328 Comments
User's avatar
⭠ Return to thread
Vin LoPresti's avatar

While I'm aware that this comment opens me up to all sorts of rebound hatred, it naturally flows from psychological logic, reinforced by certain videos of mass support for IDF actions by groups of Israeli citizens (and their US Zionist counterparts) I begin to think that the collective scars of the European holocaust were/are so deep and pervasive in the Zionist psyche of Israeli society that the ultimate outcome is a society trapped in a mass psychosis of self-justifiable torture and murder. and when I hear that "Israel has a right to defend itself", I quickly morph that thought to: If that mass psychosis is real, Israel doesn't even have a right to exist as an equal partner among nations. And then, to be fair, I must apply that same metric to my own country, the good ol' US of A. But that latter thought has been with me for decades now.

Expand full comment
Feral Finster's avatar

I'd say that the way to make any group of humans into roaring assholes is to give them unlimited rights and no responsibilities.

Expand full comment
Daniel Appleton's avatar

As I just posted, they think that they have a GOLDEN TICKET from God ( which one ? )

Expand full comment
Michael's avatar

I suspect they generally don’t believe that but use it as an excuse. Many use religion to justify atrocities to weaker minds

Expand full comment
Daniel Appleton's avatar

Conquistadors, missionaries, slave owners, people who passed out diseased blankets on Native American reservations..... AND it's mainly monotheistic religions.

Expand full comment
Anti-Hip's avatar

"it's mainly monotheistic religions."

It's clear to me that the Abrahamic tradition of Eye-of-Sauron monster gods is the Mother of all Psy-Ops. Absolutely nothing compares to its psychic power, even after the rather withering onslaught of the half-millenium Enlightenment.

Expand full comment
Daniel Appleton's avatar

They have quite a vice grip on most Western cultures. I ENVY Europe because Thoth bless them ( ! ) they're pursuing a secular mindset / way of life. They are shaking the shackles of archaic belief systems. That isn't a SMALL ACHIEVEMENT. The 1st sentient AI will question most human belief systems, as will any possible ETs whose attention is attracted to us, for some reason.

Expand full comment
Vin LoPresti's avatar

I should've also mentioned the deep psychosis entailed in the Hannibal directive by which Israel kills its own to sustain some twisted pieces of veneer to its policies. Well covered by Max Blumenthal in a Hedges interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0gECjlpXF8

and in a Grayzone piece.

https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/27/israels-military-shelled-burning-tanks-helicopters/

Expand full comment
Uta's avatar

Not only Jews were holocausted in Nazi Germany, but many Germans too: communists, socialists, alcoholics, the disabled, gypsies, vagabonds, gay, Jehova's Witnesses, other Christians, feminists, intellectuals, artists, musicians...the collective scars of the holocaust are so deep in Germany's and Europe's psyche, that even the word "nation" should be forbidden.

Expand full comment
Anti-Hip's avatar

What do those crimes against outcasts have to do with nationhood, and needing to forbid it? This is a very strange POV to me. I think that at the beginning of the French Revolution they had it right: Liberty (Rightism), Equality (Leftism), and Fraternity (at root, shared identity as a people).

None of these, or any other, components of a nation, properly constituted -- yes, including "communists, socialists, alcoholics, the disabled, gypsies, vagabonds, gay, Jehova's Witnesses, other Christians, feminists", etc. etc. -- need be exiled. To foment do so is a perversion of idea of "Fraternite".

But then, it was Marx that began setting internal components of nation at (supposed necessary) war -- no longer negotiation -- with each other, and the rest has been a very sorry history.

Expand full comment
Uta's avatar

Cher citoyen! If there is a nation, it would be defined by identity. The 'outcasts' were not outcast at all, but they provided identity: the markets, the music, books, art, language, religion. After the holocaust, culture was kitsch. False identity for everyone.

National borders however, are traditionally made by militarists. A real national identity has fractal borders like an island: the more you zoom in, the longer is its coastline. The coastline paradox. Israel has a fractal Palestine inside of it, besides kibbuzim, and are these not communist?

I don't understand what you say about Marx.

Expand full comment
Anti-Hip's avatar

"I don't understand what you say about Marx."

"Workers of the world, unite!" was a *war* cry. And with it, Marx hijacked Leftism. Leftism is about democracy (the "egalite" AND "fraternite" parts of the French motto) at its most fundamental. Democracy requires eternal, open-minded fluidity in politics, not rigid dogma.

Marx likes to speak of alienation. However, for him alienation (in the relatively new industrialization) not only occurs (explicitly) in the divorce of product from use. It also occurs (implicitly) in the fact that the parties -- worker and owner -- to the crime of property alienation were *themselves* alienated from each other. The destruction of national fraternity led to a "crystalized" alienation of citizen from citizen.

The latter didn't have to occur. But, IMO, Marxists *wanted* it to occur, to create an army of the powerless under their thumbs. This was implemented eventually under Lenin and his vanguards, and we all know how that cry of "power to the people" worked out, not only in Russia, but as well in nearly *all* similar efforts of the twentieth century. That's what happens when you foment a war and create a power vacuum without explaining what you're doing. "Oh, wow, *we* the vanguard will fill that vacuum! Don't worry your pretty little heads over it, soldiers-slash-worker bees!"

Now, since roughly the 50s, when the population of unherdable class-cats (that is, who migrate between classes) started going out of fashion, this so-called "Left" have the bright idea of separating people not by mutable characteristics (class), but by *immutable* ones (all the embedded identities of humans), whipped up and organized by the vanguard inheritors of Marxism. Does this sound like a way to "bring people together"?

