A Palestinian Adenauer?
I read many stupid things every day, some of them even from smart people who are saying intelligent things as well. An example of a stupid thing I often see is some sort of kneejerk statement about Trump being a dictator, something many people seem to feel the need to throw in there to prove themselves members of the intellectual class. Or, sometimes it’s something about how Israel is motivated by revenge, or it’s about the cycle of violence tit-for-tatism. Or something about WWII itself that shows ignorance – either poor analogies or outright misstatements.
Here’s a good example. It’s an interview with a journalist on the left named Susan Winfield. She is critical of the left’s response to Hamas and Israel, and as I read the back-and-forth I alternate between nodding in assent and shaking my head in disagreement, over and over. I’m not going to do an analysis of the whole thing; I’ll just take this one part of what Winfield says as an example of what I mean:
There’s an excellent essay on the concept of “decolonization” in the most recent issue of Liberties by Kian Tajbakhsh. He’s an Iranian-American academic who was formerly a political prisoner of the Ayatollah. He has a very clear view of Middle Eastern politics; I urge everyone to read the essay, which I think is brilliant. Tajbakhsh writes that what the Palestinians need is not a Mandela but “an Adenauer, who can accept an imperfect and unsatisfactory reality in the present to achieve a better future.” That is, someone who can lead them from conspiratorial thinking and revanchist fantasies into the reality principle, which can be the only basis of a true national revival.
Well, that would certainly be nice. But I don’t see a chance of it happening without something else Winfield deplores: a postwar occupation. Did Adenauer spring forth out of nowhere to lead the German people from Nazism by the sheer force of his argument and courage? Of course not. First there was a very brutal and long-lasting war which destroyed much of Germany. Then after the war, Germany was occupied for eleven years in the Western part (and much longer in the Eastern part, for different reasons). Adenauer had been an anti-Nazi during the war but had managed to survive. The occupation involved the victorious Allies reshaping the utterly defeated Germany and included denazification and re-education (Adenauer was against the former but much of it had already occurred by the time he came to power in 1949).
I cannot think of a single possible Palestinian candidate for a future Adenauer, nor do I see how such a person could ever be elected in a future Palestine without years of occupation and re-education either by Israel or preferably by a less Jew-hating Arab government such as the UAE.
And then there’s German society prior to the Nazis, which although somewhat dysfunctional was nothing like as sick as Palestinian society. There was more to build on in the first place with Germany compared to Palestine – although the building was far from easy. However, it required utter defeat and occupation to begin to take place at all.
And yet Winfield also says the following:
Israel is unusual in that it is the only country in the world that does not have settled borders: It has neither annexed the Palestinian territories nor freed them. The Occupation is a political and moral failure of phenomenal proportions. I have no problem calling it a crime. Israel is also the only country in the world that faces existential threats from an array of states and terrorist groups that are fanatically devoted to its destruction. Does this justify the Occupation? Not at all. Can the Occupation be separated from this? Not at all.
If you can make head or tail of that, or reconcile it with her approval of the idea of a Palestinian Adenauer, be my guest.
Did the author care back when these so-called “occupied territories” were occupied by Egypt and Jordan? I doubt it (was she even alive? I don’t know how old she is, but from her photo she doesn’t look like she was an adult in 1967). Also, Gaza essentially became autonomous in 2005, in case she hadn’t noticed. And these areas were only occupied by Israel after Israel won a war against them and their Arab brethren in 1967. The story:
Israel has occupied the Palestinian territories and the Golan Heights since the Six-Day War of 1967. It previously occupied the Sinai Peninsula and southern Lebanon as well. Prior to Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, occupation of the Palestinian territories was split between Egypt and Jordan, with the former having occupied the Gaza Strip and the latter having annexed the West Bank; the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights were under the sovereignty of Egypt and Syria, respectively. The first conjoined usage of the terms “occupied” and “territories” with regard to Israel was in United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which was drafted in the aftermath of the Six-Day War and called for: “the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East” to be achieved by “the application of both the following principles: … Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict … Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”
If the Palestinians would recognize the Israelis’ right to live in peace, there would be no occupation. Period.
You can read more on the subject here.
And yet Susie Linfield is a journalism professor at NYU and wrote this Quillette article that’s discussed in that interview. The article is a critique of the anti-Israel anti-Semitic left, and although I can only read portions of it (it’s behind a paywall), the part I can see is excellent. Some excerpts:
The history of the modern Left’s romance with terrorism—not the “old-fashioned” version aimed at czars or imperial officials, but the kind directed against unarmed civilians … started with the Algerian War and gained momentum throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and beyond with the emergence of the Red Brigades, the Baader Meinhof Gang, the Irish Republican Army, the Japanese Red Army, the Weathermen, and the panoply of organizations included in the Palestine Liberation Organization and, especially, its Rejectionist Front. The latter held pride of place …
Indeed.
