This is the legacy of a country that never denazified, but still falls in line with Western hegemony regarding the imperialist project of Israel. They have found a new victim to foist their racist paranoia unto and simultaneously use the widespread opposition among Muslims and Arabs to Israel (a state that ethnically cleanses and exterminates them) as means to justify their extermination because their opposition to the Israel is systemically and legally classified as antisemitic.
This is the obvious consequence of labeling valid criticism of Israel as rote antisemitism is fueling anti-Muslim villainization and hysteria. If you oppose Arab extermination and ethnic cleansing, you are antisemitic. And if you're antisemitic you deserve extermination.
Germans will never be the hero for any story it seems.
They always end up on the wrong side of history.
did it not murdered rome ,
did it not broke the cathlolic hegemony ,
did it not liberated the Writen Word
did it not wrote the Theory ,
did it not send Lenin ?
did it not broke the Power of Colonieser Empires ?
-- yeah but it did so for the wrong reasons , silly --
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nlmKKV0_FM
Realistically no one is going to be able to touch the British and later the Americans, but the old world Catholics sure made a brave effort.
This isn't a new thing, AfD have been pushing this narrative for years. I see that a lot of people who are the most vocal about this rn have ideological ties to them, too. Lots of identitarian ethno-state supporting, virulently islamophobic trolls crawling out of the woodwork.
ofc, it goes way beyond such circles. For example, the CDU is extremely eager rn to equate any criticism of Israel with antisemitism, while they simultaneously deny that platforming outright holocaust deniers could be seen as "spreading antisemitism."
The "Tagesschau" which is the nationally syndicated nightly news program released an article about the "3D" model of antisemitism yesterday as well. The "criticism of Israel is antisemitism" political line is an institutionally backed one at this point. The full power of the German ideological state machine is pushing this narrative.
Die Linke is also saying this. It's just so cursed.
Max Blumenthal tried to ask a Linke representative about a German Arab family being killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, and the dude locked himself in a bathroom to get away from him. They are also spineless cowards and morons unfortunately.
I should really get registered so i can vote, but then i see shit like that and wonder why i even bother.
How's voting work in Germany? Here in Finland the only thing I've ever needed has been my ID card
I mostly, just haven't registered that I now live in germany, I think then it is automatik. I think right now I am some kind of unregistered immigrant. I just looked it up and it is really uclear how i am supposed to do the bureocracy with corona and everything, which i guess is the reason i unregistered in the first place.
Die Linke is infested with Antideutsch western chauvinists and social imperialists
Holy shit, I just looked up the "antideutsch" movement it is probably the most cursed thing I have ever seen in Western left politics.
yup, it pretty much ruins my day every time I remember they exist, which has happened often this last week
Tbf part of the Israel affinity is Germans trying to "overcompensate" in a very weird way about, well, the whole nazi thing etc.
The German overcompensation is definitely real. They are kind of in an unenviable position because if they compare these Jewish led pogroms to Kristallnacht they would be absolutely raked over the coals even though the parallels are obviously there.
I mean yeah lol there isn't much like that that you can say as a German and not be compared to Nazis.
Unfortunately the same sentiment doesn't appear to exist for other victims of the Holocaust, like Roma etc.
West Germans overcompensates the fact they never really deNazifies.
The last week has been wild here, my dumb communist comedy podcast got to leak a Deutsche Welle memo saying you can't criticize Israel and deffo can't use the word apartheid or colonizer in relation to it. I'm hopeful that this (and the events of May 1st) are the last gasp of the Antideutsch in the left though because they're all posting like a divorced man in his 40s refusing to believe he's not cool anymore especially in the face of the increasingly more diverse and principled newer German left.
"We believe in impartiality, but do not allow the use of factual language in describing the situation in Israel."
Ansalm Jappe had a huge blow up at red may Seattle over Palestine just last week lol when Andreas Malm dared speak against apartheid. He's technically part of a group that split from antideustch but still basically the same.
Ansalm Jappe
He's antiimp right? Dear god I hope that term is reclaimed
I think he's wertkritik, not sure how much of a group that is though.
What does the events of May first refer to in this context?
International Workers Day, it's a public holiday here in Germany where in Berlin there's a huge demonstration of left wing groups. Somewhere between 6-8k and of course a violent police response. https://twitter.com/cornerspaeti/status/1388550703753400330
Edit: The May 1st demo in Berlin was largely lead by groups against the Antideutsch like Migrantifa, Jewish Bund, Palestine Speaks. Antideutsch were very eager to call those groups antisemitic but most people who were on the ground managed to point out online that Hebrew was one of the many languages spoken at the demo. While discussion of this stuff in media is vile, the Antideutsch are slowly falling away and zionism is becoming an exclusively right wing thing.
