Let The People Go

 

The problem of applying conventional morality to large groups of people is one of scale. Conventional morality works best in small groups or between individuals, where personal communication is possible; between nation-states, for example, or between large polities and "liberation movements," individuals cease to exist in a practical sense. Armies do not think or function like families.

In the early period of the Nazi regime, before the minds of Gentile Germans were assimilated, many individual Germans, despite holding abstract notions of antisemitism, refused to bully the Jews they knew personally. The kept shopping at stores owned by Jews, kept associating with their Jewish neighbors, and were sure that "their Jews" were not like "the others." Some even pretended to "Aryanize" businesses owned by Jews they knew to enable them to still make a living. It took years of propaganda, and several anti-Jewish laws and policies, to teach "Aryans" to see all Jews as outsiders.

However once TheJews(R) had been separated out individual distinctions were obscured or forgotten. Once two nations were created, the Germans and TheJews(R), most Germans ceased thinking in conventional moral terms, as the scale had been shifted upward and outward. What would have seemed horrible to do to the Rosenblatts across the street was a "perfectly natural" way for the Volk to treat "parasites."

Most people know this already, whether they think about it much or not. In your normal life bombing the house across the street seems "rather extreme" or even just plain wrong, but it was "just part of the war" for the Allies to firebomb Dresden.

This applies to the inhabitants of the former British Mandate of Palestine: when Jews and Arabs know each other personally they remember that everyone concerned is a person. Yet when they are separate by a border and instructed by propaganda people turn into Us and Them. Conventional morality does not scale up that far. It's simply impossible, and you should know that.

What bothers me about the situation in Gaza is that Hamas treats the civilians who live outside the tunnels as "not Us": the "freedom fighters" are perfectly willing to let the noncombatants in Gaza be bombed and shot and starved, as long as "the struggle" continues. The only Palestinians who really matter to Hamas are soldiers for Hamas, and even then individuals are expendable as soldiers always are. Your conventional morality says "nobody should be treated like the civilians in Gaza," and you are right, in conventional terms in conventional situations. Israel is really fucking those people over.

What "anti-Zionists" somehow hide from themselves is that Hamas is colluding in fucking those people over. You don't see this because you think "the Zionist entity" is evil, and "the Palestinians" are noble victims. You forget that to Hamas the "broad masses" of Palestine also cease to be people, because what matters to a "liberation army" is "the cause of The People," not any particular person per se.

In normal times it would be unthinkable to allow TheJews(R) to bomb the family across the street because of something you do, yet while the "freedom fighters" huddle in their tunnels to keep on fighting it's just too bad that whole neighborhoods of human beings have been forced to flee and and starve. What matters is The Cause, i.e. those who actively participate in The Struggle from the tunnels and bunkers.

Israel is really fucking those people over because it sees them as Those People, who are all the same: a large entity like the IDF would fail as an Army if it regarded the Palestinians as individuals they might work beside in peacetime. Group-think takes over. "They are all Hamas."

Yet Hamas has its own version of group-think: "only we are Hamas." Unless you're a "freedom fighter" you simply don't count. That's how soldiers have to think, regardless of which side they're on. When the IDF is bombing Gaza City the people who are not in the tunnels are just collateral to get damaged.

You are doubtless aware, and most of you have always known, that militarily speaking Hamas' current struggle is hopeless. It always as been. By now perhaps even the fighters themselves realize that.

So the fighting should stop so the people who are not in the tunnels can stop suffering.

The Zionist Entity is not about to stop fucking those people over until Hamas admits it's beat. There's nothing you can do about that, you can wave your signs till your arms go numb and it won't do a thing.

So it's about fucking time that Hamas stopped thinking of the Palestinians who are not in the tunnels as "collateral."

Hamas should stop fighting so Israel won't have such an easy time of being mean and nasty.

Yet Hamas in its tunnels is like the top Nazis in Hitler's bunker. The city above them, and everybody in it, can be blown sky high; as long as they are still down there The Struggle continues.