More:
In the age of the “progressive atrocity,” PLO terrorist attacks on Israelis, Jews, and civilians throughout the world were hailed as instruments of liberation. A very partial list of such incidents would include the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics (the games continued, nonetheless) and the Lod Airport massacre the same year (death toll: 26, along with at least 80 injured); the Ma’alot massacre of 1974, in which 115 Israelis, mainly schoolchildren, were taken hostage (resulting deaths: 31); the Entebbe hijacking of 1976, in which Israeli and other Jewish passengers were separated from others and threatened with death (most were rescued by Israeli commandos); the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, in which a civilian bus was highjacked (death toll: 38, including 13 children; 71 wounded); the 1982 attack on the Chez Jo Goldenberg kosher restaurant in Paris, considered at the time to be the worst incidence of antisemitism in France since the Holocaust (death toll: six, with 22 injured); and numerous other instances of air piracy. Various international groups, especially Baader Meinhof of Germany and the Japanese Red Army, sometimes assisted their Palestinian brothers “in solidarity.” Not all leftists or leftwing organizations supported these actions, but to criticize them was a sign of “bourgeois moralism” as Ghassan Kanafani, a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, put it. …
In recent years, the Left’s embrace of terror seemed to have ebbed; you won’t find many defenders of al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, or Boko Haram. The notable exception has been groups devoted to the destruction of Israel: Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah, all of which still garner enthusiasm and deluded admiration. One might have thought that an orgy of sadistic murder, of the kind that Hamas committed on October 7th, would have inspired serious moral and political self-interrogation. As the past four weeks have illustrated, however, the exact opposite is the case.
She’s of the left but doesn’t really understand the depth of its anti-Semitism and of its romance with and sympathy for the devil.
There the free part of her essay ends, but I found more of it here. The following excerpt from her essay is similar to points I made years ago in my series of posts about the 1979 Iranian revolution and the participation of the left:
In 1979, leftists who supported the Iranian Revolution had a rude awakening when the mullahs came to power and promptly executed them, along with secularists, union organizers, intellectuals, feminists, and everyone else who fit into the enormously capacious category of a counterrevolutionary. There was a lesson here: Activists have the responsibility to know who and what they support, and to separate themselves—openly and decisively—from programs and regimes that are predicated on violence and repression. Similarly, those who imagine that Hamas’s slaughters may have promoted “liberation,” “justice,” and “freedom” for Palestinians, as the banners demand, have a big surprise in store.
Unlike Iran in 1979, though, there’s no mystery as to what kind of state Hamas (an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement) aims to create; we need only look at what it already has created. This time, no one can plead ignorance. …
… History has proved, again and again, that terrorists and freedom fighters aren’t the same, which is why the former never achieve anything approaching either liberation or justice.
For many leftists and many students these days, it’s just a game they’re playing from their safe Western countries and the liberty those countries afford them. If they are successful in their goals, they may indeed be very surprised at what awaits them.
Israel haters are so blind with irrationality that you cannot reason with them. They were still calling Gaza “Occupied” even when there were no Israelis there (except three mentally ill Israelis two of who are Israeli Arabs who crossed into Gaza). They refuse to admit that the goal of Hamas/Islamic Jihad et al is not to create a Palestinian nation but to destroy a Jewish one.
adenauer, came from the catholic center party, there was that reasonably sensible finance minister but he was turfed out by Arafat, I think he resides in the UAE now, of course Abu Mazen was deeply flawed in many ways, his involvement with the KGB, his youthful indulgence in blood libels, of course the Barghoutis who are his likely rival are worse,
Sabri Al Banna, to whom the Chez Goldenberg massacre is credited, was unwound by Fatah by the Company, and the Firm, after Vienna and Rome outrages,
If the Palestinians would recognize the Israelis’ right to live in peace, there would be no occupation. Period.
Israel would still want to occupy land as a defense zones and for settlements, so clearly, there would still be occupation, unless the Palestinians ceded all the land Israel required, which they won’t do.
N.B. ALL of Israel is occupied land.
we saw this on october 7th, in living color, as much as they try to deny it,
Arafat made the decision in 2000 to choose terrorism and reject a modern nation state. Clinton had put enormous pressure on the Israel government, then run by “moderates” and was bitterly disappointed as his Nobel Peace Prize went away. They will never get a better offer.
“an imperfect and unsatisfactory reality”. I find this phrase puzzling. Imperfect in what way? He was leader of an independent country with a democratic system. What was the imperfection of that? Unsatisfactory reality; again, would a German victory have been more satisfactory? Was it the physical destruction of Germany that was unsatisfactory?
Abraxas: this is absurd. You’re complaining South Syrians (Palestine is a propaganda term resurrected by Arafat for propaganda purposes) that after trying to exterminate Jews for the last 100 years, it’s unfair that Jews won’t trust South Syrians?
I would be hard pressed to hold my tongue in a debate with Khalidi, now that we know that his family has been part of the problem, at least going back to 1936, one sees clearly, that terrible novel I saw on the remainder shelf by an australian novel, the prime minister is a khalidi, I guess Winfield is trying to speak in some unknown tongue to a tribe she thinks she can communicated with,
Israel did not really start settlement expansion until ’67, after the third war, so how could they be so blood thirsty for territory rhetorical, and this was under the labor government, of eskhol I think, I think much of the political and intellectual class in Europe and the west lost their minds after ’68, Vietnam was part of it, but much of those countries like Italy’s labor strife, arose from different places, which would lead to the Brigatte Rossi and the Lotte Continua, same with Germany’s Red Army Faction,
Israel’s experience is somewhat similar tot he first 75 years of our American project, with the obvious caveats, the new nation faced threats from the Indians, from the Brits and even the Spanish for a time, Andrew Jackson in this vein is like a Sharon, as a military leader, maybe Begin was Henry Polk
Another thing I think is worth noting is that Adenauer was amenable to the Allies and especially Western Allies precisely because he had lived basically his whole life under occupation (in his eyes). As a Catholic Rhinelander with Republican and Catholic Democrat sympathies, he had little common ground with the Prussian Protestant officialdom that dominated life between the rise of the Second Reich and the end of the Third, and also found little appealing among the Marxist Social Democrats or Socialists. Indeed during the aftermath of WWI he seriously flirted with creating a separatist Rhineland Republic under French protection. So this was already a man who felt persecuted and marginalized in the country that was supposedly his and who was more than willing to be a scathing critic prepared to break with it.
