War in the Middle East, again

[Travis B.]

Wait...so, I express the opinion that true socialism is less likely to arise & exist in a USSR-sized nation for decades at a time, than RL socialism did...and your conclusion is that, since true socialism is unlikely, the only other option is to have no hope and therefore fall prey to fascists?

The key thing is that big-C Communism's "socialism" never achieved the goals that it claimed to seek. It did not result in freedom for the worker from their capitalist exploiters but rather their subjugation by their new exploiters, that is, the Party. It did not result in greater standards of living than capitalism but rather capitalism managed to provide a better life for the everyday worker than it did. It had to resort to naked oppression simply to not implode on itself, so when this oppression started failing, it collapsed in on itself.

[Ares Land]

What is "socialist education"?

In a sense we got that in France. It's certainly state-sponsored, the teachers are very likely to be socialists and if you're taking economics, classes will be bases on Alternatives Economiques, definitely socialist.
All in all I'd say it has about the positive effect rotting bones predict. Besides I don't think it's coincidence that teachers are a favoured targets of islamists nuts these days. For that matter fascist are really into private education if not homeschooling, but that's the case in many other places.

[keenir]

I would like to apologize to you, Rotting Bones, for my post; both my incredulity at how sharply either-or your reply appeared to render things in...as well as apologize for assuming/presuming that you possessed such a sharply-demarkated (demarcated?) either-or view of the matter under discussion...and for, again, presuming that we were on the same page when it came to what exactly was under discussion (a mistake I'd made earlier on that same page, in assuming we were all using the same meaning of "socialism", until my mistake was kindly pointed out to me)

I should not be replying like that, no matter what. I can only apologize and ask that we move on, past that incident.

[keenir]

What is "socialist education"?

In a sense we got that in France. It's certainly state-sponsored, the teachers are very likely to be socialists and if you're taking economics, classes will be bases on Alternatives Economiques, definitely socialist.
All in all I'd say it has about the positive effect rotting bones predict.

In that case, i am glad to stand corrected; thank you.

[Torco]

The key thing is that big-C Communism's "socialism" never achieved the goals that it claimed to seek. It did not result in freedom for the worker from their capitalist exploiters but rather their subjugation by their new exploiters, that is, the Party. It did not result in greater standards of living than capitalism but rather capitalism managed to provide a better life for the everyday worker than it did. It had to resort to naked oppression simply to not implode on itself, so when this oppression started failing, it collapsed in on itself.

I don't know, man. never achieved *any* of the goals it claimed to seek? it's almost obligatory to say soviet union bad, but workers under it had many things that they didn't under capitalism: notably not living in a feudal hellhole, post-natal leave, women's rights, more vacations than in capitalist countries, really low homelesness, practically zero illiteracy and/or unemployment, no one went without medical treatment for lack of currency... it's not accidental that life expectancy dropped like a brick when the union fell... not to mention the second it did, the angelic free world of freedom and free people who are free immediately enacted reaganomics / austrian school doctrine, which basically killed unions, decoupled salaries from productivity and began the current trend of the purchasing power of wages dropping and rent eating more and more into your income... not to mention the death of the welfare state, and the millions of preventable deaths that came with that. like, the soviet union wasn't heaven, but it was a solid and -perhaps necessary- counterweight to the power of the burgeois. it kept capitalism decent, because the grass couldn't be greener on the other side: now everyone could starve and, because there's no alternative propaganda machine, the bosses could keep everyone convinced that it's the fault of the transes or whatever... and if we're tracking human costs of regimes, it wasn't the reds who nuked two cities. which is not to say the union was great, describing any nuclear superpower as "good" is too naive... is the US "good" ? is France "bad" ? we don't treat capitalist states with the nuance of fox news propagandists, so why should we do so with socialist ones?

the same simplistic thing could be said of capitalism: it hasn't lived up to its stated goals: of course it hasn't, no real ideology does... i still prefer it to the ancient regime, though.

[Travis B.]

The key thing is that big-C Communism's "socialism" never achieved the goals that it claimed to seek. It did not result in freedom for the worker from their capitalist exploiters but rather their subjugation by their new exploiters, that is, the Party. It did not result in greater standards of living than capitalism but rather capitalism managed to provide a better life for the everyday worker than it did. It had to resort to naked oppression simply to not implode on itself, so when this oppression started failing, it collapsed in on itself.

