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Israel's lack of cultural proximity is also the prime reason people don't like Israel. Zionists and philosemites make claims of Israel being very culturally 'western' whilst at the same time Israel is getting itself into all sorts of trouble relating to the conflict precisely because they are not acting 'western'.
The response to a muslim terror attack, as demonstrated by the many European nations that have suffered them, is not to bomb civilians into oblivion. In fact, the preferred response is to venerate the outgroup that hurt you and seek reconciliation even harder. Israel does not do this. Israel should be taking in hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. Possibly millions. Israel does not do this. Instead they bomb women and children. You could not be any less western.
By the same token, many people do not know how some jews view the outside world and have no concept of how ethnocentric semites are.
I think many zionists and philosemites need to understand that the 'rooting for the underdog' mentality that drives some support for Palestine is the same one that drives tolerance for semites around the world. You can not have it both ways. Either the culturally foreign, which includes both muslims and jews, is not tolerated or they both are. Trying to have it both ways because you love yourself so much more than anyone else is not going to cut it for fair minded westerners. In fact, trying to employ classic dehumanizing rhetoric like you do in your post is not going to work precisely because of jewish anti-prejudice propaganda driven into every westerners head.
I would point out that in no small part due to the European elites taking this stance, anti-muslim anti-immigration parties have grown enormously in power across Europe. Meloni is in charge in Italy, Wilders is in charge in the Netherlands, the National Rally is about to win the French election, AfD is rising in Germany, etc, etc.
This comes off the back of a decade of mass immigration, terror attacks that have left hundreds dead, thousands of children raped etc, etc.
I think it's fair to say Israel has a fair amount of catching up to do before they can justify putting forth a moderate right winger to lead their country, as is happening in Europe. Forget about the actual ethnonationalist zionism that underlines the Likud party. I mean, would such a thing even be allowed in Germany? You know, Zionism... but for Germans...
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Ah, but the US is not a European country. And the US response to a muslim terror attack was to take over by force not just one but two Muslim countries -- one of them not even involved -- including lots of bombing which necessarily killed civilians. So the Israelis may be closer to the US than the Europeans, culturally.
The US response to a muslim terror attack was to follow a plan laid out by philosemitic neoconservative zionists in the American government. I see that more as a self reinforcing circle of zionist influence than anything else.
But aside from that, yeah, most Americans supported the war effort at the time. Many European nations joined in, a lot of muslims got annihilated in the name of women in the workplace, NATO, burgers and freedom. But how does the 'west' look at that effort today? Positive or negative? I'd say overwhelmingly negative.
To that end Israel might be western by an older standard that was defined a fair bit by zionism in American politics, but I would not say that this standard would cut it today.
Whether the US responded that way because The Jews made us or not, the US did indeed respond that way. Perhaps Philosemitic neoconservative zionists (whether in Israel or the US) are the real Westerners and Europe is just a shadow of itself, poisoned by postmodern European liberalism.
Maybe the Europeans. I'm pretty sure US voters are still pretty happy about taking out Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's buddies, even if both wars dragged on far too long.
I'd appreciate if you didn't restate what I wrote in a way that's infantile and inaccurate.
I refer to the west as the sum total of actions and expression made by the relevant groups that compose it, not what I can define it as being in wordplay land. When Europe got hit with terror attacks it didn't go out bombing, it didn't condemn muslims. In fact, no amount of rape and murder even put a dent in their immigration rhetoric. That's what the west is today. It may have been different in a different time, but I was pretty clear in referring to the west of today. It may change tomorrow, but that doesn't change what it is today and recently has been.
And they're pretty unhappy about the loss of life of their own. From what I can gather its 50/50 on whether or not using force in Iraq was the right choice. With how negatively the war is seen in Europe I'll stand by my words and say that the war in Iraq and war on terror in general is seen as an overwhelming negative as far as the 'west' goes.
And I'd appreciate if you didn't post such infantile and inaccurate things as suggesting that Zionism was somehow responsible for the American response to 9/11, but I think we're both going to be disapppointed.
That's what Europe is today, a shadow of their old selves. The US is part of the West as well, and is not so accommodating.
Remember Iraq didn't even do 9/11. So if this is true, 50% of Americans think using force to topple an innocent (at least of that particular crime) Islamic country was fine.
The history of influencers within the White House at the time is well documented. There would have been no war in Iraq had there not been for neoconservative zionist and philosemitic intervention. From the WMD hoax to the neoconservative triumph over realist voices in the White House
So Europe is what it is, just like I said. With roughly half of the US population being on a similar page. I'd say that what constitutes 'the west' and by proxy what counts as 'western' today is far away from the Israeli expression. This can most obviously be demonstrated by the opposition to Israeli warfare on the global stage by the vast majority of the European nations, as well as a lot of requests to 'back off' from US officials.
