Earlier quoted context omitted.
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It was a genocide long before October 7th.
In what way?
They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
481–490 of 536 posts
Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
The stated objective of the Final Solution was to murder literally every Jew in Europe, thus the “Final”. The stated objective of Hamas, voted into power by the Arabs of Gaza, is to murder literally every Jew in Israel. I don’t think that anywhere in the Likud manifesto for the democratic elections of the democratic state of Israel it states that genocide of the Gazans is a policy. Do you see the difference between a…
The current Hamas charter states that they fight Zionism, not for them being jews but for their own stated goal of stealing their land, which they have and are continuing to do. Why are you trying to pretend that Israel have not had far right forces within it for a very long time, they're currently in power. I'm not saying that Hamas is good by saying that Israel is also bad, both are bad, but only one of them came t…
> I'm not saying that Hamas is good by saying that Israel is also bad, both are bad, but only one of them came there with the goal to steal the land of the people living there.
If you mean Hamas was founded with the goal of stealing the land (by destroying Israel), then yes.
But it's not correct historically to talk about Jews coming to Israel to "steal" the land - the majority before the founding of Israel came as refugees looking for a place they wouldn't be oppressed, and came mostly legally as immigrants, legally buying the land, not "stealing" anything.
The majority immediately after Israel's founding were either a) the remaining European Jews that had been rounded up in concentration camps but hadn't been killed by the Holocaust, and that spent a few years in displaced persons camps with nowhere to go, until the UN collectively voted to give them a tiny patch of land in Israel, or b) Jews ethnically cleansed from the Arab world.
Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not everything is related to Israel, and there's no good reason to believe that this has anything to do with Israel Netanyahu himself tweeted in support of Elon Musk after his nazi-like salute. This is obviously about Israel. > it's quite clear now that you're confusing the fight for the freedom of Palestinians and the hatred of Jews I didn't mention Jews, you are the one confusing Jews and Israel. There are many J…
You are claiming that Israel has “irresistible leverage” over American presidents, so you're gonna need a lot of clarification to who that this isn't an antisemitic dog whistle. What exactly do you think this leverage is?
No I don't owe any clarification to support what is obvious. At this point, the fact that Israel has almost complete control of US politics is the null hypothesis. It's those who deny it that need to provide very convincing, non-handwavy, alternative explanations of why the US is constantly doing Israel's bidding against international law, the international community and basic human rights, damaging its own standing and authority and going against its own geopolitical interest. And why the representatives of US people fly the Israeli flag outside and inside their offices, and why AIPAC boasts to manage to get elected 95% of those it supports, and why such a foreign interference is even allowed in the country, etc. etc.
Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
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How is the response to Oct 7 a defensive action? Using block sized bombs to take out one terrorist minutes after shooting a missile and has already left the scene when smaller munitions from drones can do the job is defensive? The military threat of Hama' s is a few RPGs that have barely injured anyone since the war started. How does Israel even know the ratio, they're not counting deaths. All Hamas wanted from the b…
> How is the response to Oct 7 a defensive action? Using block sized bombs to take out one terrorist minutes after shooting a missile and has already left the scene when smaller munitions from drones can do the job is defensive? The military threat of Hama' s is a few RPGs that have barely injured anyone since the war started.
You're minimizing Hamas's rocket fire on Israel (which weren't RPGs) because it "barely injured anyone". And that part is true, but you're misunderstanding the costs here. In the weeks after October 7th, Israel was effectively shut down. There were sirens that forced the majority of Israelis into safe rooms 5, 6 times a day. Schools couldn't open, workplaces could barely function.
And of course, the reason these rockets "didn't hurt anyone" is because of millions spent shooting them down.
Now I don't know which of Israel's actions are "justified", if any. And I don't know what is "morally correct response" to a foreign territory ruled by a terrorist organization effectively shutting down your country. But I don't think you can simply dismiss this. It's a real problem.
How many times would you be willing to run into a safe room with your terrified children, before you say "well we need to put a stop to this?".
> All Hamas wanted from the beginning to release hostages was for Israel to do the same.
