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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28233 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Please excuse the following rambling.

The way I see it this goes back to the cold war, when Israel was a proxy for the West and the muslim countries were getting cozy with the soviets. Now, regardless of whether it was actual soviet manipulation or just an organic development, somehow Western youths and students ended up getting on board the anti-imperialist, socialist and pro-soviet train, and backing palestine over israel is just part and parcel of that. And while elements of the far-left, especially in Germany, have been pro-israel probably as an outgrowth of being anti-nazi and thus anti-antisemitic, the majority still gets their geopolitics from ye olde colde warre thinking. Add to that the timeless but boosted-in-modernity fixation on promoting the interests of the weak and oppressed, and the degraded cultural immune system of the West that's no longer able to defend itself against leftist narratives which leads to increasingly drastic purity spirals in leftism as well as the marginalization of other lines of thinking that leave this kind of leftism in control of most discourse and media, and there you go, the youth and the students and many of those who have some sort of platform to speak from are now pro-palestinian by default, and even if they'd like to denounce what hamas are doing they can't without betraying their side in the culture war.

Now, the German left very quickly shut up and toed the line to support Israel, since you cannot be anti-zionist in this country without putting yourself dangerously close to the nazi area, but America doesn't have quite the same mechanisms in place, so your youth and students can fully enjoy their ideology.

This was an interesting thing, that I was trying to but failing to reference/get at:

In the 1960s, the radical left and black militants engaged in terrorism and mass violence for several years. During that period, a disproportionate amount of money and leadership on the left came from Jews and Jewish organizations. Then the Panthers took the movement by storm and imposed a Third World, anti-imperialist focus on the left, which turned hard against Israel after the Six Day War in ‘67. The Panthers’ anti-Zionism bled over into plain anti-Semitism, and many disillusioned Jews began to back away from the movement. Then, in ‘69, black militants in NYC picked a fight w/the mostly Jewish NYC teachers’ union, and the virulent antisemitism that had been just beneath the surface burst out into the open. The Jewish Defense League was actually formed in the aftermath of the conflict, to protect and retaliate on behalf of Jews who were being harassed and attacked by black militants.

The loss of Jewish support was the end of the ‘60s radical left as a serious movement, and the long march on the institutions began. Now that it’s had a half decade to regroup, it’s back on the streets causing mayhem. As before, Jewish organizers and groups played a disproportionate leadership role w/BLM, campus radicals, and other militant groups, and as before, the movement has turned against Israel and Jews more generally. If the rest of the cycle repeats, turning against the Jews will mark the beginning of the end of this round of left wing madness…

Hopefully we all learn a more lasting lesson this time.

Your points about purity cycles and lack of immunity to leftist narratives also rings true to me

The opposition probably has little to do with cold war era politics today and more to do with failed neocon policy. In Europe we have seen the consequences of warmonger in the middle east with large waves of refugees. The enthusiasm for more bombing, fighting and occupying in the middle east is not high when it has been a failure for 22 years with the only tangible result being massive blowback. People don't want 2 million arabs to flee Gaza, people don't want to waste military resources on forever wars and people question the morality of these wars.

Israel has had large immigration from Eastern Europe. Forcefully moving arabs from their home so Belorussian's can build a new house in Palestine is hard to justify. The naval blockade against Gaza, the continuous mistreatment of Palestinians and the creeping expansion of Israel isn't popular.

Furthermore, Israel hasn't really provided any benefit to Europe while continuously causing tremendous headache.

The proximate cause of large waves of refugees flooding Europe is your liberal governments accepting them, not "neocons" in America. It's not George Bush's fault that your country doesn't deport them like it should.

We have no massimmigration from Jordan, the emirates or Saudi araba. We had no mass immigration from Libya before the war. Mass immigration from Syria and Iraq started with the neocon wars. Afghans pretty much didn't exist before the war in Europe. The force pushing them into Europe is the US war machine.

I think the main reason that the German left remained partially (not wholly obviously as you say, see the RAF and the Munich attacks, various radical leftist groups to this day) zionist is that the ‘68 culture in Germany specifically involved the whole Vergangenheitsbewältigung thing, ie a lot of performative anger by young people at parents or elders who had been party members or had variously moved on from the third reich without ever discussing it. That creates a kind of inoculation against hardcore anti-Zionism, at least for a few decades. The second thing was obviously that Germany was a divided country with a huge US and allied military presence, polling showed that a substantial minority of Germans would hide an RAF member from the police, and so the CIA’s (and domestic West German government’s) anticommunist efforts were most staunchly focused on young West Germans and driving a wedge between West German leftists and Soviet-funded leftist movements (arguably an origin story for the success of the modern Green movement in in Western Europe).

"polling showed that a substantial minority of Germans would hide an RAF member from the police"

Until I looked it up I thought you were talking about a poll taken during or after the war that said that a substantial minority of Germans would hide a downed British pilot (Royal Air Force) during the war if they had encountered one. Which seemed like a crazy poll to me. Then I figured out that it stood for Red Army Faction.

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