I see. That's a good at least, that such an obscenely cancerous movement as the antideustchers are falling apart
Oh it's nuts over in Austria too. FPÖ writing horrified sympathy statements decrying imported antisemitism .... you know, the party that got boycotted by Israel for antisemitism a few years ago lmao.
The other fucked up thing ofc is Jewish German people who speak up for Palestine (like the Jewish Antifascist Bund in Berlin) gets called antisemitic and self-hating BY GERMANS. I mean it's bad enough when anybody does it, but BY GERMANS. Now that's fucking antisemitism.
Hmm. Maybe it's Germans that don't have a right to exist honestly.
Immigrants are stealing all the good jobs at the antisemitism factory from native Germans.
at first I read the title as "Gamers are now calling..." and I was completely believing it
I mean Gamers are definitely doing it too. I guarantee it.
But guys we should be like "socialist" Germany, they have welfare. By god that nation is a curse
The healthcare here sucks by the way. It's one of the worst in Western Europed because we use an universal insurance system. It's universal at least, but it uses the worst possible universal model outside of Obamacare.
Everyone outside of germany is always shitting on german healthcare.
At least it's not as bad as the Netherlands dog shit system.
I get the feeling that noone really likes their healthcare system.
People still like the NHS, just creaking a little recently with near 2 decades of under funding
Yeah they all have issues that are mostly due to getting healthcare being a really uncomfortable and inconvenient in general tbh
Immigration will be an ever bigger issue in the future, interesting to see how politicians frame it. I guess this hints at liberal saying "keep em out they're all bigots".
"Keep out immigrants because they aren't woke" would be absolutely something I hear libs saying. Woke obviously being used disingenuous.
The original 80s/90s anti-immigration ferver was driven by the perception that Latinos were only coming to the US to sell drugs and rape women. This isn't even new. It's just been given a new layer of varnish for the 21st century.
Immigration is like the keystone issue in German politics at the moment, because for native Germans they are in the midst of the worst inverted demographic pyramid in the world other than Japan. Their population is ancient and decrepit and they need immigration for both menial and intellectual labor, but they're incredibly conservative and mostly xenophobic. The country's "democracy" is run on behalf of an unproductive class of olds on the top that both need immigrant labor, but want to punish immigrants.
Immigration is going to be interesting for the west as a whole (due to generally shitty fertility and demographics). Right now there's a facade of the west being the most "tolerant/progressive" part of the world but that's obviously not the case. From imperialism to media coverage to structural socioeconomic issues, there's a lot of bullshit beneath the surface. In fact, this very sentiment is rooted in white chauvinism (or white man's burden) and therefore self-contradictory.
But as immigration numbers go up, more and more of the underlying racism and xenophobia will show itself and the facade will be stripped away. Structural and systemic racism will bubble to the surface, more and more yt people will become openly reactionary and vote for far-right politicians to keep the migrants out.
But as immigration numbers go up, more and more of the underlying racism and xenophobia will show itself
The positive flip side of this is that I see around me, is a lot of westerners being increasingly red-pilled to horrible the shit the west is doing. Immigrants are increasingly the friends, colleagues, neigbors, spouses and family of westeners. So racist propaganda isn't sticking like it used to. Don't know if I described it clearly like this.
I hope you're right. Seems like far right and neo nazi shit has made significant political gains in recent years.
They won't have to frame it in any way because the media in the global north will put a blackout on any news of the masses of climate refugees being imprisoned or outright gunned down.
This is a big question: how does a revolutionary vanguard oppose Zionism, but not give fuel to anti semetism. I don't think it's enough to just shrug and say they arent the same thing, but a lot of people aren't going to make that seperation.
I sent an older person a bunch of info on the occupation, and she came back at me with all this anti semetic stuff about american Jews. I was like wwooooo woohoo noooo. I was like the Greek anarchists from that ancap copypasta nnnnnooooo nnoooooo. I tried to explain, but it just didn't get through.
