Israel-Hamas War 2023

[Grey Fox]

2 things can be true.

[Razgovory]

You didn't know the far-left was anti-war in 1939-1941?   Last night I was reading about Dalton Trumbo, a Hollywood writer and committed communist.  He had written a book praising the Nazi-Soviet pact, and was anti-war right up until June 1941.  He later won an academy award, there was a movie about him a few years back.  The far left was antiwar because the Soviets were allied with the Nazis.  The far left were anti Israel because the Soviets were.  The Soviets were for two reasons: The Israelis maintained connections to the US and Stalin wasn't keen on Jews.

I posted an article where about Settler-Colonialiasm where the author pointed out the rhetoric of Palestinians and the Walther Darre were basically the same.

Until recently, Palestinian leaders preferred to avoid the language of indigeneity, seeing the implicit comparison between themselves and Native Americans as defeatist. In an interview near the end of his life, in 2004, PLO Chair Yasser Arafat declared, "We are not Red Indians." But today's activists are more eager to embrace the Indigenous label and the moral valences that go with it, and some theorists have begun to recast Palestinian identity in ecological, spiritual, and aesthetic terms long associated with Native American identity. The American academic Steven Salaita has written that "Palestinian claims to life" are based in having "a culture indivisible from their surroundings, a language of freedom concordant to the beauty of the land." Jamal Nabulsi of the University of Queensland writes that "Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is in and of the land. It is grounded in an embodied connection to Palestine and articulated in Palestinian ways of being, knowing, and resisting on and for this land."

This kind of language points to an aspect of the concept of indigeneity that is often tacitly overlooked in the Native American context: its irrationalism. The idea that different peoples have incommensurable ways of being and knowing, rooted in their relationship to a particular landscape, comes out of German Romantic nationalism. Originating in the early 19th century in the work of philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Johann Gottfried Herder, it eventually degenerated into the blood-�and-�soil nationalism of Nazi ideologues such as Richard Walther Darré, who in 1930 hymned what might be called an embodied connection to Germany: "The German soul, with all its warmness, is rooted in its native landscape and has, in a sense, always grown out of it ... Whoever takes the natural landscape away from the German soul, kills it."


For Darré, this rootedness in the land meant that Germans could never thrive in cities, among the "rootless ways of thinking of the urbanite." The rootless urbanite par excellence, for Nazi ideology, was of course the Jew. For Salaita, the exaltation of Palestinian indigeneity leads to the very same conclusion about "Zionists," who usurp the land but can never be vitally rooted in it: "In their ruthless schema, land is neither pleasure nor sustenance. It is a commodity ... Having been anointed Jewish, the land ceases to be dynamic. It is an ideological fabrication with fixed characteristics."

In other words, Blood and soil with different aesthetics.

The Soviets were anti-Zionist except from a brief period in the 1940's. Stalin thought that supporting the Zionists would weaken the British.  After 1948, they were no longer useful and Stalin when anti-Zionist and began the mass murder of Jews.  That's your heel turn.

Zionism was racism because Jews were innately racist.  Their holy book said they were the chosen people, so it was right to oppress them in the Soviet Union or destroy them abroad.  It didn't matter if the Jews were actually religious, Jews were racist.

"If we searched the entire world for a person, more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli."

-Nasrallah guy who runs Hezbollah

What a beautiful articulation of self-determination!  As a left-winger I would be proud to align myself with this left-wing group!

[Razgovory]

2 things can be true.

And they are!

[Josquius]

I'm done. Raz's nonsense ceased being fun to poke holes in a while ago. Suffice to say another massively ignorant post seeped in far right rhetoric.

The idea that the left was anti war when they were the main ones who really hated the nazis and wanted to fight them to the end....
"Pacifism is objectively pro fascist" much?

The WB/Gaza Arabs don't want "self-determination" they want to live under the rule of a terror state ala the Taliban and kill every Jew in the levant. You're fucking nuts if you think they want self-determination, they want to kill the Jews.

You're clearly the nuts one here to believe this.
The support for killing Israelis derives from the Israeli oppression. It's not something they support just for kicks.

[Razgovory]

Well, I've learned a lot.  The idea that Soviets were murdered Jews is far-right, though Stalin himself may have been a right winger.  Being left or right, good or bad is not matter of what you think and do but you status as a marginalized person.  The Palestinians are left wing and good because they lost their war in 1948 and Israelis are right-wing and bad because they won.  This does make sense, though it is morally abhorrent.  The world is made up of the oppressed and the oppressor.  The oppressed is left wing and virtuous, the Oppressor is right-wing and wicked.

[Admiral Yi]

Raz, Squeeze:

I'd like six pages on wars of aggression and wars of self defense this Friday at start of business please.

[OttoVonBismarck]

The support for killing Israelis derives from the Israeli oppression. It's not something they support just for kicks.

This is not just dumb, it is borderline antisemitic. It ignores that Arabs have been wanting to kill Jews since long before Israel existed as a state, long before Jews had any political power over them. That Arabs embraced, and loved, the literal German Nazi Party during WWII, even modeling some Arab political parties in the region after it during and post-WWII.

[Razgovory]

I think that Josq might be surprised to find out what he Daily Star (then the Daily Worker), was writing between 1939 and 1941.

[Gups]

Obviously Raz is right that the non-Trotskyist far left in the UK and the USA (and France until invaded) followed Stalin's line in opposing WW2 from the date of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact right up until the Germans invaded the Sov U.