I don't know, man. never achieved *any* of the goals it claimed to seek? it's almost obligatory to say soviet union bad, but workers under it had many things that they didn't under capitalism: notably not living in a feudal hellhole, post-natal leave, women's rights, more vacations than in capitalist countries, really low homelesness, practically zero illiteracy and/or unemployment, no one went without medical treatment for lack of currency... it's not accidental that life expectancy dropped like a brick when the union fell... not to mention the second it did, the angelic free world of freedom and free people who are free immediately enacted reaganomics / austrian school doctrine, which basically killed unions, decoupled salaries from productivity and began the current trend of the purchasing power of wages dropping and rent eating more and more into your income... not to mention the death of the welfare state, and the millions of preventable deaths that came with that. like, the soviet union wasn't heaven, but it was a solid and -perhaps necessary- counterweight to the power of the burgeois. it kept capitalism decent, because the grass couldn't be greener on the other side: now everyone could starve and, because there's no alternative propaganda machine, the bosses could keep everyone convinced that it's the fault of the transes or whatever... and if we're tracking human costs of regimes, it wasn't the reds who nuked two cities. which is not to say the union was great, describing any nuclear superpower as "good" is too naive... is the US "good" ? is France "bad" ? we don't treat capitalist states with the nuance of fox news propagandists, so why should we do so with socialist ones?

the same simplistic thing could be said of capitalism: it hasn't lived up to its stated goals: of course it hasn't, no real ideology does... i still prefer it to the ancient regime, though.

The reason why things got so bad with the fall of Communism in the Eastern Bloc was that those in power saw the standards of living that their counterparts in the West had and proceeded to engineer the privatization and dismemberment of the Communist economy to their own benefit and the extreme detriment of everyone else. These people were the same people who had run things under Communism, and who had thought that "luxury" meant having a car, a somewhat nicer apartment than everyone else, and if you were up the totem pole in the Party, perhaps a dacha. So it is not like the people running things under Communism were somehow nicer than their Western counterparts and it was the evil West who ruined things with the fall of Communism.

That said, I am firmly of the view that true democratic socialism - and by that I don't mean mere social democracy - would be infinitely superior to both capitalism and big-C Communism. It would achieve the goals that socialists have always aspired to, if not achieved.

[zompist]

post-natal leave, women's rights, more vacations than in capitalist countries, really low homelesness, practically zero illiteracy and/or unemployment, no one went without medical treatment for lack of currency...

Trying hard not to be snarky, but are you absolutely sure all this can't be done without also killing at least 20 million people, invading its neighbors, destroying the environment, being unable to feed the country, and fostering wars and dictatorships across the planet? Is Finland a cesspool of horror compared to the paradise of Stalinism? For that matter, isn't this pretty close to the fash praising the order and prosperity of 1930s Germany?

I agree with your point that the USSR was a beneficial challenge for the US— internally. Americans had to take seriously their own ideas of egalitarianism and justice; it's not coincidence that when the USSR went away, conservatives got to make our country much shittier.

Externally, however, the US-USSR conflict made everything much worse. Both sides preferred dictatorships and eternal proxy war. It's pretty striking that when the USSR fell, all of Latin America except Cuba ended their dictatorships. If you want to give the USSR credit for making capitalists better at home, you also have to give them some blame for justifying capitalists being worse abroad. (And USSR client states were not nicer than US ones. Ask the Afghans or the Poles or the Congolese.)

It was also singularly unfortunate that the USSR fell just at the time that neoliberalism was prevailing. It's common as dirt for winners of a war to mistreat the losers— but the one major exception is the US after WWII. It was realized (and this is of course part of the need for acting on ideals due to the Cold War) that Germany and Japan needed huge infusions of aid as well as a return to democracy. That would probably have worked with Russia too, but nobody tried it.

[Travis B.]

post-natal leave, women's rights, more vacations than in capitalist countries, really low homelesness, practically zero illiteracy and/or unemployment, no one went without medical treatment for lack of currency...

Trying hard not to be snarky, but are you absolutely sure all this can't be done without also killing at least 20 million people, invading its neighbors, destroying the environment, being unable to feed the country, and fostering wars and dictatorships across the planet? Is Finland a cesspool of horror compared to the paradise of Stalinism? For that matter, isn't this pretty close to the fash praising the order and prosperity of 1930s Germany?

I agree with your point that the USSR was a beneficial challenge for the US— internally. Americans had to take seriously their own ideas of egalitarianism and justice; it's not coincidence that when the USSR went away, conservatives got to make our country much shittier.

Externally, however, the US-USSR conflict made everything much worse. Both sides preferred dictatorships and eternal proxy war. It's pretty striking that when the USSR fell, all of Latin America except Cuba ended their dictatorships. If you want to give the USSR credit for making capitalists better at home, you also have to give them some blame for justifying capitalists being worse abroad. (And USSR client states were not nicer than US ones. Ask the Afghans or the Poles or the Congolese.)