Expand full comment
Ohio Barbarian's avatar

Any diatribe about Marx that does not even mention capitalism or economic class is either incredibly ignorant or based on anti-Marxist propaganda, and not even well done propaganda at that.

Expand full comment
Anti-Hip's avatar

"alienation ... in the divorce of product from use" [I should have said "production" here]

"worker and owner"

"unherdable class-cats (that is, who migrate between classes)"

i.e. Did I not identify that there are problems with class? There's not a lot one can cover in a handful of paragraphs -- especially when pointing out a different problem.

So, what are some great new insights about class today, that will be just the trick to turn the world around to an actually *viable* solution? Hint: We Leftists are barking up the wrong tree. We need to figure out better how societies actually work. If Marx himself actually understood, then we have to ask about his motives.

Just because Marx identified class (and eloquently) didn't mean he knew what to do about it. We in the 21st century have the great advantage of seeing what happened when his followers attempted to implement a revolt, and *dozens* of times. In my opinion, this is in large part based on a rigid *war* attitude, of implacable us-vs.-them, my team right or wrong, and of fight-to-the-death. It is this same war mindset that infects modern societies to this day. Made sense, maybe, in existential confrontations between hunter-gatherer bands tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago. But the only war needed *today* is to quarantine sociopaths/psychopaths -- they're the true enemies of society, and they're found everywhere. We need to put our thinking caps on.

So, it's past high time to step out of this box. I'd like to recognize that Leftism (social fairness), Rightism (individualist freedom), and Nationhood (societal belonging) are all pieces of the same puzzle of how to run a society.

Expand full comment
Anti-Hip's avatar

"shared identity as a people"

I mean that as in geographic -- and in consequence, language, culture, etc. -- realms, where it has been natural and near-universal for a very long time. That is, since the dawn of agriculture. But where that goes awry, then, it seems, there can be problems.

Expand full comment
Daniel Appleton's avatar

TRIBALISM is a mindset in which NO ONE is a complete winner, one group loses territory, the other loses ethics / morals & soul, it crumbles away.

Expand full comment
andy tonti's avatar

Oh yeah, defend yourself in the back pocket of the sugar daddy USA!!! Sniveling cowardice!!!

Expand full comment
Jeano's avatar

This is soooo good Vin, thank you.

Expand full comment
Michael's avatar

As a moral argument, I think you have a point. As a practical argument, it’s not practical to go back in time. Some things can’t be undone and now you have a moral and practical conundrum. Both have a right to exist now regardless of history and both have innocent people to consider in a resolution

Expand full comment
Phillip Badger's avatar

No. They most certainly do NOT have a right to exist and they never did. This is like arguing that Nazi Germany should have a right to exist since they existed in the 1930s. Da fuk is wrong with you. Israel hasn't existed since 322 BC when Alexander the Great eliminated them. Fuck that idea. It's psychotic and delusional.

Expand full comment
Daniel Appleton's avatar

A fallacy on par with THIS GEM : " America has always been a Christian nation ". How were we Christian before the arrival of Europeans, pray tell ?

Expand full comment
Michael's avatar

‘Da fuck’ do you propose that doesn’t involve a Jewish genocide?

Expand full comment
Phillip Badger's avatar

"Da Fuk" can't you see that Israel is committing a genocide right fucking now. That's not "defense". You're like arguing that Hitler, or any other mass-murdering dictatorial monster just "had to do what he had to do" or else they'd be defeated. Are you abjectly stupid, or just evil? Humans have been forced to get along RATHER THAN SLAUGHTER EACH OTHER for fucking ever. And if the Israelis get slaughtered, guess whose fault that will be -- THEIR OWN. The Palestinians let them migrate there is the 40's, sympathetic to their suffering in the Holocaust, then the fucking "Israelis" turned the tables on them, as if they had learned from Hitler's techniques rather than decided to condemn them forever as the rest of the world had. The Israelis are the new Reich. They are literally fascists and Nazis; hell, Albert Einstein even called them out on that. So you can take your Nazi-apologia and GTFO of here.

They should have listed to Einstein and his other Jewish friends who wrote the following typo the NYT decades ago:

https://archive.org/details/AlbertEinsteinLetterToTheNewYorkTimes.December41948

Expand full comment
JennyStokes's avatar

I don't think Palestinians had any say in the matter.

Expand full comment
Michael's avatar

You didn’t answer my question

Expand full comment
Phillip Badger's avatar

Answer your own question you lying piece of shit. "Israel" started this and they can end it. "Israel" can either work for peace or they can get DESTROYED. Or are you so stupid and/or indoctrinated that you can't see this. You're arguing that Hitler had to keep going or else he'd get wiped out. Well guess what, wiping out Hitler was the only way to end it. Sadly, Nazis were imported into the US after the war, and that shit lives on, both in the US and "Israel". It's time to truly wipe out Nazism.

Expand full comment
Jeano's avatar

I will—how about making them live in one state where all rights and duties are shared by all citizens with a real constitution (Israel doesn’t have one) and is a protectorate of the UN outside the security council. Wipe “Israel” off the map just as we should pull down all the confederate statues put up in the 1920’s and claimed as “heritage” by the murderous South.

Expand full comment
Jeano's avatar

Who is conferring this “right” anyway? Some god, some pope, some military, some self-righteous mofo?

Expand full comment
Daniel Appleton's avatar

Evangelicals are cheerleading it, if not spearheading it themselves.

Expand full comment