On Bigotry

Another post that started out as a thread on “X marks the plot” but grew too long.

Those who know me are aware that I've been an active anti-racist all my life, which includes opposing all forms of antisemitism. How can I not? My left-wing politics and knowledge of history aside, I have Jewish family, and I count many Jewish people among my dearest friends and comrades.

 

I know that among people who profess support for Palestinians are some who are antisemitic, just as among those who profess support for Israel are antisemites who currently hate and fear Arabs and Muslim people more. 

 

I don't accept the highly ideological or idiotic premise that criticism of the policies and actions of a far-right Israeli government is actual or de facto antisemitism. 

 

Those who stick the labels of "racist" or "antisemite" on any argument or behaviour of which they disapprove, risk emptying the concepts of political and critical meaning, and as such they serve to weaken opposition to racism and antisemitism.

 

Israel is the de facto 51st state of the US. It couldn't exist without US federal backing; its interests align with those of the USA, albeit that the current ultra-right-wing Israeli government has slipped the leash and savaged more non-combatants than its imperial master might have wanted it to. 

 

It’s one thing justifying owning an attack dog by claiming it’s for defensive reasons because of the dangerous neighbourhood; it’s another thing entirely when the dogs get off the leash and rip a load of kids to pieces.

 

The old European imperial powers advanced their interests via settler colonialism. They declared a land to be “empty” of people or populated by people who lacked the ability to utilise its natural resources, and/or to govern themselves in what the imperialists deemed to be a "civilised" way.

 

Zionists couldn’t claim terra nullius in Palestine given the known history of the role of multiple empires in the region since people first settled it … Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Canaanite, Phoenician, Hebrew, Carthaginian, Minoan, Greek, Persian, Illyrian, Thracian, Etruscan, Iberian, Roman, Byzantine, Bulgarian, Arab, Berber, Ottoman, British … so they relied on what is a variation of the lies told by the white South African apartheid regime. 

 

They claim that when Jews began to arrive in Palestine in large numbers from Eastern Europe in the late C19th, only around 250,000 Arabs lived there, most of whom had arrived in recent decades, and all, according to the Zionists (many of whom were mired in European supremacism), were an inferior people.

 

Also, they claim, that although Muslim invasions of the region in the 7th century AD had resulted in Arabic being the main language and Islam the main religion, it was never exclusively an Arab region.

 

No one has ever claimed it was but more than twelve hundred years of settlement and cultural-religious influences cannot be denied or deemed inferior without creating a justified backlash.

 

Many Arab nationalists saw the Levant as a logical part of a Greater Syria with a capital in the ancient city of Damascus. Greater Syria was a potential Arab powerhouse that was anathema to the old and new imperial powers which wanted the Middle East to be a collection of small states they could dominate and play off against each other to protect the trade routes and the oil.

The Balfour Declaration which promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and the League of Nation’s Mandate that followed it, placated powerful Zionists in the UK and the US. 

It has been interpreted by Zionists as having granted a de facto legal right to sovereignty that was formalised by the 1947 UN partition resolution which established the state of Israel.

After the horrors of the Nazi slaughter of Jews became widely known, the UN resolution served as a political balm to assuage the guilt of the countries that had allowed the horror to happen and had refused entry to refugees.

The ultra-Zionists’ rewriting of a complex history rests firmly on the idea of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine as both a lesser people and as aliens, recent “invaders” of a land to which the Jewish people have both a divine right and an indigenous claim because their God promised it to Abraham, and there has been uninterrupted Jewish settlement from the time of Joshua. (Including the hyperbolic claim of being the “world’s first constitutional monarchy” around 1000 BC.)

It also sowed the seeds of the anti-Arab racism that is now a malignant cancer in the Israeli social body.

 

To ensure enough Israelis continue to elect right-wing governments and support their extremist measures, the population is heavily indoctrinated, with the IDF and compulsory military service playing a significant role in that. 

The most potent element of that indoctrination, apart from the fuelling of anti-Arab racism, is stoking fear and rage over the Nazi holocaust. That those right-wing governments directly and indirectly force young Israelis to participate in genocidal acts against mostly young Palestinians, is beyond tragic.

 

 

 

Nothing Wholly Disappears Off The Internet ....

I've been re-reading some of my old blog posts, and 11 years ago I wrote a post about unhinged reactions to a video of some girls having a fight. 

The comments were on a Facebook page (prior to the "feminisation" of the site which led to controls which the newly masculinised-Meta (snort) is now removing to curry favour with Trump Inc.) 

Now, we all know that certain things trigger the Amygdala Brigade into what, in hindsight, even they might see as behaviour deserving of a spell in a mental health facility or a prison.

I quoted the worst of them verbatim and provided links. 

Curious to see how the angry ones have moved on in the intervening eleven years, I checked on them.

About half of the accounts have been deleted but others are still there. There were some that were unintentionally funny, like the one who hurled abuse at the offending girls and then claimed New Zealand is a nation of kind, friendly and welcoming people.

One especially charming fellow wrote: 

"Fuck the fat one is an ugly cunt. Pathetic bitches. Those are some girls ill gladly smash 4 on 1. Dont care that im a male. Scum like that deserve a face kicking" ...

He now seems to have a daughter. I wonder if fatherhood has changed his mind about calling a girl, a fat ugly cunt, and wanting to kick her in the face?  

His was by no means the worst. I think this one, whose FB page is no longer available, takes pride of place for the most unhinged and sadistically misogynistic:

"Fucking fat whores need to get probed in the ass with a knife shot in the knees tounge choped off ears cut off fingers and toes and the shove them in a dumpster"

Given the use of "ass" and "dumpster" I don't know if this person was a New Zealander, but there was a very seriously deviant young man in Christchurch who, in 2016 and 2019, was sentenced to a combined twelve-year sentence for possession and distribution of objectionable material, and for child rape and other serious child sex offending. In May last year, he was released on highly restrictive parole conditions, which includes no unsupervised access to the internet and a curfew.  