The Soviet army didn't give a damn about ordinary Germans as people. And the High Command in the bunker didn't either, or they would have decided to quit so fewer ordinary Germans would die. That was fine with Hitler: in his Last Will and Testament he said that because the German Volk had lost the struggle against "Judeo-Bolshevism" the German people no longer had any right to exist.

You have a point comparing the IDF to the Nazi army. Both armies are armies: that's what armies do.

But what about the "high command" in the tunnels under Gaza? Don't you see that they resemble the top Nazis in Hitler's bunker?

Do you think the fighters are starving too? Hardly. They have the food and medical care they need to keep fighting. The struggle would stop continuing if that happened.

Hamas is treating ordinary Palestinians like the Nazis treated ordinary Germans. When The Cause is lost, at least for now. It's time for the fighters to stop fighting, for them to once again become ordinary Palestinians who care about ordinary Palestinians.

It's time for Hamas the let their people go.

Conquering For Peace

 Roughly 40 years ago I stopped being fazed when people disagreed with me. One of the things people around me disagreed with was the Sabra and Shatila massacre: I said it was just plain wrong and that Israel should not have allowed it, because it was immoral and unfair.

Some people disagreed with me because the Palestinians were "terrorists" or closely connected with them. Some of those thought Israel and its buddies were doing God's work, some supported Israel and its allies/proxies for secular reasons. It made me sad when people disagreed with me about what I saw as a basic moral issue.

Some people agreed with me that it was wrong for Israel to let the Lebanese fascists slaughter civilians, but said it was wrong because TheJews(R) were evil. And some people agreed with me that it was wrong but attributed the evil to Capitalist Imperialism. I disagreed with both attributions: I thought it was wrong because it's wrong to massacre civilians, regardless of who does it. It made me sad when people agreed with me for what I saw as the wrong reasons.

Since then I've studied the history of the "Middle East" going back 3000 years, and what I see is the old pattern of people slaughtering each other, both in battle and in massacres, over ethnic and/or religious differences. It doesn't matter who's doing what to who at any given time, there's always some tribal conflict going on. In 1982 in Lebanon the Falange Party was a right-wing Christian tribe of Arabs; in 2023 in Gaza Israel has become in effect another tribe of Arabs. In both cases their enemies were supposedly left-wing tribes of Arabs, some fighting for Islam and some fighting against Capitalism. Who they were and why they said they were doing it didn't matter, which side they were on was irrelevant, what matters was they were all bloodthirsty.

In just about every instance of intertribal violence the "Mideast" over the past 3000 years people have been killing civilians, such as shooting up refugee camps and blowing up school buses full of little kids. The reasons change, the names of the peoples change, but the basic geography and how people behave there remains the same. Maybe there's something about that area, something in the soil or air or water, some germ or radiation, that makes people bloodthirsty.

The only practical solution I see, the one that's least immoral in the long run, is for Israel to pacify the area. History has shown the only way people in that area will stop killing each other like that is if they're all under the heel of some really nasty bunch who can beat everybody else, separately or together.

The analogy is the Mongol conquest of central Asia, which is also in the same general sphere: the Mongols beat everybody else so bad for a couple generations the tribal warfare died down. The Mongols had the same methods and the same ends, but they forced everybody they beat to join in their attack on the people next door.

Israel doesn't need to build that kind of enforced coalition because behind Israel is the USA, this era's greatest empire. As long as the USA keeps the IDF in business Israel can keep all its neighbors down if it feels it has to. Israel can force its neighbors to be peaceful, or at least to stop ganging up to kill TheJews(R).

We've also seen that Israel didn't have to do much in Syria because the Syrian Arabs were too busy killing each other to harm Israel, and unlike in Lebanon Israel didn't pick a side because it hated them both. That Syrian civil war was good for Israel but not good for the people who live there: it would be better if somebody could stop the Arab tribes from killing each other. In the long run it doesn't matter who does it or why, what matters is that some overwhelming force compels peace.