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Bombing women and children has been a totally acceptable tactic utilized by Western militaries since at least World War 2, as you know. Was the United States not a Western country when it annihilated dozens of Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians? Or in Vietnam, or Cambodia, or Iraq, or Yugoslavia? And to be clear, this isn’t an “America Bad, therefore Israel also Bad” comparison. It’s just demonstrably true, as far as I can tell, that nothing Israel has done since October 7th is beyond the bounds of what any major Western military has done within our lifetimes, or would do if given a reason to.
Far from being a sign of how different and alien Israelis are compared to us, I think it actually just demonstrates that Israel is having to conquer its indigenous population in the age of social media and ubiquitous video cameras, whereas the United States had the luxury of having finished off the Amerindians long before anyone could have posted our atrocities on Twitter. (The Indians also didn’t have proper schools and hospitals to bomb, so the scale and optics of the destruction of their civilization was less photogenic.) Israel is the only significant modern example of a settler colonial state, which is a geopolitical model intimately familiar to the history of nearly every major Western country.
And the general western sentiment of bombing civilians today is that it is bad.
I'm not taking this comparison seriously. If you think Israel is acting western by repeating what every other western countries now count as dark periods of their respective histories I can only throw my hands in the air.
Western powers said: No more endless conquest, no more slavery, no more colonialism, no more bombing. We live in the present day and Israel needs to get with the program if they want to call themselves western. As I said before, the western response to a terror attack is not bombing but veneration for the outgroup that did it. Yes, in the past there would have been bombs, but we are not talking about acting western as the west was 100 years ago. These are moderns western standards being applied to Israel and Israel fails to meet them. By that token Israel is not acting western at all since you are not allowed to terrorize the defenseless little brownfolk anymore.
If the commancheria was a going concern, I guarantee you we would be doing it and not feeling guilty.
We don't bomb the drug cartels, and it's not obvious to me that they're less awful than the Commanche.
In addition to the cartels mostly hitting US citizens by collateral damage- and keeping the worst stuff in Latin America anyways- bombing the cartels and carrying out reprisals against their supporters wouldn’t be that unpopular.
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The drug cartels, so far as I know, do not engage in their most brutal actions within the United States. And the brutal actions they do engage in within the United States are mostly against other criminals. Let a drug cartel raid The French Laundry and take scalps and see how long they survive.
A fair point, but the Commanche weren't taking scalps from the French Laundry either, were they?
The Cartels are extremely brutal, and their brutality has hit American citizens just on the other side of America's borders, and constantly hits the citizens of a close American ally. I grant that it's not a perfect comparison, but I think the OP's premise is questionable. We really have turned down the violence knob a whole lot in the last few decades.
They were attacking respectable Americans, if not the elite. I think a big reason the cartels keep their most brutal actions on the Mexican side is they don't want the US to come down on them.
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Who in those countries thinks this? Shitlibs! Progs! Why are you echoing and reifying their moral framework? The periods you’re referring to were, by any measure I care about, the civilizational peak for the European diaspora. You get to live comfortably in the shadow of that era today, enjoying all of its myriad fruits and consequences, and you simultaneously get to be sanctimonious and squeamish about it because it happened before you were alive to have to watch the sausage get made in real time.
They were able to say that because they’d already gotten everything they needed out of those things. (Except for the times when they actually still needed to make exceptions - like, again, the many times the American military has reverted to the old civilian-bombing, city-leveling model within my lifetime.) Meanwhile, as I said, Israel is in a position where the old model is still the only realistic option for them, given their geopolitical position and what they’re trying to do. (i.e. secure and expand their settler-colonial ethnostate)
Look, I share your squeamishness about bombing women and children! I visited Japan just a few months ago, and I spent a couple of days in Hiroshima, including a visit to the Peace Memorial Museum. When I ponder what the Americans did not only to that city, but to dozens of other Japanese cities during the closing stages of the war, I too feel strongly the pull of the peacenik instinct. Once upon a time I would have happily declared myself a pacifist.
However, I eventually had to reckon with what the world would look like today if the Americans had just let the Indians share the continent, or if Japan had fought the U.S. to a stalemate as a result of the Americans deciding to only have “fair fights” where civilians weren’t targeted. Is that actually a better world? Surely for the people who ended up dead and maimed in our timeline, yes, that would have been preferable. Would it be better for their posterity today, though? I think it’s a pretty tough argument.