What are the odds?

That aside, these sorts of splenetic explosions of vileness are once again granted immunity, courtesy of Meta's spineless capitulation to the New Patriarchs.

The Turn Of The Screw

I predicted a Trump win, and I’ve also predicted he won’t see out his term which would mean the world will suffer a Vance presidency.  

In analysing the Democrats' defeat, it must be acknowledged that Harris had to overcome the double whammy of her sex and her ethnicity in a country which, in its bones, is sexist and racist. In addition, her parents were "immigrants" of the sort that Trumpists have been encouraged to see as the main cause of their mounting social and economic woes. 

There surely is no greater demonstration of the USA's national cognitive dissonance than the spectacle of the descendants of settler colonists and subsequent immigrants railing against other, more recent, immigrants.

Harris had to keep the warmongers (I refuse to grace them with the term hawk) in her party happy, and toe the party-corporate line in continuing to fund Israel’s brutal assaults on Gaza and Lebanon, while trying to persuade Muslim-Americans and anti-Zionist Democrats that they should still vote for her. 

She had to try to win back enough of the millions of angry, disillusioned, fearful working class Americans by promising to keep the trickle-down tap open a notch, while also keeping the predatory corporate class and their legions of affluent enablers and minions happy by not letting too much of what they see as “their money” flow down to the increasingly debased base.

She had to walk the political tightrope between professing an on-going, uncritical support for trans rights, (a cause the Democrats handled in a way that allowed the religious and secular right to make a bumper crop of political hay), and defence of women’s reproductive rights in the form of access to abortion and birth control – which the right want to erode.

She relied on a procession of celebrities using their tinselly star power to win votes from the various cults of celebrity that infest the USA and, due to its cultural hegemony, infest the rest of the world also.

She even appealed for support from some of the worst of USA Inc’s warmongering border-line and actual fascists.

All she had to do was to beat a bumbling, mumbling, incoherent, seventy-eight year-old, self-absorbed rich-boy with improbable hair and orange-hued skin. 

A sexist who holds women in contempt. A convicted felon. A cheat. A liar.  An out and proud ignoramus. A person whose popular appeal can only be explained in the context of the venality, cynicism, and opportunism of his main political opponents.

Some people, men and women alike, are drawn to the maverick, the bad boy – the man who appears to thumb his nose at convention and the forms of authority which maintain it. As is usual in the US, appearance has a tenuous link to essence. 

The real US is hidden under a glossy veneer of democracy and decency which obscures its plutocratic and essentially corrupt social and political foundation. USA Inc's foundation is now so riven with contradictions and so rotten, the veneer, even where it was once thickest and glossiest, has warped and cracked. 

Trump is not a maverick; he’s a narcissist who is driven not by ideology but by ego, by a drive for personal power that fills the places in his psyche where intellect, rationality, self-control and decency should reside. 

Trump’s ego is vast but hollow, and it requires a constant stream of fawning and flattery to keep it inflated. Those who want to influence or wholly control him know this.

Those of his supporters who aren’t drawn to his apparent individualism and political unorthodoxy have been captured by the cult of celebrity which wields immense influence in the US, and Trump was a media celebrity before he decided to enter politics. It is a measure of the USA's cultural depth that even the spurious claim to celebrity via a schlocky “reality-TV” show is enough to draw people to him.

Some people voted for him because they are desperate for anything seemingly solid and unsinkable that they can use as a buoyancy aid to stay afloat in increasingly wild socio-economic seas. 

Some perform a seemingly impossible leap of logic and common sense and turn him into an almost messianic figure. 

People will continue to analyse the reasons why he has won a second term as president despite all the aspects of his life, his intellect, and his morality that should be impediments to it.

The fact is, the Republicans won largely because their opponents failed to provide a viable choice for the tens of millions of Americans who desperately want their country to change – to change in its essence, not just see another coat of gloss paint or cheap veneer laid over the rotting base.

The women who voted Republican because Trump "knows what a woman is", because he promised to roll back trans rights, protect women's sport, keep gender ideology out of schools .... were conned. 

They were led to or actively chose to believe that the ideology of gender identity was the construction of the left; that somehow this "left" which is incapable of achieving much else, managed to impose an ideological framework on global corporations, on NGOs, and on corporate-compliant governments at all levels of governance and management. 

Their narrow focus prevented them from seeing gender identity ideology and praxis as a Neo-liberal project, the culmination of the rightwing politics of the "self", which was a nail in the coffin of mass collectivism, a wedge to topple the last of the trees in the leftwing forest.

The idea of the gender identity orthodoxy being a leftwing movement only makes sense in relation to the infantile notion of the Democratic party being left wing, which, by any sensible measure, it is not. 

It is essentially a right wing, corporate-friendly party that has recently embraced certain "liberal" issues. There is not even the pretence of making systemic changes, just some accommodations to take off the worst of the sharp edges and dull the most glaring contradictions. 

In essence, the Democrats' commitment to traditional leftwing values and causes takes the form of applying more layers of plastic veneer, gloss paint, and glitter.

Left wing feminists said all along that the way the ideology of gender identity was embraced and enacted risked being weaponised by the religious and secular right  – to the detriment of women's rights and wider democratic and social rights. 

As we are pushed into taking a stand on critically important issues, I will enter into strategic alliances with those liberals who embraced gender identity orthodoxy. Those who did so fanatically however, I am unlikely ever to trust, or forgive because they either lacked political acumen or they acted in bad faith.