It seems to work better if the overwhelming force is not from that area, if they're Assyrians or Persians or Mongols or Turks; Israel can fulfill that function with US help, if Israel remembers to act like imperialists instead of just another bloodthirsty tribe. Forty years ago in Lebanon Israel got bogged down in the tribal conflict and picked a side, which in the long run was a mistake. The Mongols would have conquered the whole place and made the Arab tribes get along or else.

Note that the idea is to stop the tribes of that area from slaughtering each other, and the way to do that is overwhelming force. "To make a desert and call it peace," and then to make the conquered people get along well enough to do business peacefully with each other. The Silk Road was safer and more profitable under the Mongols than it had ever been. And once the Mongols had killed enough people fewer people died by violence, and more people got enough to eat. and so on.

The history of the most ancient civilizations, those between the Mediterranean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, has always been one of bloody murder. And certain areas, like the Middle East, are concentrated hot spots where murderous tribes have been banging against each other since time immemorial. Unless some bigger beast makes them stop.

In southeast Asia for a couple hundred years the various European empires conquered the area and imposed the kind of peace where all the different tribes had to get along so the empires could profit: e.g., Chinese and Malays and Burmese and and Khmers and Annamese and Thais and so on, of various languages and religions, helped the Brits and the French and the Dutch build a huge commercial network that could basically run itself, as long as the Europeans stayed on top and as long as they weren't too busy fighting each other. The long-term winner in the region was Thailand, that became a rich country because of all the immigrants and refugees who moved there to work and raise kids and eventually intermarry. And for as long as the European empires had control the various tribes of southeast Asia were peaceful with each other.

People are stupid and develop bad habits. One bad habit we have is tribal conflict, which over the course of centuries comes to be normal. Only an empire, be it Persians or Romans or Brits or whoever, can keep them from fighting among themselves. And for a while everybody benefits, some more than others, from the ceasefires among the subjected tribes. Whatever else they're doing they're not at war with each other.

In the long run, if you value peace and prosperity and life itself, you have to allow some overwhelming force to eventually make the tribes stop fighting. The only country that can do that in the Levant is Israel, with US backing. Only "the Zionist conspiracy" can keep the Arab tribes from killing not only TheJews(R) but also each other.

West Virginia and Pennsylvania don't go to war because the USA rules them both. It works if you let it: tribes stop fighting when you make them. And that is peace, which is a good thing, which benefits all the tribes.

People are that stupid. That hasn't changed in over 3000 years. That will only change for our species when one power rules the planet, such as a global communist dictatorship. Speaking of (a kind of) communism, consider the example of the Russian empire: under the Tsars the Russians had been conquering northern Asia from west to east a couple centuries, when in the 1800s they conquered the smaller nations that bordered them, the Armenians and the Georgians and the Turkmen and the Uzbeks and so on, that had been fighting each other for 2000 years, and were starting to make them peaceful. Then came the "Marxist-Leninists" of the USSR who enforced peace among those peoples for 70 years. Then once the USSR fell apart these tribal societies got back to killing each other, until once again the Kremlin overwhelmed them all.

One good thing about Leninism is it valued unity, making the Georgians and the Uzbeks cooperate for the benefit of the USSR. There was more to that than armed force, but only armed force brought enough peace so maybe people could be taught to not fight each other. The USSR gave lots of good and bad examples of how to be a communist empire, so we can build on that without having to reinvent the wheel. All we need is a global hegemon we can subvert, like the Leninists subverted the Tsarists, to get back to the problem of civilizing humanity.

We might have to have more than one hegemon, say Russia and China and the USA, but once they've divided the world between them they'll have to more or less get along. In that case it doesn't matter if Oceania has always been allied with Eastasia and at war with Eurasia, as long as the empires are doing business peacefully and keeping their own societies under control. Each empire will have to evolve systems that work in similar ways, whatever vocabulary they use, and as time goes by they might learn how to come together in one world. If not at least the Shiites and the Sunnis, and the MAGAS and the Woke, all the conquered tribes that make up each empire, will learn to cooperate, because they have to. And the big empires won't fight each other because that would destroy them.