It was also singularly unfortunate that the USSR fell just at the time that neoliberalism was prevailing. It's common as dirt for winners of a war to mistreat the losers— but the one major exception is the US after WWII. It was realized (and this is of course part of the need for acting on ideals due to the Cold War) that Germany and Japan needed huge infusions of aid as well as a return to democracy. That would probably have worked with Russia too, but nobody tried it.

Precisely.

[WeepingElf]

Thirded.

[zompist]

Ares Land replied in the Random thread, and that's a good idea. So, please, despair over the Israel-Gaza war goes here, despair over capitalism goes there.

[bradrn]

Ares Land replied in the Random thread, and that's a good idea. So, please, despair over the Israel-Gaza war goes here, despair over capitalism goes there.

I feel sure we had a dedicated thread for complaining about capitalism, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere.

[Raphael]

Ares Land replied in the Random thread, and that's a good idea. So, please, despair over the Israel-Gaza war goes here, despair over capitalism goes there.

A thread about Israel/Palestine being taken over by a discussion about something completely different is an interesting reversal of how things often happen on the Internet.

[rotting bones]

What is "socialist education"?

In a sense we got that in France. It's certainly state-sponsored, the teachers are very likely to be socialists and if you're taking economics, classes will be bases on Alternatives Economiques, definitely socialist.
All in all I'd say it has about the positive effect rotting bones predict. Besides I don't think it's coincidence that teachers are a favoured targets of islamists nuts these days. For that matter fascist are really into private education if not homeschooling, but that's the case in many other places.

Without socialist ideology, you're imparting nationalist education by default. At least one Jew has been stabbed in France. India has public education, capitalism is not seen as the best thing ever around there, and Modi is the most popular elected leader in the world.

[keenir]

Without socialist ideology, you're imparting nationalist education by default. At least one Jew has been stabbed in France.

To be fair, its hard to find anywhere on Earth that my people haven't been stabbed or otherwise killed.

I mean, other than Antarctica.

[rotting bones]

Without socialist ideology, you're imparting nationalist education by default. At least one Jew has been stabbed in France.

To be fair, its hard to find anywhere on Earth that my people haven't been stabbed or otherwise killed.

I mean, other than Antarctica.

But no bread was stolen to feed starving kids. A swastika was sprayed on the door.

[rotting bones]

BTW, Matthew Yglesias thinks what's unjust are Israel's activities in the West Bank, not Gaza: https://www.slowboring.com/p/israels-tw ... um=reader2

[Raphael]

I'm sorry for reviving this thread so long after the most recent post, but I've thought a lot about some things recently, and I think that I just have to write some of those thoughts down somewhere. This post might make some of you angry, but again, I just have to post it somewhere.

It's now more than four months after the initial horrors of October 7th. The pendulum has moved very far in the opposite direction. There now seems to be near constant heavy loss of Palestinian lives. And, what's arguably even more important, really a lot of Palestinians - perhaps more than a million - seem to be in a situation where it's difficult to see how they're supposed to stay alive for much longer: cut off from outside food supplies, with no ability to provide their own food, and the food they have left - if they have any food left - rapidly running out. Israel's treatment of the Palestinians has long been brutal, but I don't think it has ever been as extremely and immediately harmful as it is now. Putting more than a million people into a situation where they're slowly (or not so slowly) starving to death might not technically count as genocide, but it's close enough that the difference is not that big.

Going only by what I've just written, I should have a clear ethical obligation to support the cause of those who oppose Israel's actions.

But.

(Sorry. I've read rather a lot of David Allen Green recently, and I might have picked up his habit of writing paragraphs that consist only of the word "but".)

A whole lot of both the Palestinians themselves and their supporters around the world apparently either would love to see a different genocide themselves, or at least wouldn't mind such a genocide all that much.

That means that supporting the Palestinian cause, at least if you do it not just in the abstract, but as part of the actual concrete organized global Pro-Palestinian movement, is itself dangerously close to supporting a genocide yourself.

I can't support that kind of thing with a clean conscience. And then, there's my simple self-preservation: while I'm not Jewish myself, I have enough Jewish ancestry that the fact that I'm not Jewish myself probably wouldn't make much difference for all too many of the world's Jew-haters.

Joining forces with a lot of people who would be fine with another genocide, and one where I would be on the list of targets myself for good measure, would be both ethically indefensible and, from my personal perspective, simply stupid. And I don't think I ever have an ethical or moral obligation to be stupid.

Have any of the great thinkers of history ever tried to explore this particular conundrum?

Really, to some extent the problem is that much of what each side says about the other is true. Sure, the Palestinians and their supporters are not right when they say that Israel secretly rules the world, or that Mossad has hired all kinds of non-human animals as spies, or similar nonsense. But they're right on the core point that, even before the current round of fighting, Israel was clearly run by people who wanted Israel to spend a really long times ruling over people with no chance of having a say in Israel's political structures. Wherever you stand on the arguments about terminology, that's simply wrong.