The issue I see is that much of Hamas’s leadership and that of the Balestinians are far more radical and ruthless than the Arab or Muslim mainline. Even the Taliban pretend to put on a moderate face, and the Abraham Accords made serious headway in creating a modus vivdeni between the more reactionary gulf monarchies and the Israelis as part of a common front against Iran’s “Resistance Bloc.” And unfortunately I do not see the Balestinian political culture changing much more beyond crushing humiliation. I also note that German nationalism is not inherently genocidal or exclusionary; I have plenty of things to say about the Three Reichs and even Weimar but Germany could at least theoretically exist just fine with France, Poland, Austria, and so on. In contrast, Balestinian Nationalism has many hallmarks that are fundamentally genocidal and exterminationist towards Israel and Jews, in large part because
And even the author’s article I think falls fallow, in large part because of how they are insistent on being cowardly, dishonest fuckers who are so intent on virtue signaling that they are prepared to sacrifice the truth and human lives precisely to show they are supposedly “good people” and “not one of those.” I barely made my way through it but I have no intention of reading it again.
Of course the Both Sidesism. “I am a very balanced, stable genius and not one of the Radicals.”
This is TECHNICALLY true, but not at all in a way that helps Linfield’s case. Hamas is in essence the Gaza/Palestine chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, tracing its way through Hassan al-Banna and its Egyptian formation all the way back to the Wahhabist groups in Arabia that they self-consciously emulated. but with heavy influence from al-Husseini’s clan of pro-Nazi genocidaires. Both parts of this are important.
The Muslim Brotherhood needs to be recognized for the monstrosity it is. The Nazis at least TACITLY *considered* the possibility of co-existing with other “races” to some degree or for some duration (such as with the Chinese and/or Japanese), the Muslim Brotherhood is, remains, and has always affirmed its goal to fight until all the world is Muslim and all nonbelievers are converted or sent to the Hellfire. They also have even less respect for the conventions of secular war and laws than the Nazis did.
While the influence they get from al-Husseini is…telling. I and a friend were discussing the al-Husseini problem and particularly attempts by the expected quarters to try and deny or downplay the connections between him and Hitler (admittedly in part due to Netanyahu and co overreaching by claiming the Mufti gave Hitler the idea for the Final Solution, which he absolutely did not). Such as contesting that the Nazis gave support to the rebels during the 1936-39 revolt, with some even going so far as to argue that the Nazis favored the “Zionists.”
I find this dubious on multiple levels, especially given money trails and the Nazi media airing in favor of the Rebels and their genocides. However, a friend and I noted that one thing even they by and large do not deny is that Amin al-Husseini and his “Higher Committee” REACHED OUT TO THE NAZIS TO SOLICIT SUPPORT. Which frankly should undercut the point these sophists are trying to make by underlining that at least in this case and time, the rebels and al-Husseini were even MORE bent on Jew Murder than literally Hitler.
Or to quote this friend…
One can quibble with the exact judgement, but I think it underlines something important.
Oh FUCK OFF LINFIELD. It is NOT Shameful, and indeed this bullshit by you and your fellows IS Shameful. I have my disagreements with Netanyahu (though I doubt he made this decision alone), but this is not one of them.
Because fundamentally, in many ways those murdered by Hamas at the Literal Peace Festivals and elsewhere WERE fundamentally the same as those murdered in places like Sobibor and death pits across the Baltics. They were INNOCENT People (or if we want to split hairs “mostly innocent”), and MOSTLY Jews, murdered BECAUSE THEY WERE JEWS OR AT LEAST IN THE WAY OF THEM.
All of that is far more important than all the secular trappings Linfield tries to split hairs over which do not affect the ethical or moral calculus one iota. And Netanyahu was CORRECT to call attention to this.
Moreover, I’ll note that the Jews before the Holocaust DID generally have “powerful civil societies”, both expressly Jewish ones and those integrated into others. Indeed, as Thomas Sowell pointed out German Jews prior to the Holocaust were on the whole fervently assimilationist German patriots and nationalists, to the point where even the German-American Jewish Diaspora was somewhat infamous for carrying water for the Kaiser and his warlords (whether or not that was because they really were that vocal in favor of the Reich’s genocidal warlords in WWI or because enough of them were and as Jews they were convenient targets for others in a way Christian or Agnostic German-Americans weren’t exactly is another question but ultimately beside the point). To the extent they had or needed strong armies or a powerful state, they had them in their secular, non-Jewish states.
And look at where that got them, is the counterargument.
Honestly for humanitarian reasons I believe it not only can be done, but must be done. After all, Adenauer only emerged in Germany in the advent of absolute defeat and crushing humiliation, one so thorough it quite literally shifted the centuries old center of balance in Germany Westwards, both literally and physically, with the effective destruction of Brandenburg-Prussia. These people seem to recognize it is important to change the tenor of Balestinian leadership and consider an Adenauer, but they ignore the circumstances that led to him as well as how very different he was from most German leadership at the time.
Probably because it is convenient not to. I also note that Fatah could get a possible opening if they committed to the war on the side of the Israelis and to fighting in Rafah alongside them. It would solve several issues, such as who would occupy the area once taken. But that is unthinkable to them for a host of reasons.