And time will pass and power will mellow and people will learn to get along because it's the right thing to do, because peace is better than murder. It'll be easier if the official ideology of each empire is peace & prosperity for all our members, but even if it's not eventually people will learn peace the hard way.

Democratic socialism and/or anarchy will come later, when the various tribes that make up the planet have been kept down together for so long that they forget about that shit and learn to do something else. Learn to share, to cooperate, to negotiate, for mutual benefit. First they have to be united the way Pennsylvania and Virginia are united. Beat their swords into plowshares. Wise them the fuck up.

The official ideology is almost irrelevant. What people think they're doing matters less than what they're actually achieving. How many people have to die before they're forced to be peaceful will depend on how stupid they are, how long it takes them to catch on. If they're so stupid that they'd rather all die than be peaceful that's their problem. 

We have to start with the species we have, taking the facts as they are. Basically speaking Hobbes had a point: Leviathan brings peace. Once we have peace we can go on to the next step: learning to share. 

  

On My Abysmal Egotism

I should probably put a few style books on my Kindle just in case, so I won't have to use DuckDuckGo, the search engine that doesn't track you, to prove I have heard of them, that I can if need be cite things like a scholar. In case anybody out there suspects that I never got a PhD because I'm not smart enough, as opposed lacking the self-discipline bordering on masochism one must exhibit to attempt such a thing.

One girl I dated actually followed through on her high school plan to get a PhD in Russian Literature by writing about an obscure poet from (I think) Petrograd so she can go around signing herself Doctor [Whatever] for the next 30 years, even though her actual career has nothing to do with the subject and doesn't require such a credential. But advanced degrees were expected in her family, her older siblings and their spouses had or were pursuing them, so she couldn't let down the side; and perhaps also she presumably wanted to prove that she didn't spend six months getting naked with me every Friday evening because she was a total dimwit.

When she told me she'd worked out that plan with her school guidance counselor, to get a PhD she'd never really need, I told her it was pretentious bourgeois wankery, and advised her to do something else, such as marry me, have my baby, and make an honest househusband out of me, which of course I didn't think she'd even consider so it was safe to suggest. Who in her right mind would get a PhD in an obscure subject just to prove she could? At the time I wrote parodies and pastiches of translations of dead French poets, but that took very little effort as, for example, the sonnet form requires only fourteen lines, and alliteration, allusion, assonance, and enjambment come naturally to idle eccentric with a congenital gift of babble.

Yet upon reading her published dissertation, which I hunted down in the local university library twenty-two years after she got rid of me, I could not withhold my admiration and respect for the fact that she actually followed through on that ridiculous scheme, and that she invested several years and fuck knows how much of her father's money in tracking down all those publications and all those interviewees, thereby proving herself my intellectual superior, to herself at least.

To be fair in those days I had a near-fatal case of Dunning-Kruger and loved to babble on about things I had only a cursory knowledge of, because I thought that's what people with 140+ IQs did, which doubtlessly annoyed the fuck out of everybody who knew better, as APs in an expensive Quaker school presumably did. It turned out that people were right when they said that IQ scores alone mean nothing, you have to back up your bragging with actual achievement, and that by the way she was absolutely correct in leaving me for dead, as it felt at the time. This realization by the way was one hell of a comedown for me, that exploded in my head once I got on the Internet and gained access to all the world's knowledge and to people who could compare Derrida and Pagels having actually read them; so thence I've spent the last fifteen years trying to prove to myself, by voracious reading in those subjects that interest me, that I'm really not a total dimwit after all.