Well it's honestly a huge failed legacy of the communist movement in general to properly conceptualize and move forward with a proper characterization of Jewish nationhood. The argument itself can really be primarily dated back to the major factional argument between the Bolsheviks and the Bundists in the Russian Social Democratic movement, where the Bund wanted a federated party based on the Bund representing the national interests of the all Jewish proletariat. The question of Jewish nationhood, imo, became subsumed to the more practical question of organizing a clandestine and illegal party and its incommensurability with federation in that context. Obviously the Bolsheviks wanted a centralized structure given the prevailing political context, and I think that was the right call, but they justified this political practicality through launching a theoretical and historical survey of how to classify a nation with Stalin's seminal pamphlet that asserted Jews did not classify a nation and the only path forward was Jewish "assimilation" into the greater nationalities. A view shared by Lenin as well.
Obviously, this "assimilation" concept does a lot of heavy lifting, but was never properly outfitted with an actual practical vision for what this would mean or how it would be accomplished. History has kind of proven the assimilation thesis untenable, especially given that the only conceptions of Jewishness are negative in that Jewishness is defined as in opposition and "otherness" to nationalities, rather than primarily being fixed to a positive conception of what it actually means to be Jewish. Following the holocaust, the conception of Zionism was of great practical importance because Jews were asking themselves how they could ever exist in a context where they were straddling a line between being assimilated but existentially opposed and unable to actually assimilate into greater schemas of nationhood. So the Jews took a step in constituting themselves as a "true" nation by founding a national territory. The criteria that Stalin used to deny them the historical classification as a nation.
Now the great question is can Zionism exist as a way of life that integrates ancestral Jews into an indigenous way of life and existence in the Middle East, or can Zionism only exist as an imposition of a European linked and defined nation-statehood? If Zionism is only possible as a settler-colonial construct, then does this necessitate the resettlement of 9 million Jews out of Israel? This is a huge question that obviously needs to be very carefully dealt with and theoretically well developed. Currently I think anti-Zionism is probably a poison pill, and the left should focus their efforts more on a positive affirmation of Palestinian problems and clearly and unequivocally supporting the Palestinian right of return and an end to Israeli occupation and settlement. That's probably the best that can be done from the Western left in the interim.
All of this is to say I don't actually know lol. But it's clear to date that the orthodox interpretations of nationhood are insufficient in conceptualizing the problematic introduced by Jewishness, and we really need to renew an investigation and study into what our conceptions of a nation truly are.
Now the great question is can Zionism exist as a way of life that integrates ancestral Jews into an indigenous way of life and existence in the Middle East
One thing I think is missing from your analysis is the fact that Jews have existed in what is now Israel since before Zionism existed as a colonial project. In fact it wasn't until after the Nakba that the identities of "Arab/Palestinian" and "Jewish" were considered to somehow be at odds. Indigenous Jewish Arab groups lived well throughout Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine right up until the mid-20th century, when the conflict between Israel and the larger Arab world forced a lot of people in those groups to have to pick between their identities.
Zionism is inherently the product of European colonialism, in that a persecuted minority within a colonial empire knew of no other strategy of liberation than to be granted a colony of their own, and the ruling class of that empire was only too happy to use their plight to further their own geopolitical ends.
No leftist should be opposed to Jewish people living in greater Palestine; they've always been there. But we should oppose Zionism as an explicitly racist, colonial ideology that seeks to create a false division between "Jews" and "Arabs" for the benefit of capitalist empire and mostly-white settlers from mostly Europe and America.
I think you have a national bourgeoisie forming after the formation of the state with a material interest in apartheid and disenfranchisement to develop the internal capitalist economy through arms industry and real estate/ construction coming tangential with the interests of European and US imperial interests in the region.
I think in the conflict the principal contradiction is related to the national bourgeoisie (and presumably petite bourgeoisie, taking over services and business etc. hence the fascist elements. there is clearly a class collaborationist element here.) Imperialism could become the principal contradiction if there was as situation whereby the Palestinian population became enfranchised enough to seriously impede Israel being used as a base for imperialist operations, but it is possible to have a largely woke liberal multicultural state that would still materially benefit from imperialist assuming the superstructural aspects of arab nationalist etc. didn't overshadow the material motivations for imperial patronage.
or something along those lines.
It's hard to separate the Palestinian population from anti-imperialism at this point, though, given that they've been some of the most visible victims of imperialism of the last 70 years at least. It's why the American / Israeli / W. European governments are so opposed to a one-state solution with full Palestinian enfranchisement.
If the Palestinian population is fully enfranchised, and if the systemic apartheid against Mizrahi and Arab Israelis is ended, I'd bet big money that Israel's stance toward the U.S. and Europe would do a 180.