And it seems like in many ways the answers are still unthinkable to Winfield and so on. In the end the BothSidesism fatally taints her view, such as insisting there needs to be “new leadership” on “both sides”, as if the Israeli leadership are anywhere as culpable as the Balestinian ones (and note I did not simply limit this to Hamas’s leadership. Hamas did not launch their latest war alone, but with allies such as PIJ – Palestinian Islamic Jihad – and the PFLP, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and probably others. And even among those that did not take part in the war, Fatah and its ilk have remained hideously complicit). The Zionist leaders were more than happy to embrace the idea of co-existence in the Levant with non-Jewish Arabs, as shown by their acceptance of the Partition Agreement.
It is the Balestinians that have been the prime marinaters in genocidal hatred, mythology, and literal attempts to rewrite history. That needs to stop.
}}} I read many stupid things every day, some of them even from smart people who are saying intelligent things as well.
“Stupid”? Or foolish?
As I have noted, in my commentaries about a possible “Wisdom Quotient” test to match the IQ test, we often use the word “stupid” when what we really mean is “foolish”.
This is mildly relevant because they really are two different measures of learning capacity, and, through that, reasoning capabilities.
And there is no lockstep for them — There are both wise idiots (or at least, ignorant and poorly educated) and foolish geniuses. The former is the classic old man on a porch step who has never been more than 100 miles from home and never read books, yet, somehow, understands enough of the world to offer sage advice on What To Do with regards to at least some things…
For the latter category, it seems obvious that Noam Chomsky qualifies. In his field of linguistics, there is no question he is brilliant. But… face it, he’s also a Marxist, and, if you want a quick touchstone to recognize a fool, “Do you like Marxism?” is a glaringly obvious one. If the answer isn’t a scowling, “Fuck, NO!” then they are well along the fool gradient curve. 😀
You know I didn’t dig all the way, in there, I knew there wasn’t a pony, but I didn’t expect frank sophistry, of this nature,
Hamas is an eliminationist faction, Fatah was one from the Khartroum declaration, but they feigned coexistence after Oslo, because Beillin and co, were such easy marks, they handed off their work to Rabin, who took it because after 50 years of war, well why not, we know why not, the Oslo paradigm was a street without an exit that leads to
we see the period after Oslo to the next intifada as another Hudna, a pause in which they would arm themselves with the weapons and training the acquired after the Wye Accords George Tenet never gets nearly as much contempt as he deserves,
as we see in the interval between 67 and 73, Sadat and the Baathists in Damascus and the Hashemites planned their revenge against Israel, the intelligence community was rather blind on that score, except perhaps Angleton,as the apocryphal story he relayed to Aaron Latham,
the Fedayeen, were active in the period before the last war, but they came into their own after 67, notably with the Black September rising, and the backlash that arose, after King Hussein crushed it, then there was the backlash to that ended up in Munich
The last paragraph says it all. It’s just a game played in the safe spaces of the West. A game that incurs blood and slaughter of real people. But remembering that gets in the way of the game. Well done Neo.
Why are people so unserious about serious subjects
Speaking even of the “excellent” Quilette Article, I already notice a few things.
Honestly, this stinks to high heaven for me. It’s not only that this would entail Memmi not observing the events in Algeria, Morocco, and to a lesser extent his native Tunisia, as well as over the sea in Spain, Italy, and France. It would mean frankly ignoring about 200 years of history of left wing terrorism. I think that – at my most generous – the emphasis would be “the deaths of children and persons outside the struggle.” Which is a very convenient way of intellectualizing away the deaths of children and persons “inside the struggle.” And who defines the deaths of those?
This smells a fair bit like Marxist attempts like those Lenin did, claiming to denounce “terrorism” even as he had Stalin as trusted lieutenant and triggerman going after banks and blowing things up.
Spare me. I am no great fan of the Tsars or their officials, but let’s not fool ourselves when it comes to how that “old fashioned version of terrorism” included plenty of allowances for targeting civilians. Stolypin’s daughter and a bunch of others died during a failed bombing attempt on Stolypin himself. Whether or not one believes Gavrilo Princip and his co-conspirators in their claim that they were trying to kill Franz Ferdinand and Military Governor Oskar Potiorek (and for what it is worth I actually do believe they were), the fact remains that they used bombs that injured a good number of soldiers and some passerby, and then Princip killed Ferdinand (as planned) and his civilian wife Sophie (unintentionally, or so the theory goes). The Dashak – while fighting one of the most urgent and justified anti-imperialist struggles imaginable against the genocidal Ottoman Empire – routinely carried out things like male kinship annihilations of Turkish and Kurdish clans that engaged in them.
So let us not kid ourselves about the willingness of left wing terrorists targeting those to kill civilians or children.
Spare me. Anarcho-Syndicalist Catalonia called, as did the Haymarket Bombers, and Ho Chi Minh’s brutal purges. And the IRA, including in concert with both the Nazis and Soviets. Indeed, in some ways this author admits that, albeit in a backhanded manner. Which makes this odd positioning all the stranger. There certainly was an upsurge from the 1950s and 1960s, but it had deep and dark roots.
Ethnically repellent it is, and I am glad we can agree there. But “oxymoronic”? Kindly study Marx and Engels blathering about Greater German and Hungarian nationalism and their victory over “Little Nationalities”, or Robespierre’s wholehearted endorsement of terror as a reverse image of virtue. Or even earlier, with the supposedly beloved Draco of Athens. “Progressive Atrocities” have a deep seated tradition (and not even purely on the left), and to pretend otherwise is to imitate the ostrich without having the wisdom of doing it for the reasons an ostrich does (to remain cool).
“I am very impartial. I can see the problems with both sides (but apparently not Robespierre blathering about Terror and Virtue). Please listen to me.”
I am willing to let this one slide relatively gently since at least she might have a point and it isn’t too glaring unlike some, but it is aggravating.