Certainly the Israelis seem to believe that the current spasm of barbarity is ultimately necessary to secure the prosperity of future Israeli generations, who will certainly look back on their grandparents’ generation with the same level of sanctimonious disgust you’re demonstrating now. Such is the inexorable cycle of progress.
Don't do that.
I was expecting that. I figured I’d leave it in and take my chances. I don’t disagree, though.
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The ruling class thinks this way. I am not reifying their moral framework, I'm describing it. If you want to play as a man against time do go ahead. Though I'd appreciate it if you did so relating to any other topic than this one. As it only serves to carve out an exception for a people who do not deserve it.
The same impulse that guides the west today guided the colonial powers away from properly settling the lands and pushing the locals away. There is still plenty of resource to be had in every one of these places. And gathering it is still being hindered by the people who occupy the areas. To imagine that the decision to abandon fertile lands was taken because no one needed these resources anymore is silly. There was plenty of need and plenty of poverty to go around in the homelands. But that was also the case for the colonies. Which is why the people there weren't robbed and slaughtered but aided.
You're still playing with the same piece of yarn regardless of how far you drag its thread.
I don't look back at the past with rose tinted glasses, imagining that the complete and utter failure of the past is somehow venerated by the same failure in the present, just because I happen to be alive. As if the two aren't holding hands. The moments in time you see as highs are the moments in time everything was fated to this point. If you don't like how things are today I'd ask you to take a more critical look at the past.
Of all of the users on this forum, I think I’m one of the ones to whom this accusation applies the least. I’m on record here advocating for the racial partition of the United States, and for the reintroduction and expansion of public executions for a massively wide range of crimes. Whatever else you want to say about my worldview, I very obviously do not believe that only the Jews should be allowed to return to the tried-and-tested methods of the past.
All good points! I don’t dispute that the European powers could have been far more brutal and exterminationist than they were. Their sentimentality, for right or wrong, did prevent them from really going all the way, even though many of the peoples whom they conquered, if given the whip hand, would never have hesitated so.
I struggle a lot with whether I think “Western values” even refers to any real and reliably identifiable category at all - and, if so, what jettisoning such values would mean for the societies who supposedly believe in them today. Would I actually want to live in a society where the concept of “inalienable human rights” was abandoned? Sure, it’d certainly mean less homeless people in my neighborhood. Probably less disorder. Certainly less refugees and welfare recipients. What would be its other knock-on effects? To what extent are the soft-headed liberal values you’re decrying actually load-bearing cultural infrastructure underpinning the best parts of our society, versus simply luxury beliefs that could easily be discarded or de-emphasized without impacting the parts of my society that I care about? Certainly I personally don’t believe that every individual human life has significant intrinsic moral value. But do I want to live in a society where everyone in power agrees with me? I’m not actually certain.
Then we can chalk it up to poor timing.
I don't know why you bother yourself with these questions. You don't need lofty universalist principles or imaginary rights to live. National Socialism works just fine. Direct the compassionate towards their own and you will never speak poorly of a 'liberal' again.
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This section to me is particularly dangerous. You can't untangle "western values" from the societies that have been created by them and the benefits conferred to billions through that process. Many times when you pull on a few seemingly unrelated threads in a system it turns out that they were actually load bearing threads and the whole thing unravels. There is certainly a secret to western success, and a large part of it has been trust and cooperation beyond clan and family; if you abandon those values you're right back to it. It is all fun and games until you're the one up against the wall with no due process. Everyone always imagines they'll be the boot instead of the human face, most people don't end up being the boot.
When England led the world in coal and textile production, we proselytised for Free Trade. It became one of our great societal convictions, and as a country we became very rich.
Then the coal started running out and we didn’t have oil. Factories in other countries could take advantage of cheap labour and generous subsidies. And suddenly Free Trade meant globalisation hollowing out our economy.
Because the West is in many ways an ideological concept, and the US is an explicitly ideological state (reflected in the constitution), and because western countries have historically been rich and pleasant places to live, we have avoided asking ourselves if our ideologies caused our success or were contingent on it.
I don’t think we can assume that due process causes high trust societies (rather than vice versa), and that free markets produce prosperity. They may! But I’m not currently willing to take it as an axiom in the way that I was 20 years ago.
England was a trading empire long before coal and textiles. It was already very rich by Euro standards before the industrial revolution. It wasn't the coal and the textiles. It was the people and the culture that developed in a place that could only be reached and lived in with some expeditiousness.
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