I agree, I'm just saying that the principal contradiction that maintains the occupation is domestic. There is no doubt that imperialism plays a big role.
It's maybe 6 of one half dozen of the other though to be fair.
This is basically a contradiction inherent in the concept of the nation state. Nation states are inherently exclusionary, but states that are multicultural or assimiltory obfuscate national insterests and end up generally serving the interests of the most powerful nation group, for example white Americans in Canada or the United States.
It's a question of the principal contradiction to me: what drives the power inequality between nations? I think at its root it's class, because the majority of what makes a nation a nation is superstructural. The real simulated meat of the issue is that nations are going to have a bourgeois class or a comprador class etc. who will have a material interest in maintianing material and political inequality between nations.
I don't think there is an easy out. It's just going to have to be a long drawn out dialectic process of national liberation, finding new inequalities, more national liberation until we untie this hairball.
This is the kind of thing that gives me headaches. Is there some drawn-out, agglunative word for "I agree with the Anarchist criticism of the nature of the state but I just think it's idealistic to think we'll be able to go straight from a world of capitalist nation-states to a completely state-free world"?
I mean, it should give you a headache. Neo-colonialism and imperialism form the principal contradictions of our age. To the extent that solving problems give you headaches, this one should give you the biggest headache.
Yeah I would say it's simply more constructive for the left at large to positively affirm Palestinian right to return and end of Israeli occupation and settlement, than to take on anti-Zionism at this point.
I have no issue with anti-zionism. Zionism in its current form should be opposed and it is on Israelis to redefine it as something constructive. If Zionism is redefined as an indigenous movement ascerting that Jews should have EQUAL rights to live in Palestine/Israel, I'll be out protesting in support of that.
Anti semetism, on the other hand, I am extremely opposed to.
I guess I'm agnostic on anti-Zionism. Does Zionism necessitate this form of Jewish existence? Then obviously I'm anti-Zionist. But I think it's just easier and more clear to oppose the current construction of Israel and its history than the principle of Zionism writ large.
youtube suggested this interview between Noam Chomsky and this Ruby Rochberg guy who is basically like a woke liberal Zionist. and Noam actually said he used to be a Zionist in the 40s, but the definition has changed from Jewish right to equality and to live freely in what the Jews call Israel to what it is today, basically a form of Jewish supremacy and settler colonialism. I can support the former, the later is cringe zone 9k.
I think honestly what happened is that after the state was formed you see the creation of a national bourgeoisie who have an obvious material motivation for continual expansion and disenfranchisement of the other local population. It is pretty much you standard internal primitive accumulation creating the base for capitalist development.
This is the legacy of a country that never denazified
Like, I feel you. But when I look at the former Soviet Block - your Polands and Hungarys and Ukraines - I don't see a dearth of fascists, either.
This isn't a problem of failed de-Nazification. This is a problem of re-Nazification, with the international enemy updated to a 21st century bigot's woke sensibilities. In the same way that Bismark updated the internecine hatred of the German principalities into a singular seething hatred for Franks, Anglos, and Slavs. In the same way the Third Reich synthesized proletariat outrage with post-war revenge fantasy and Americanized Christian White Nationalism. Merkle-ists and Macron-ists have staked out a new International Jew in the form of the modern Muslim.
This is the obvious consequence of labeling valid criticism of Israel as rote antisemitism is fueling anti-Muslim villainization and hysteria.
I'd call it a deliberate goal of post-Cold War CIA-sponsored Islamic Radicalism. In the same way Latinos were transformed from humble migrants into cocaine-slinging mafiosos, our modern propaganda wing is turning Islam into wild-eyed religious anarchists. Radical Islam simultaneously becomes an arm of the secret services and a stick to prod domestic nationalists into ever-more-reactionary attitudes.
Less a bug. More a feature.
This is a pretty common talking point in Sweden as well. It is an easy excuse to be islamophobic while appearing to be anti-racist I guess. I think it is less about slavish devotion to Israel than it is in Germany.
It is an easy excuse to be islamophobic while appearing to be anti-racist I guess.
Reminds me of the 80s/90s when homosexuals were conflated with pedophiles and rapists. Islamophobia fills the same role as the Gay Panic Defense.
Alternatively, you can do the "Roof Koreans" Woke LA Liberal line. Justify shooting black pre-teen girls under accusation of shoplifting by pointing to the "Good Minority" and claiming it's racist to argue otherwise.