Ehh, close enough I’d argue.
I’ll note that Kanafani was also an avowed advocate of genocide who took it to extremes. Indeed, in many of his writings he tried to rah rah a dishonest, deluded narrative where he went off on Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem, Founding Father of Genocidal Arab Balestinian Nationalism, Ally of the Nazis, and architect of things such as the Farhud, as NOT BEING HARD ENOUGH. Specifically, Kanafani argued that Husseini wasn’t REALLY that good of a leader or active in it (which is absolutely deluded as we know from history and British intelligence), and that the “liberation movement” in 1936-39 was divided between “bourgeoise” and collaborators, and a more authentic group of radicals pushing on al-Husseini…. presumably to murder more Jews.
This is quite literally Kanafani and the PFLP trying to one up one of Hitler’s Middle Eastern Allies by going “Aksually he wasn’t that dedicated (but we can do better).” I hope it is blindingly obvious why I will defend Mossad’s decision to delete him from existence, and only am sad his daughter died with him in the car bombing. Kanafani was morally not much different from the RTLM.
I wish that were true, but it isn’t. The Baath Party took power in Iraq and Syria through terrorism. As did the communists in Indochina, of whom only the Khmer Rouge have been deposed. FARQ is now part of the government, and the Taliban have retaken Afghanistan. And of course El Comandantes in Cuba and Nicaragua deposed their local kleptocratic caudillo and inaugurated something worse. Terrorism can work.
There’s something simultaneously amusing and infuriating at her acting as if this was some kind of astray situation rather than exactly what was intended. Vanguard Socialist Nationalist terror group does Vanguard Socialist Nationalist things in power. Indeed, I’ll note that the FLN’s terrorism was actually important since it helped them reach out to consolidate power and destroy splinter groups, like the war fought in the cafes of France by bombings between different Algerian groups.
Literally only the last one fits. In particular the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions were INCREDIBLY violent and featured widespread attacks against civilians, even if not quite as often as happened after the regime got into power.
This is what we call gaslighting, as looking at Marx himself reacting to the closure of his Rhine Newspaper by trying to threaten the Prussian Autocracy to a Terror Hoedown (spoiler alert: He lost; turns out people willing to fix bayonets and charge everything from Napoleon’s Grand Armee to their own people are not going to be intimidated by a socialist edgelord with Faustian poetry) shows. If I were feeling generous I would argue that this MIGHT have been an indication of an “early mistake” that helped lead Marxists to repudiate terrorism as a viable strategy……
…… except we literally see fairly widespread Marxist terrorism within decades of his life, and this is outright endorsed by the likes of Lenin and Trotsky, with the latter going so far as to talk about “The man who repudiates terrorism in principle… must reject all ideas of the political supremacy of the working class and its revolutionary dictatorship.”
Apologies Neo, I was nearly finished with my comment when my keyboard went unresponsive and began spamming whatever that last character is, so I had to restart and I figured I would post what I had since I would be unable to save it otherwise.
But I was going to say that Linfield to my eyes comes up glaringly short in her own metric or serious self-interrogation. Such things such as talking about how she views the ground assault on Gaza as justified but not the siege I think shows she is very much another flavor of foreigner playing armchair quarterback from the safety of her high horse an ocean away. And doing so badly. I probably have more respect for the “Israeli Left” she cites, or even for the Terrorist Shills who at least probably are relatively honest about what they hope to have happen and what their stance entails.
I apologize in advance for this criticism of a commenter, but if “Turtler” insists on posting such long comments, maybe he should wrote his own blog. Whew!
@Basherte 1
It is ok, and a fair point. I have considered it here and there but I lack the expertise on the whole, and given the way things are going I admit there is more interest on my part to limit identifiable ties or the like such as hosting. But on the whole I doubt I’d be quite as good organizing a blog.
Germany in 1928 was a fairly accomplished and comparatively prosperous society that had had over the previous 15 years a number of setbacks. Note that the median performance of the volkisch parties during the period running from 1888 to 1918 was about 2% of the vote. That from 1918 to 1929 was just north of 3%, with a peak of 7.8% just after the ghastly inflation of 1922-24 (though you could argue that some of the volkisch sentiment was stashed in the vote totals of the National People’s Party. One could argue that Hitler’s was a fad movement which flourished after multiple stressors had discredited every component of the German establishment. One might posit that had a military regime emerged in 1932-33 and placed economic policy in the hands of Hjalmar Schacht, that the Nazi Party would have faded away as the economy improved.
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Some years ago I had access to a service called Polling the Nations. One thing that hit you about polls of the West Bank and Gaza undertaken during the years running from 2003 to 2008 (by two different agencies) was that the Arab population there (by and large) maintained stances that made no sense outside of a universe in which they were in a position to dictate terms to the Jews, something they have never been. (The surveys indicated that about 1/3 of the Arab population was willing to endorse a settlement with their Jewish neighbors). You can blame UNRWA and various Arab patrons for some of this; the Arabs on the West Bank and Gaza have never been in a position where the full economic consequences of their preferred courses of action have hit them. If the ‘displaced persons’ problem in the Levant had been handled the same way it was in Europe, those ‘refugee camps’ would have been emptied by 1963 and their population resettled in the Fertile Crescent and Egypt. The Arab states wouldn’t have it and eventually determined the UNRWA clients were a hot potato.