And the Israelis and their supporters are fundamentally right that many of the groups fighting against Israel generally try to kill as many Jews as they can and would cheerfully kill all the Jews in the world if only they had the opportunity.

Again, the question of how to approach all this looks like an unsolvable conundrum to me.

Now, a lot of people might respond to this that, right now, the Israelis have the power and the Palestinians don't, and therefore, only the Israelis' actions matter.

But, well, while I'm generally more or less left-of-center on most issues and usually vote for more or less left-of-center parties and candidates, one of my most fundamental disagreements with today's Left is that I think they highly overrate the importance of the difference between the powerful and the powerless, or the less powerful.

First of all, if the main thing that keeps you from doing very bad things on a large scale is your lack of power, that's not exactly something to brag about.

Second, everyone who's physically fit enough has the power to commit hate crimes, and everyone who's a leader or influencer with a lot of supporters has the power to inspire hate crimes.

Third, power is temporary. Power relations can shift over time. To use an example close to the topic at hand, over the course of the 20th century, Middle Eastern Jews, as a group, went from having a lot less power than the Muslims among whom they lived, to living in one fairly small area where they had a lot more power than the nearby Muslims.

And finally, related to the third point, in politics, "to support someone" usually means "to hope that that someone gets more power than they currently have", or "to work towards helping that someone get more power than they currently have". I don't see how it's defensible to do that for people if, for now, the main thing that keeps them from being really bad is a lack of power.

So. Yuk. Looks like whatever I do, I at least indirectly support atrocities.

[bradrn]

Have any of the great thinkers of history ever tried to explore this particular conundrum?

Alas, I’m not sure they have. Your summary of the situation is one of the most clear-headed I’ve yet seen.

But I don’t think there’s a total moral equivalence here. It is true that Israel is currently controlled by factions with nasty and near-genocidal ideologies… but there is a huge diversity of opinions in the country, and many Israelis find that ideology repugnant. It is possible to support the aims of Israel’s war against Hamas, while at the same time opposing any atrocities which may have taken place. (For that matter, I also think the IDF has behaved significantly more morally than it’s commonly painted, but that’s a separate discussion.)

By contrast, Hamas is entirely focussed around committing atrocities. Not only do they make no attempt at avoiding civilians (something the IDF has at least attempted, insofar as it’s possible), its entire strategy revolves around it killing, raping, torturing and kidnapping as many people as possible, then hiding its infrastructure under ordinary homes, schools and hospitals. It is not possible to support Hamas without supporting atrocities; they are inseparable.

Of course, just like it is possible to support Israel while rejecting the Kahanists and other extremists, it is entirely possible to support the broader Palestinian movement while rejecting Hamas and Islamic Jihad. This is, I think, the moral thing to do, and I hold out hope that this whole horrific war may somehow eventually end in some kind of lasting peace.

[rotting bones]

I can't support that kind of thing with a clean conscience. And then, there's my simple self-preservation: while I'm not Jewish myself, I have enough Jewish ancestry that the fact that I'm not Jewish myself probably wouldn't make much difference for all too many of the world's Jew-haters.

Arab Antisemitism is not as blood-based as German Antisemitism, or even Judaism for that matter. It's based on the traditional four-fold division of the world according to Islamicate culture: Muslims, Christians, Jews and pagans.

This judgement is based on absolutely nothing, but it's really convincing to Muslims for unknown reasons. In this context, Jews are understood as the religious community of Moses. But like all conspiracy theories, it bleeds into every other aspect of life. For example, Muslims regard anything the West does as an act of "the Christians" regardless of whether Christianity was the motivating ideology. No matter what you say your beliefs are, I'm positive Muslims will say you are a Christian. No one will care that you have Jewish ancestry. Many of the core Muslim families have Jewish blood. This is not a salient factor in Islam.

You should worry that since you said you are an atheist, a conservative Islamic regime will try to put you to death for being a "Christian heretic".

Have any of the great thinkers of history ever tried to explore this particular conundrum?

No. Usually, most people understand who the powerful are, and why they are not our friends. The 21st century might be the first period in history where people feel deep in their bones that sucking cock is an act of rebellion.

[rotting bones]

For that matter, I also think the IDF has behaved significantly more morally than it’s commonly painted, but that’s a separate discussion.)

Are you trolling us? Civilian casualties for the IDF are much higher by percentage than those for Hamas. The IDF have deliberately targeted journalists, poets and university professors. They posted snuff films to social media! All the while dancing around celebrating and having weddings in the front lines! If this is morality, I will take my chances with pure evil, thank you. At this point, I would settle for fewer attempts to convince me that bad things are good, actually.