this thread is so full of terrible, not-relevant, or just plain rule-breaking discourse across the board that we’ve decided to totally remove it, and that’s very disappointing because this is the first time we’ve had to do this to a thread. let’s please not do this again.
Paywalled, but the little bit before that is tiring. Gotta put that bolded ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ lip-service to genocide before anything else can be said, huh? Tell me again how the perpetrator of apartheid is defending itself against members of the population it’s pushed into an overcrowded open-air prison by bombing them into oblivion.
Your bias is entirely favor of the Palestinian people, as it probably should be but I don't think your analysis is accurate in context of wider history.
Are you saying this is the same level as the holocaust? That was a systemic murdering for the purposes of eliminating jews from the planet. This at its worse, as it currently stands, is an ethnic cleansing. I'm interested in what you would argue makes this genocidal over ethnic cleansing?
I mean it’s not great what they’ve done in Gaza, but just to recalibrate your senses a bit, this is what happens when a nation actually commits genocide against a weaker people inside its borders: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide
A significant metric to look at is population growth. Gaza strip is one of the densest population areas in the world, and it has been growing rapidly. This is, incidentally, the reason why most of their population is under-age. In Uyghur areas, in contrast, population has been diminishing in growing rates.
Of course, you shouldn’t also ignore the forced labor, political indoctrination, forced sterilization, forced contraception, forced abortion. I don’t think Israel has done any of these? Israel has destroyed some mosques in their attacks, whereas China has razed or damaged 16 thousand mosques in Uyghur areas. Granted, the area is much larger, so there are probably more mosques in there also. But you should note that China is not at war against Uyghurs, and hasn’t been attacked by them – they’re just destroying them.
Perhaps all the people who would downvote me have already blocked me ;-)
But seriously, this is not whataboutism. It’s an appeal to recalibrate and come to senses, and most importantly, not dilute an important and serious concept like genocide. Even what happened/is happening in Ukraine is probably not a genocide even though I’m happily 100% against Russia.
To summarize it, human rights attorney Rabea Eghbariah makes the case that Israel’s efforts to eliminate the political agency and national identity of Palestinians should be viewed as a novel atrocity which she suggests calling a “Nakba”. She argues that using formal definitions, one can create a compelling case that Israel is guilty of at least attempting genocide in numerous discrete places and points in time, however the contours of their actions are very different structurally from past genocides, and don’t extend well when trying to characterize the broader devastation brought against the Palestinian people even when bombs aren’t falling.
She points out that our concept of apartheid emerged from a system by that name in South Africa, and our concept of genocide emerged after witnessing the industrialization of ethnic murder by the Nazis. In this vein, rather than insisting on trying to examine the Israeli model using the tools and benchmarks of past forms of ethnic suppression, she argues that we may find it more instructive to examine it as a series of innovations in control, particularly focusing on the legal systems used to carefully segment the managed subclass into a complex hierarchy selective in its conferral of rights to movement, occupancy, and legal protection.
I think this is a good framework. I’m very comfortable calling the campaign against Gaza in the last few weeks genocide, but many people call what has happened since 1948, or 1968 or since 2006 a genocide, and it’s understandably harder to pin down. But it starts to become easier to think about and talk about if we tie the intermittent bombing campaigns into a larger picture with the systems of work permits and building permits and water rights and so on that are used to dispossess Palestinians and render them powerless.
This seemed like a high quality analysis by a respectable academic, then the veryfirstsource I checked out turned out to be an amazing exaggeration. The article states
Tens of thousands are injured, and over 45% of homes in Gaza have been destroyed.
So I check the source, which is a paywalled WSJ article. Already the title of the article is
At Least 45% of Housing Units Destroyed or Damaged in Gaza
Destroyed ordamaged. Should I check the other sources for similar “mistakes”? Perhaps I just got lucky and found the only bullshit reference from this article written by a Harvard Law School PhD graduate?
Or perhaps Harvard Law Review was onto something when they didn’t publish it and I would be wasting my time looking through all of them instead of just trusting them on this.
I’m very comfortable calling the campaign against Gaza in the last few weeks genocide
Because it fits nearly every single clause in the UN convention on genocide? Because Israeli officials have admitted on national tv they intend to create “a second nakba”? Because they’re using dehumanizing language to describe Palestinians? Because they’ve admitted their goal is to take over Gaza? Because they’re violently attacking hundreds of people in the West Bank, where Hamas has no presence? Because it is by definition a genocide, and apologia like yours does nothing but try to push people into genocide denial.
Why is it almost always the people who call themselves communists?
Because you’re ignoring genocides committed by others?
What about:
native Americans
Irish
Bangladesh
Holocaust
Armenia
Just to name a few famous examples.
Besides, Pol Pot wasn’t much of a communist, as soon as he started the genocide, he lost support from other communist nations, he became a staunch anti-communist and got the support of the USA even more than a decade after the communists deposed him.
I’m not going to argue the holodomor with you, but even there, the case is not as simple as you think.
On top of that, the existence of bigger genocides doesn’t stop making this less of a genocide.
Sure, many of these happened in a time where communism was still more like a theory (or not even that yet) than anything tried in practice. People who called themselves communist did a lot of these in a single century, most of them after WW2.
Besides, Pol Pot wasn’t much of a communist
To be fair, I said people “who call themselves communist”.
What’s your point? Are you saying that there are always people who commit genocides and these people become communist after they read Das Kapital?
Communism’s main rival is capitalism. If you want to make a fair comparison, you need to include genocides committed by capitalist countries too. And capitalism has been around for a fair bit longer. Not making excuses for communist countries, just putting things a little more in context.
To be fair, I said people “who call themselves communist”.
Communism and socialism is popular, if you are a populist, an often used strategy is pretending to be the popular thing. Hitler pretended to be a socialist, until he purged all socialists. Pol Pot pretended to be a communist, until it no longer suited him and he had them killed.
Pol Pot pretended to be a communist, until it no longer suited him and he had them killed.
He was the leader of the Communist Party of Kampuchea from 1963-1981, at which point it was rebranded as the Party of Democratic Kampuchea, which he lead until 1985. Also that new party was communist. The Cambodian genocide was roughly 1975-1979.
Are you just defining people who are absolutely horrible not communists even though they call themselves communist, are allied with other governments who call themselves communist, and execute similar policies as them? I mean I get the impulse, I also get plenty of negative feelings when I think about pro-free market, pro-freedom politicians who commit atrocities or say stupid shit and would rather that those people don’t exist. Sadly, real world doesn’t always like us.
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