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Have a gander at the economic data for the Near East and points adjacent. Israel for all that plagues it qualifies as a 2d tier affluent country. Cyprus and Turkey qualify as borderline affluent countries. Then you have a big drop and there’s Egypt, which is a mildly under par middle-income country. The petro states have built up their public works, educational network, and level of public health, but their indigenous populations are still skill deficient and have low levels of labor mobilization, so most of them are relying on scads of guest workers with real skills. For all the Arab states are a disappointment, few have performed as poorly as the West Bank and Gaza, all that UNRWA aid notwithstanding. If you bracket out the remittances they receive, the only places in the Near East, North Africa, and Central Asia with a lower real income would be the Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. They’re an unproductive population which lacks constructive goals. Their idea of collective actions is plotting revenge on the Jews. Advocates of the Arab cause are dead to this reality.
@Basherte 1
Relax, it’s just dissertation day at the NewNeo.
Arafat made the decision in 2000 to choose terrorism and reject a modern nation state.
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Or, the Oslo process was a long con.
Too many words, Turtler. Knock it off.
@IrishOtter49
This IS me “knocking it off.” I pointedly stated earlier that I could apparently read the entire article (for whatever reason it was not paywalled like it was to Neo), and so I figured it would help to cover some of it because of how Linfield falls down, but that I was not going to cover everything both due to length and how I could honestly barely be bothered.
But I think it is worth going over in depth in some places precisely because of how badly things stink. Neo got it right by pointing out how Linfield calls for a Palestinian Adenauer while ignoring how Adenauer was viewed as a borderline or actual traitor for most of his life and only came to prominence as a result of invasion and utter defeat for the previous government. But it is worse than that.
In any case, I will take opinions into consideration, but few can get me to take orders.
Tajbakhsh writes that what the Palestinians need is not a Mandela but “an Adenauer, who can accept an imperfect and unsatisfactory reality in the present to achieve a better future.”
Islam will never “accept an imperfect and unsatisfactory reality in the present to achieve a better future” because the only theologically acceptable ‘better future’ is one in which ALL the Jews, Non-Abrahamic religionists, atheist’s and sexual ‘deviants’ have been genocided. Christians who accept enslavement will still be periodically ‘culled’ (like Egypt’s Coptic Christians) and only reluctantly tolerated.
Given that irreformable theological reality, Tajbakhsh is either willfully blind or being purposely deceitful.
@Art Deco
Agreed. That is another thing I disagreed with regarding Kangas and co asking the Republic was always doomed in Germany.
I think that is overly optimistic, though admittedly it also depends on how we define Volkish and how many parties would arguably quality in the original definition of the term in spite of not being totalitarian or aggressive. But even then I do think that the figures there are too few, even if they were still a minority.
Part of that is due to what you said about “stashing” of the vote in larger and more electable parties. The DNVP is as you pointed out the clearest candidate for this, being nationalist, conservative reactionary, and with strong monarchist and authoritarian camps including much of its leadership like Hugenburg. But I would also argue it extended well beyond them. A lot of Volkish Catholics voted on confessional lines with Zentrum, for instance, and von Kahr is a good example of this. And indeed even the SPD had fairly sizable elements that were at least sympathetic to the idea, with it playing a leading role helping to engage in propaganda and suppress details in favor of the Stab in the Back idea, in spite of it being probably the biggest victim in the end as what was supposed to be a populist rallying cry against the old Entente and the imperial authorities was used to hit them.
This means that I do think that the expressly, specifically Volkish parties were just the tip of the iceberg, with a sizable number of Volkists in the mainstream parties (indeed even in those we think of as the bastions of the Republic like the SocDems, Zentrum, DDP, CSVD, etc), a and far more people at least partially receptive to them. This meant that when things could go wrong there was a ready base of people to recruit from compared to what the polls alone would indicate.
But perhaps even more important than what lay underneath the polling results was what lay separate from them. Authoritarian Volkisch sentiment would not have had anything like the power it had if it was reliant upon polling results at an election, but it benefitted from how many things could not be easily changed by such. Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Erich Ludendorff didn’t get the power they wielded by winning a vote, but by gaining the offices of influence or at least the ears of people that held them. This is particularly prevalent in the military, judiciary, and bureaucracy, where politics generally ranged from authoritarian to totalitarian, and the widespread control they had over German culture and life as well as their social esteem made them a power far beyond what any ballot would give them. Assorted communist coups and terror attacks only helped maintain that.
It also basically gave the authoritarian nationalists a kind of permanent “shelter” from electoral politics, where even though a bunch of them would get screwed by the latest Wile E. Coyote coup plan against the Republic, those not caught could sort of slink back in to come back later, sans maybe the people caught literally red handed in it. And then even, old Paul von Hindenburg was voted in as President of the Republic as an “independent” while Hitler was given a sweetheart sentence for trying to overthrow the Republic.
That’s similar to my view, with two difference.s
While Hitler’s movement was maybe a “fad” it was a fairly well disciplined one that was growing at a slow but steady pace. Even its failure to get industrial backing proved to be a bit of a benefit since it made the party develop a big grassroots recruitment and fundraising machine that kept Hitler independent of the major financiers or cartels, and also got the party into organizing the major industrial workers at places like Farben and Siemens plants, giving them inroads into the other socialist parties and more voting power. They weren’t a truly massive threat until the Depression, but they were a durable cockroach that was hard.
I also wouldn’t say the Depression discredited “every component” of the German establishment though; most fatally it didn’t discredit the Reich Presidency under Hindenburg or the military. Indeed I’d argue that in spite of Hindenburg being guilty of most problems that started in the German government, he escaped much of the blame for things like Papen and Schleicher, and in many ways the German public turned to him more and more for power as the Nazis and Communists rose while the rest of the Federal Government squabbled.
