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Clever Pseudonym's avatar

I'm curious as to what it means and what it says about humanity that every person or movement that preaches “nothing less than the liberation of all people” ends up shortly thereafter building concentration camps, mass-murdering both its external and internal enemies, and starving and otherwise immiserating its people until its collapse. (Or in this current example, excusing massacres and chanting for genocide while denying it.)

Is it just like Dostoevsky said? "Starting from unlimited freedom, I have arrived at unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that there can be no solution of the social equation other than mine."

But if you looked at a supposed pro-Palestinian protest and muted the volume and blurred any words, would anyone think that these people were marching for anything resembling peace, liberation, freedom, etc? Or would it just seem like an eruption of blind rage and hatred?

The poor Palestinian people have been incredibly ill-served by being transformed into a Cause. Once a people become a Cause their actual welfare and futures become secondary (or irrelevant) to all the supporters of the Cause, who are usually cheering for some vicarious bloodshed or to be able to witness the most barbaric conception of Justice—watching people you hate get killed. If the Palestinians were treated as just one party to a land dispute where both side had good claims, this could have been worked out long ago. But that would spell the end of the Cause (without any erotic release), thus the bloodshed must continue.

God forbid you or your tribe become a Cause!

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Ellis Geist's avatar

Great essay. Re: "Had the Arabs peacefully accepted partition, there would have been a Palestinian state larger than any now seriously proposed back in 1948," I recently imagined a counterfactual history in a recent note: https://substack.com/@ellisgeist/note/c-78418567

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