw took issue with a statement that had “so called Australia” in it, I believe referring to the fact that these places had names before they were colonized by imperial powers.
Anytime anything Aboriginal is mentioned in the Australia subreddit, the redditors act like the OP just murdered a baby in front of them. The mere thought that Aboriginal people are human and actually have a history is offensive to Australia’s redditors. r/Australia is a cesspit that stands out against the other cesspits, every fucking racist thing you can think of is spoken proudly there, and those who argue against it get banned.
Jesus, yeah that tracks. Not sure if you have seen it, if you mention Romani people (commonly referred to as g*psy) in any Euro-centric or adjacent subreddit you’ll see the mask drop fast.
In some threads, USians will be talking about Romani folks quite reasonably and when time passes and it’s end of work hours for Euros you’ll notice a shift in rhetoric and the mask will drop. Some of the lefter USians will be confused, like, how are these folks so blatantly prejudiced? They really think Romani people are inferior? That they are all criminals?
Practically every European I’ve met has opened the conversation with a “joke” about the Romani. I don’t even think Australia has a Romani population, but it’s shocking how openly awful people will be about them. Like, Australia is a really fucking racist country, but visiting Euros seem to take that as a challenge.
I feel really bad for kids in public school right now learning about concentration camps in holocaust for the first time, because you know that’s gotta be confusing as fuck to come home and see everyone cheerleading Israel on the TV doing the exact same shit to Palestinians, then you go back to school and read sad stories about the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world ™
But it’s not framed that way, and a lot of children won’t see the similarities. I may not have, once upon a time, as critical thinking isn’t encouraged at school. There are many things I think about in relation to economics and foreign and domestic policy which I had to have pointed out to me by more experiened leftists. This frustrates me, as I should have been able to spot these glaring double standards and errors by myself; it also makes me worry about the children of today, who may go their entire adult lives without encountering anything which intellectually challenges them.
Sure, but the ones that do see it are going to be very confused, and God help them if they try to ask an adult to explain
I feel like it’ll go more the way of Turkey and the Armenian genocide than anything else. Israel already has the “International Community” by the balls in order to prevent them from even calling it a genocide the way Turkey did with foreign governments.
I disagree. The only people who will think like this are liberals, and who gives a fuck what they think? Libs gonna lib, as they always have. Left-wingers (some of them, at least - I assume there were some who thought differently) have always been critical of colonialism and imperialism - Marx wrote scathingly about atrocities committed by the British against the Chinese and Engles had some thoughts about the English occupation of Ireland, for example. If it seems as though no-one cared about the Aboriginal Australians or the First Nations people, it was very likely because not as much was known about them; there were only so many socialist thinkers at the time, and they were probably more preoccupied by potential revolutions going on closer to home.
However, the surviving indigenous peoples of America and Australia certainly won’t forget what happened to them, or what is still happening to them. The palestinians have the support not just of white European and American leftists like myself, but broadly of the Muslim diaspora community on those continents and the people of the Islamic nations surrounding Palestine. I know I certainly won’t forget what Israel has done, nor will I ever think it was justified. And what happens when Uncle Sam finds it inconvenient or impossible to stand up for Israel anymore? I don’t know for sure, but it will probably involve a lot more killing.
Who cares what liberals think? Certainly every world leader cares what liberals think, because capitalism is the current world economic system and liberalism is therefore the default hegemonic ideology of most of the world. Netanyahu doesn’t give a shit if you personally don’t forgive him. He knows that history has demonstrated that other states have been forgiven for larger crimes once enough time has past. He knows that other states will have a material interest in normalizing relations in the conditions that he believes will exist in the future, and so most people will forget any historical crimes that interfere with that day to day normalizing of relations when the dust settles.