That was pretty much the game plan (sans Schacht arguably) for Hindenburg and co, and they came very close to it with the Prussian Coup and the “Cabinet of Barons.” What they really didn’t count on was infighting within their house between Papen and Schleicher over the Kanzlership while the NSDAP and KPD going into totalitarian mass street politics in a big way.
Agreed there, and I think this is a major issue. Prior to about 1956 this made some degree of sense since the Israelis could not clearly defeat their enemies, including the Egyptians occupying Gaza and the Feyadeen. But after that and especially after 1967 it doesn’t make any sense without the foreign aid encouraging the Gazans to stay angry, stay murderous and suicidal, and keep trying to eventually destroy their hated enemies. The economic data also shows this is basically what you’d get if you were trying to cultivate a society of shock troopers for perennial war.
I dont think there was a happy ending once the german economy crashed a salazar type was unlikely or like vargas across the ocean
There hasnt been a civil current that i cam see in palestinian society hana ashrawi who was often netanyahus foil on nightline ended up exactly where
“She’s of the left but doesn’t really understand the depth of its anti-Semitism and of its romance with and sympathy for the devil.”
An outlook that is shared by many on the Left who don’t understand how antisemitism is embedded in the warp and the woof of the Left. It’s there with P.J. Proudhon and from Proudhon it goes into both the statist and anarchist Left. Bakunin brings his rabid antisemitism into future Anarchist movements.
And then, there’s Karl Marx, himself the grandson of an Ashkenazi German rabbi on his father’s side and a Sephardic Dutch rabbi on his mother’s side, who pens this little gem. If you’re in a hurry, just read part two and you’ll be appalled enough.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/
Never, ever doubt for a moment the depth of antisemitism in the history of the Left.
miguel cervantes:
Henry Polk? Do you mean James Knox Polk?
Islam will never “accept an imperfect and unsatisfactory reality in the present to achieve a better future”
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Muslim states live with imperfect and unsatisfactory realities every day.
Yes thats what i meant
Art Deco wrote:
If the ‘displaced persons’ problem in the Levant had been handled the same way it was in Europe, those ‘refugee camps’ would have been emptied by 1963 and their population resettled in the Fertile Crescent and Egypt.
On this point see Robert Locke’s evergreen article at VDARE, “Is Population Transfer the Solution to the Palestinian Problem—And Some Others?”: https://vdare.com/articles/is-population-transfer-the-solution-to-the-palestinian-problem-and-some-others
Geoffrey Britain wrote:
Islam will never “accept an imperfect and unsatisfactory reality in the present to achieve a better future” because the only theologically acceptable ‘better future’ is one in which ALL the Jews, Non-Abrahamic religionists, atheist’s and sexual ‘deviants’ have been genocided. Christians who accept enslavement will still be periodically ‘culled’ (like Egypt’s Coptic Christians) and only reluctantly tolerated.
Long ago I wrote a review at VDARE of an excellent, slim book — Religion of Peace? Islam’s War Against the World — that thoroughly backs up what Geoffrey said: https://vdare.com/posts/book-recommendation-religion-of-peace-by-gregory-davis
If the Palestinians were to somehow, by some miracle, produce an Adenauer, they would still need to produce their own Willi Brandt, someone who would acknowledge to guilt of Palestinians for the atrocities they have committed.
Adenauer, it should be noted, never really acknowledged the guilt of ordinary Germans for crimes committed during the Nazi regime. Rather, he expressed guilt for crimes committed “in the name of the German people,” thus verbally and emotionally sidestepping the guilt of wartime Germans.
jvermeer,
““an imperfect and unsatisfactory reality”. I find this phrase puzzling. Imperfect in what way? He was leader of an independent country with a democratic system. What was the imperfection of that? Unsatisfactory reality; again, would a German victory have been more satisfactory? Was it the physical destruction of Germany that was unsatisfactory?”
Look at a map of pre-unification Germany and compare that to a map of pre-WW2 Germany. Adenauer was only chancellor of about a third of pre-WW2 Germany; when Adenauer took over, it was the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland), colloquially called “West Germany.”
Much less than a third of pre-war Germany was Soviet-occupied and communist, neither of which was good, and slowly but surely having German culture destroyed. That was the German “Democratic” Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik), colloquially called “East Germany”. Critically, Berlin was deep within East German territory, but Berlin had been divided after WW2 similarly to the rest of post-war Germany, so part of Berlin (“West Berlin”) was kinda sorta part of West Germany, but dependent on a select few land and air routes of communication from the west through East Germany.
More than a third of pre-war Germany was taken away. The Soviet Union decided to keep all the territory it got with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which was about half of pre-war Poland. To “compensate” Poland for these territorial losses, the post-war Polish border with Germany was moved to (mostly) a line formed by the Oder and Neisse Rivers. The German provinces of Pomerania, East Brandenburg, and Silesia (a major industrial and coal-producing region) were thus given to Poland. Additionally, the former German province of East Prussia was completely wiped out. The southern part (including Danzig and the Masurian Lakes region) was given to Poland. As I understand it, the northern part, which included the provincial capital Königsberg, was originally to be given to Poland as well, but Stalin decided to keep it because it would give him a warm water port and also wipe out the very name of Prussia. So Stalin kept Königsberg and renamed it “Kaliningrad” after one of his presidents, whom he abused. Poland was compensated with the German port of Stettin, just west of the Oder River, which deprived East Germany of its only major port. All of the Germans were kicked out of these territories, rather brutally. Interestingly, Poland has stopped referring to Kaliningrad by its Russian name and has reverted to calling it “Królewiec”, which is the Polish word for Königsberg. Other European states threatened by Russia are following similar policies, much to Russia’s fury.