All Hamas wanted was to invade Israel, shoot massive rounds of rockets at it for weeks, and for Israel to not respond because they took hostages. Had Israel not responded, they would've repeated this again and again. It's also very possible that Hezbollah, whom we now know had massive preparations underway for a similar invasion of Israel, would've carried out that plan and invaded Israel, leading to far more death for everyone.
(btw, if your implication is that the Palestinian prisoners released today are "hostages" in the same sense as the Israeli hostages in Gaza, then I have to disagree with you.)
Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Eh. Pretty much everyone called what happened in Gaza an attempt at genocide, including many Israeli scholar. The wiki page [1] list some source from the U.N, various NGO, ... Amos Goldberg ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_Goldberg ) called it a genocide, and the ICC launched an investigation (ofc, blocked by Israel). Is Hamas a terrorist group ? Yeah, by many definitions. But if you accept this, you also cannot…
> you also cannot not see how what Israel did in Gaza, and has been doing for years with Palestinian, is not genocide
In what way is "what Israel has done for years" genocide, if we're not including the response to October 7th?
> mass killing of civilian (it is estimated, by many source, that roughly 45000 Palestinian died, of which at least ~80% where civilian) ...
Every civilian death is tragic. But if civilians aren't targeted, but are killed as part of other military actions, then it is the unfortunate and terrible reality of war. Unless you consider every war genocide, this doesn't show that it was a genocide. (I'm not sure your 80% number if anywhere near accurate, btw.)
> If you accept the Shoah, the Armenian genocide, the genocide of the tutsis, ... You cannot logically not see this as a Palestinian genocide.
Let's make clear the difference. In the Shoah (Holocaust), Jews were rounded up, sent to concentration camps, then killed by various means. They were not a hostile armed group, not in a territory that was controlled by militants, or anything like that. They were literally civilians that were rounded up and killed.
None of that applies in Gaza. Civilians are not rounded up and killed. They are killed as terrible, horrible collateral damage while attempting to kill militants. If the militants, who are their current government, were to put down their arms - the war would be over immediately.
Also - since the Holocaust, the Jewish population still hasn't recovered its numbers. The Gazan population has only increased. This isn't proof of anything (it can be an attempted genocide even with a low count of dead), but you're comparing ~30k civilian deaths to 6 million Jewish deaths in the Holocaust.
> Eh. Pretty much everyone called what happened in Gaza an attempt at genocide, including many Israeli scholar.
Many people have called it a genocide. Many people called it a genocide two days into the war, and some have been saying Israel is committing genocide for years, which makes you think it's something they think without Israel's actual actions since October 7th having any relevance to it.
But by no means "pretty much everyone" calls it a Genocide. What determines whether something is a genocide is not a show of hands of a select group of organizations.
Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work I'm sceptical of that. I tend to suspect that Michael Gove's "the people have had enough of experts" thing was _kind_ of correct; there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout, at least, the West at the moment. (I don't think this is quite the same as traditiona…
Fwiw, my experience from growing up in deep red America was that anti-intellectualism was staggeringly strong there. People would actually define their beliefs in opposition to those of people they perceived to be 'smart'. The way that I always understood this was that if they had a disagreement with someone 'smarter' than them, and they operated in good faith, they would lose ~98% of the time. This doesn't feel good…
This is a very good description of the paranoid, mob-mentality anti-intellectual subculture I've seen wax and wane in America throughout my lifetime. And I grew up in the 80s surrounded by people who were rejects from this anti-intellectual culture, who were smart enough to think all kinds of unauthorized thoughts for themselves. I believed that, above all things, this rejectionist safety-seeking and fearful mob mentality was old and that it was inevitable that its smarter progeny would rebel against it.
It's really only when you look at it through the frame of the Weimar Republic, or, the 60s youth in Argentina or Chile or the 50s in Hungary or right now in Russia or China, that you see how fragile individualism is, because it is so damn easy to whip up a mob against anyone who thinks differently, as you're describing. What is so telling about this book is how the mob itself barely even thinks it's a mob. Most of the time it doesn't even think it's doing any harm or anything unpopular. That is the lesson that we need to learn as a species - not some vague idea of freedom, but that hard individualism is more valuable than easy camaraderie. There were about 50 years worth of Hollywood movies trying to reinforce this notion, but about 10 years of social media obliterated it.
Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the current thing is a little bit different, though. It has gone from "academics are bad" to "anyone who knows how to do a thing is unsuitable to do that thing", which is a far more extreme viewpoint.
I got a little carried away with this response and it's a little off-topic, but I figured it might be worth posting anyway. I think this has to do with the nonlinear growth in the human-facing complexity of the world over the past 30 years. Humans aren't getting more intelligent (they may not be getting dumber either, but at the very least, the hardware is the same), but the complexity of the world that we have to en…
There is a lot in this that is phenomenally well stated. I don't disagree with most of it.
I'd point out that there was a lag between when extremely well informed people started to get the firehose of bullshit and when they became able to parse some facts from it; right about at that moment, the firehose was turned on the totally unprepared, uninformed mass of other people, and since that point it's been a power struggle over who controls this out of control hose. But that's not to say that, at some point, the incredible level of distrust among the confused and ill-informed won't turn against whoever seems to be pointing the hose at them at the moment. If simple answers are what people need, then information overload has its own logical way of overwhelming whoever is trying to control the flow of information.
Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fwiw, my experience from growing up in deep red America was that anti-intellectualism was staggeringly strong there. People would actually define their beliefs in opposition to those of people they perceived to be 'smart'. The way that I always understood this was that if they had a disagreement with someone 'smarter' than them, and they operated in good faith, they would lose ~98% of the time. This doesn't feel good…
I'm in a red state and I hard disagree with your generalizations. Even in red red red states Kamilla got 30%-40% of the vote. Trump got 40% in California.
I think you should re-read what they wrote. Asserting that you're part of a group of people who agree with you (aka conformism) is what they're saying is common in places that hate intellectualism and are scared of individualism. You're kind of just doing what they said you'd do.
Not just that, but your post is almost a perfect example of the attitude which most of the Germans in the book "The Germans 1933-1945" ended up regretting, if not on moral grounds, then after it led to the destruction of their country.
Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
#489"The Germans" is an absolutely jaw dropping read, a series of interviews with average German citizens and low-level nazi party members, conducted a decade or so after the war, by an American Jewish journalist. It shows, in first hand accounts, the banality of evil and how easily it can prevail if people do nothing. It is an account of modern tyranny and everyday collaboration. The parallels in the feeling of what's h…
In France, I remember we read several classic allegories on that theme at schools. Rhinoceros by Ionesco (even watched it in the theater as a school trip), also The Plague (Albert Camus). I didn't think much of it when I was a teenager, but I'm looking at them on the light of these recent events. Especially Rhinoceros on ideological contagion.
Is "The Plague" considered an allegory of the struggle against upcoming extremism?
While reading it I saw some parallels with occupation: people trying to escape, some suffering from being separated from their loved ones, those abusing the system and enriching themselves with contraband, help being flown in irregularly, etc. But I didn't get as far as Nazism.
Do you happen to remember which elements supported that supposed theme?
Re: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
> DO people identify as British or European? And that framing is where the trick is hidden. People are perfectly capable of accepting and having multiple identities. They can be a mom of their kids, a receptionist of company X, a neighbour of street Y, a citizen of city Z, a member of the flower gardening society, a supporter of football club Q, citizens of the UK and Europeans too. In fact you don't have to choose b…
They can have multiple identities, but may not want to be British and European.any more than a Scottish nationalist wants to be Scottish and British. This is a very common conflict for many communities around the world and rarely is “just be both” a satisfactory solution: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separatism
America is a bit different and, for some generations, consider ourselves better than the ugly factionalism and national identitarianism that led Europe into centuries of pointless warfare. One can be an African-Mexican-Asian-Queer-Irish-Jewish-Italian-American without subjugating one's identity.
Basically that's because "American" isn't a breed, like Scots or French. It's a political choice and an identity which is (should be) open to anyone who lives here and adopts the Constitution as the set of laws they want to live by.
Ironically, this is why Yarvin and Musk and Thiel will fail in their attempts at overthrowing the US government to create "network states". The US is the original state founded on a set of ideas rather than identities. (Since, at least, the Roman Republic). That is its strength, and something difficult for Europeans to really understand.