That’s the real difference of political opinion going on in the Israeli state: the most reactionary elements of Israeli settler society want to get the extermination out of the way quickly so that normalization can begin. They believe that the longer that the extermination remains incomplete, the more likely it is that it can be interrupted by resistance or intervention. The moderate Israeli settlers would prefer to conduct the extermination slowly. They believe a steady gradual expansion of settlements and reduction of the Palestinian population will eventually bring about the same end goal, but with a lower risk of creating a single incident big enough to justify external interference. The progressive Israeli settlers would prefer to handle Palestinian removal with something akin to the American Indian reservation system, where Palestinians can be walled off in isolated ghettos to be kept alive in a token sense and forgotten about.
In all cases, Zionists are unified in their political objective, and they’ll continue pursuing it by whichever strategy they believe is most effective until they either succeed completely at removing the population, or are forced to stop by Palestinian armed resistance and international intervention. Israel won’t stop while they still have infinite resources and imperial protection. The US won’t stop pursing its material interest in the region out of boredom or coincidence. The US will only stop if some combination of international factors change so that further investment in the project would stop being economically viable.
Alright, but we still remember all the shit that happened to the indigenous people at the hands of European settlers, and more importantly, so do the indigenous peoples of the world. That’s not going away, even if the liberal consensus is that it’s all in the past and we should forget about it. This is all part of a historical process, and history doesn’t end once the liberals say it does. It’s all cause and effect. What I don’t like about this post is that it’s just handwringing about the state if things, thereby implying that these struggles are, in fact, in the past. If this is all going to be forgotten, then why do we bother talking about it? We should be documenting and discussing precisely so that it doesn’t get forgotten.
Nothing I wrote here was intended as prescriptive advice for communists. I described how past settler colonialism informed present settler colonialism, because there’s every reason to believe that similar conditions will produce similar results. I’m not claiming it’s good, telling you how how you should feel about it, or telling you what you should do about it.
As historical materialists, we bother remembering and talking about the past to better inform strategies for changing the present. If we can’t draw the right lessons from history, or apply those lessons in a way that changes things for the better, then remembering or talking for it’s own sake is useless. Liberal settlers are more than happy to “keep the idea alive” and “remember” their victims so long as no action prevents them from making more victims to “acknowledge” in the future.
I think an important caveat is that Israel do not literally want all Palestinians to die for the sole sake of them no longer existing. Initially Zionism wanted them off the land so that they could exploit it themselves and their own Israeli working class. But the Israeli economy now relies too much on exploiting Palestinian labor, notably in Israel proper and the West Bank, with large numbers of being going into Israel every day to work. In that they also rely economically on exploiting dirt-cheap Palestinian labor. That doesn’t change the fact that they have still been engaging in slow-motion (in the long-run pov) ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, but it is important for understanding how they will relate to Palestinians. Nor does it change the fact that Israeli politicians, ministers and military officials are thinking, saying and doing genocidal shit, but I don’t think the Israeli state as a political entity thinks it is in their interests to literally industrially murder every last Palestinian for the sake of it. The geopolitical factors here of brutally beating the Palestinians into submission is also an explicit goal that Israeli and American state and intelligence officials have been talking about publicly and privately.
I agree that is probably what they’re doing, but I also read in this an implication that putting the past behind us is a bad thing. Though there is still 100% need to address the current plights and oppression of indigenous people today, as well as the inequalities existing today created by past conditions, you can’t fight a long-forgotten war forever, and that’s probably a good thing.
What “long-forgotten” war are you talking about? Who forgot? Why should it be a good thing to stop fighting? Who do you speak for?
Any of probably millions of historical wars that were fought over issues that don’t affect people anymore? There may well have been very visibly good and bad sides and principles in the conquest of Sumer in 2271 BCE, but that doesn’t mean we should be going to that border to fight over it now. Throughout history, thousands of wars were won, and atrocities done by evil people, and yes, ‘they were unfortunate things that happened in the past’, that sucks, but you can’t chase down every one of those wars and keep fighting it just for the sake of principle.
At some point people had to get over those grievances and focus on fairness and humane treatment of people today. Again, that doesn’t mean forgetting the rights of people who are alive now and still affected by past injustice.
Indigenous people still exist
Again, that doesn’t mean forgetting the rights of people who are alive now