Other elements of the left were opposed to the war including the Independent Labour Party



 

[grumbler]

I say the Palestinians have the rights to their land pretty simply because its theirs.

The WB/Gaza Arabs lose land for starting wars, simple formula.

That's why the Jews, having lost many wars, have no right to any land except by right of conquest.

[crazy canuck]

The idea that the left was anti war when they were the main ones who really hated the nazis and wanted to fight them to the end....

Jos, you need to read a bit more about what happened.  There has been a lot of work done by historians and others showing the link between the Soviet Union's stance on the war, and how communists and communist adjacent folks in Europe and North America acted.   One of my favourite studies on the topic traced how American folk music went from being very anti-war during the pact between the Soviets and Nazis to being full blown jingoists when the Nazis attacked the Soviets.

[Josquius]

The idea that the left was anti war when they were the main ones who really hated the nazis and wanted to fight them to the end....

Jos, you need to read a bit more about what happened.  There has been a lot of work done by historians and others showing the link between the Soviet Union's stance on the war, and how communists and communist adjacent folks in Europe and North America acted.   One of my favourite studies on the topic traced how American folk music went from being very anti-war during the pact between the Soviets and Nazis to being full blown jingoists when the Nazis attacked the Soviets.

Breaking my implementation of my rule to selfblock the thread here to reply to someone else....

You need to read a bit more about what happened. This is well known stuff.
The majority of the conservative party led by Halifax wanted to sue for peace.
Churchill was able to form a government by enlisting the support of Labour who were extremely anti nazi.
Communists were irrelevant. The sweeping claim that the left were pro nazi is a nonsense.

[crazy canuck]

The idea that the left was anti war when they were the main ones who really hated the nazis and wanted to fight them to the end....

Jos, you need to read a bit more about what happened.  There has been a lot of work done by historians and others showing the link between the Soviet Union's stance on the war, and how communists and communist adjacent folks in Europe and North America acted.   One of my favourite studies on the topic traced how American folk music went from being very anti-war during the pact between the Soviets and Nazis to being full blown jingoists when the Nazis attacked the Soviets.

Breaking my implementation of my rule to selfblock the thread here to reply to someone else....

You need to read a bit more about what happened. This is well known stuff.
The majority of the conservative party led by Halifax wanted to sue for peace.
Churchill was able to form a government by enlisting the support of Labour who were extremely anti nazi.
Communists were irrelevant. The sweeping claim that the left were pro nazi is a nonsense.

Jos, I am trying to communicate with you in good faith.  What does Churchill have to do with the left?  And from my reading of this thread Raz was definitely talking about how the views of the left changed depending on the Soviet's view of the war.  This is not a controversial point.

And of course the left was not pro Nazi.  But that was not Raz's point.  Nor a point made by anyone else.  The left was largely pro Soviet though.  And so the key point for you to learn from this thread is that the opinions of the left did definitely shift when the Soviets entered the war.   

[Josquius]

The idea that the left was anti war when they were the main ones who really hated the nazis and wanted to fight them to the end....

Jos, you need to read a bit more about what happened.  There has been a lot of work done by historians and others showing the link between the Soviet Union's stance on the war, and how communists and communist adjacent folks in Europe and North America acted.   One of my favourite studies on the topic traced how American folk music went from being very anti-war during the pact between the Soviets and Nazis to being full blown jingoists when the Nazis attacked the Soviets.

Breaking my implementation of my rule to selfblock the thread here to reply to someone else....

You need to read a bit more about what happened. This is well known stuff.
The majority of the conservative party led by Halifax wanted to sue for peace.
Churchill was able to form a government by enlisting the support of Labour who were extremely anti nazi.
Communists were irrelevant. The sweeping claim that the left were pro nazi is a nonsense.

Jos, I am trying to communicate with you in good faith.  What does Churchill have to do with the left?  And from my reading of this thread Raz was definitely talking about how the views of the left changed depending on the Soviet's view of the war.  This is not a controversial point.

And of course the left was not pro Nazi.  But that was not Raz's point.  Nor a point made by anyone else.  The left was largely pro Soviet though.  And so the key point for you to learn from this thread is that the opinions of the left did definitely shift when the Soviets entered the war.   

Churchill has nothing to do with the left. He was very much a conservative.
He however was amongst a minority of Conservative MPs who did not support suing for peace with the Nazis.
The reason he was able to become PM and keep the war going was that he gained the support of the left to form a coalition government.

Labours Soviet sympathies hadn't entirely vanished by this point in time but really the Spanish civil war and news seeping out from the ussr about what stalin had been up to was really shifting the narrative.
 Pro Soviet is vastly over stating their position at the best of times
Already quite a clear division had formed between the mainstream left and Marxists, so the idea they would do an about face on their anti nazi views because... Stalin said so? It has zero basis.
Then there's the very real well published evidence that they were core to making ww2 a win for democracy. Without them, it would have been a victory for the nazis.
.

[crazy canuck]

Well, I tried. But if you are interested in learning more about the link that did exist, perhaps you might listen to some of Guthrie's songs during the war.  I think you will find that he wrote songs promoting peace up until Germany invaded Russia, and then from that moment on he wrote full throated songs and poems in support of the war.

If you want to read a bit more about it, you might look at some of the interesting work historians have done debating the extent to which Americans like Guthrie were under the control of the Soviet Union or were merely sympathetic to its plight.