Anyway, it should seem obvious that Adenauer found unsatisfactory that: 1. Roughly half the German population were slaves under murderous communism; 2. Germany was divided into two countries; and 3. much of what he considered German territory, including the economically valuable region of Silesia, the port of Stettin, and the cradle of Germany in East Prussia, were now longer German, but part of Poland or the Soviet Union.
“…puzzling…”
I believe it means that “The PERFECT is the ENEMY of the GOOD”(TM).
Alas, in the case of the Palestinians (or, at least, their leadership AND a significant percentage, if not most, of the population), that well-known, oft-quoted adage is a non-sequitur…since in the case of I/P there is NO DIFFERENCE between “PERFECT” and “GOOD”.
(There is ONLY…NECESSITY, i.e., there is only DIVINE JUSTICE…AKA MORAL IMPERATIVE…AKA HISTORICAL NECESSITY…IOW, what is REQUIRED is, very simply, the disappearance of the ILLEGAL, ILLEGITIMATE, IMMORAL, GENOCIDAL [and/or…fill in your fave deprecatory adjective] State of Israel.)
All the rest, as they say, is commentary.
File under: Refreshingly simple.
Related…alas..
“Why Palestinian Leaders Cannot Make Peace With Israel”—
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20773/palestinian-leaders-cannot-make-peace
Anyway, it should seem obvious that Adenauer found unsatisfactory that: 1. Roughly half the German population were slaves under murderous communism; 2. Germany was divided into two countries; and 3. much of what he considered German territory, including the economically valuable region of Silesia, the port of Stettin, and the cradle of Germany in East Prussia, were now longer German, but part of Poland or the Soviet Union.
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I have a complaint
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Populations in 1956:
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West Germany: 53.3 million
East Germany: 17.4 million
Austria: 6.9 million
Germanophone Switzerland: 3.5 million
Germans in Soviet Russia: 1.7 million
Germanophones in Alsace-Lorraine: 1.5 million
Roumania: 385,000
Luxembourg: 300,000
Germanophones in South Tyrol: 260,000
Czechoslovakia: 165,000
Germanophones in Belgium: 75,000
Hungary: 50,000
Liechtenstein: 15,000
Poland: disputed, midrange estimate about 300,000.
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By my count, about 23% of the Germanophone population of Europe was to be found in Communist countries. East Prussia was not the cradle of Germany. The former Prussian province of Posen had a Polish majority in 1918, as did the southerly portion of West Prussia and the eastern third of Silesia; that’s why Poland was awarded them at Versailles.
they would still need to produce their own Willi Brandt, someone who would acknowledge to guilt of Palestinians for the atrocities they have committed.
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They need to do that to achieve what purpose? What the Arabs on the West Bank, in Gaza, and on the UNRWA dole elsewhere would benefit from doing is developing constructive objects. The Arab states are in sum a collective disappointment, but they do accomplish some things. Egypt, to take one example, has seen slow incremental improvement in its relative position vis a vis the world’s affluent countries (in addition to its absolute improvement in productivity); it’s per capita product was 10% of that of the United States in 1950 and is about 20% of ours today. Life expectancy at birth there is now over 70. It’s a country which has a high tolerance for illiteracy; still, illiteracy among late adolescents and young adults has fallen to 8% of the total and illiteracy among the total population over 15 has fallen to about 25% of the total.
Mubarak fell to a color revolution exacerbated by the price of food staples spiked the oversees impact of qe as well as social media like bin ali like qaddafi, the successor regime is schism between the eastern provinces and the west headed by a rump goverment
General asisi learned the lesson about the shah to a point
Turtler wrote some rather long comments above. Some other commenters complained that they were too long. I agree that they were on the long side for comments but, to my mind at least, they were interesting and informative enough that I read them all the way through. Just my 2 cents worth.
Art Deco,
I was describing Germany from Adenauer’s standpoint. I’m half-Polish, so my sympathies lie with Poland. But Silesia, Pomerania, and East Brandenburg had not been Polish for at least 400 years.
Prussia was a different issue. It was the driving force behind German unification. While the political capital of Brandenburg-Prussia was Berlin, the cultural capital and seat of the Junkers that were the Prussian nobility was Königsberg. It was also the land of the Teutonic Knights, to which Prussia and Germany trace their past. Bismarck, Hindenburg, and Ludendorff all came from the area of Prussia, regardless of whether their birthplaces such as Posen had majority Prussians or not.
And, BTW, get a grip. One Germany becomes two, it’s going to be seen as half the population in one and half in the other. I highly doubt Adenauer did a census to find how many German citizens still lived in Namibia so he could give an exact percentage in significant digits, nor did he care about Germans living in Austria, Switzerland, or Liechtenstein, because they were safe. His first concern was the citizens of West Germany. He was very much concerned for the Germans enslaved in East Germany. And he wanted a unified Germany with Silesia, Pomerania, East Brandenburg, and East Prussia back in the fold. (The status of those areas was not legally confirmed until 1990.) He did not see it as a happy situation for Germany.
@ John+F.+MacMichael – – I agree with you about Turtler’s blog-length comments, and look forward to reading them.
@ Turtler: I have often lost comments to the Dread Comment Eater, and have sometimes written them out on a word processor first, then copied the text to Neo’s Reply box.
That also has the advantage of saving them for your own later use.
@ John+F.+MacMichael
I thank you for your kind words. I am glad you found them interestign enough.
@AesopFan I can understand why, and wise words. Alas, in this case it was already too late for that due to the nature of the malfunction, but I certainly can consider using your strategy more. Lord knows I have done it in the past, but not typically.