So I hope getting involved with me was the stupidest mistake she ever made, which if so means she got that over with in her junior year of high school; I'd love to take credit for the forty-four years of brilliant successes that might have followed that, inspiring her to decide--as her people are wont to decide-- "never again." Even if she did have surgery on her nose and marry a frigging Midwestern shegetz with an even more common English name than mine which she replaced her own with, and go around putting "Doctor" before her name instead of "PhD" after it like more modest eggheads do.

I used to count this person as the love of my life, going by the extreme emotional investment she somehow called up from me and the six months of near-total collapse that followed her 'escape', yet in the years since then I have been kicking myself with "what was I thinking?" It wasn't that I punched above my weight, the kind of chicks a white trash eighth-grade drop-out are supposed to chase after literally bored the fucked out of me, but that I gambled so much on such an obvious long shot. That works okay for picking Derby winners, but then I never bet more than $5 on any horse race and have only lost less than $20 in my whole life.

I never had much success with either playing the ponies or fucking the fillies, but at least I was smart enough to not bother accumulating all the tokens middle class white men are supposed to be able to show for themselves and then lose everything because of an idiotic miscalculation or two. As I saw it there's not much difference between gaining a normal life and being an inveterate gambler, except that when gamblers win at the track they get a lot of money but when normal men win they get saddled with a lifetime of debt and perennial exhaustion. Only a damn fool--in my expert opinion--would take either role.

So the dear Doctor was right, I never got anywhere, but then I never had to try very hard either. Dragging my crazy ass through day after day has indeed been tiring, but that--as with reading thick books with lots of big words in them--came naturally to me. As does emitting this unnecessary torrent of neurotic drivel that I really can't expect anyone to read.

Nor did I ever lose very much.

 

 

 

 

Don't Sell Out Ukraine

 I doubt US troops would have ever been committed, and Trump seems to intend to sacrifice as much of Ukraine as he can get away with. But consider that if Russia takes over all of Ukraine after all the "support" we've provided it will damage this country's image, almost as bad as giving Afghanistan back to the Taliban after 20 years did, and presumably the USA's prestige matters to the people whose opinions count even if they disagree with the trend of US policy.

The best that's going to happen is the de facto war will end with Russia keeping what it's stolen, which isn't that bad considering that before WW2 the Crimea and the area roughly coextensive with that we call the Donbass were in the USSR, and the unconquered parts if Ukraine used to be eastern Poland, so in the long run Ukraine still breaks even.

That's a geostrategic defeat, as much as the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact was for the rulers in the Kremlin and the return of the Sinai to Egypt was for "the Zionist entity," but then many people say those areas should never have been conquered in the first place.

It might be unwise to insist Ukraine become part of NATO, but NATO and/or its constituent nation-states should guarantee its independence and its borders, and Ukraine should be included in the European Union if the people of the Ukraine and the constituents of the EU agree. (Note that joining the Eurozone and the Schengen area would still compromise Ukrainian sovereignty to some degree, perhaps even more than joining NATO.)

Objectively speaking the USA needs an enemy, one whose disappearance would not greatly undermine the USA, and that can't be China because most American consumer goods are made there and Chinese interests own big portions of the US economy. Since 1941 this country has been dependent on the idea of a foreign threat to sustain its military-industrial complex, and an isolationist non-imperial USA would soon wind up a third-rate power like Belgium or Thailand. Russia is not the enemy I would choose, but nobody listens to me so Russia would have to do.

Therefore Russia cannot be allowed to conquer all of Ukraine if the USA is to continue as an entity worth considering. That would look like weakness, whatever incidental benefits it provided to some people, and a weak USA will soon find itself under some kind of attack from all the peoples it's damaged in its imperial course. A USA without NATO, without military bases in "friendly countries," without enforceable pretensions to being a Great Power, would be as internationally weak as it was before the Spanish-American War. No foreign power would take it seriously, and even the Monroe Doctrine would be dead in the water.

So it would be extremely unpatriotic for the US government to sell out Ukraine, and anyone who'd do so is a traitor.