#I’ve seen way too many posts call for the “death of jews” as if all jewish people are israeli | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sylvielauffeydottir · 3 years

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Hello, it is I, your friendly neighborhood historian. I am ready to lose followers for this post, but I have two masters degrees in history and one of my focuses has been middle eastern area studies. Furthermore, I’ve been tired of watching the world be reduced to pithy little infographics, and I believe there is no point to my education if I don’t put it to good use. Finally, I am ethnically Asheknazi Jewish. This does not color my opinion in this post — I am in support of either a one or two state solution for Israel and Palestine, depending on the factors determined by the Palestinian Authority, and the Israeli Government does not speak for me. I hate Netanyahu. A lot. With that said, my family was slaughtered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I have stood in front of that memorial wall at the Holocaust memorial in DC for my great uncle Simon and my great uncle Louis and cried as I lit a candle. Louis was a rabbi, and he preached mitzvot and tolerance. He died anyway.

There’s a great many things I want to say about what is happening in the Middle East right now, but let’s start with some facts.

In early May, there were talks of a coalition government that might have put together (among other parties, the Knesset is absolutely gigantic and usually has about 11-13 political parties at once) the Yesh Atid, a center-left party, and the United Arab List, a Palestinian party. For the first time, Palestinians would have been members of the Israeli government in their own right. And what happened, all of the sudden? A war broke out. A war that, amazingly, seemed to shield Benjamin Netanyahu from criminal prosecution, despite the fact that he has been under investigation for corruption for some time now and the only thing that is stopping a real investigation is the fact that he is Prime Minister.

Funny how that happened.

There’s a second thing people ought to know, and it is about Hamas. I’ve found it really disturbing to see people defending Hamas on a world stage because, whether or not people want to believe it, Hamas is a terrorist organization. I’m sorry, but it is. Those are the facts. I’m not being a right wing extremist or even a Republican or whatever else or want to lob at me here. I’m a liberal historian with some facts. They are a terrorist organization, and they don’t care if their people die.

Here’s what you need to know:

There are two governments for the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza. In April 2021, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas postponed planned elections. He said it was because of a dispute amid Israeli-annexed East Jerusalum. He is 85 years old, and his Fatah Party is losing power to Hamas. Everyone knows that. Palestinians know that.

Here’s the thing about Hamas: they might be terrorists, but aren’t idiots. They understand that they have a frustrated population filled with people who have been brutalized by their neighbors. And they also understand that Israel has something called the iron dome defense system, which means that if you throw a rocket at it, it probably won’t kill anyone (though there have been people in Israel who died, including Holocaust survivors). Israel will, however, retaliate, and when they do, they will kill Palestinian civilians. On a world stage, this looks horrible. The death toll, because Palestinians don’t have the same defense system, is always skewed. Should the Israeli government do that? No. It’s morally repugnant. It’s wrong. It’s unfair. It’s hurting people without the capability to defend themselves. But is Hamas counting on them to for the propaganda? Yeah. Absolutely. They’re literally willing to kill their other people for it.

You know why this works for Hamas? They know that Israel will respond anyway, despite the moral concerns. And if you’re curious why, you can read some books on the matter (Six Days of War by Michael Oren; The Yom Kippur War by Abraham Rabinovich; Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergmen; Antisemitism by Deborah Lipstadt; and Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis). The TL;DR, if you aren’t interested in homework, is that Israel believes they have no choice but to defend themselves against what they consider ‘hostile powers.’ And it’s almost entirely to do with the Holocaust. It’s a little David v Goliath. It is, dare I say, complicated.

I’m barely scratching the surface here.

(We won’t get into this in this post, though if you want to DM me for details, it might be worth knowing that Iran funds Hamas and basically supplies them with all of their weapons, and part of the reason the United States has been so reluctant to engage with this conflict is that Iran is currently in Vienna trying to restore its nuclear deal with western powers. The USA cannot afford to piss off Iran right now, and therefore cannot afford to aggravative Hamas and also needs to rely on Israel to destroy Irani nuclear facilities if the deal goes south. So, you know, there is that).

There are some people who will tell you that criticism of the Israel government is antisemitic. They are almost entirely members of the right wing, evangelical community, and they don’t speak for the Jewish community. The majority of Jewish people and Jewish Americans in particular are criticizing the Israeli government right now. The majority of Jewish people in the diaspora and in Israel support Palestinian rights and are speaking out about it. And actually, when they talk about it, they are putting themselves in great danger to do so. Because it really isn’t safe to be visibly Jewish right now. People may not want to listen to Jews when they speak about antisemitism or may want to believe that antisemitism ‘isn’t real’ because ‘the Holocaust is over’ but that is absolutely untrue. In 2019, antisemitic hate crimes in the United States reached a high we have never seen before. I remember that, because I was living in London, and I was super scared for my family at the time. Since then, that number has increased by nearly 400% in the last ten days. If you don’t believe me, have some articles about it (one, two, three, four, and five, to name a few).

I live in New York City, where a man was beaten in Time Square while attending a Free Palestine rally and wearing a kippah. I’m sorry, but being visibly Jewish near a pro-Palestine rally? That was enough to have a bunch of people just start beating on him? I made a previous post detailing how there are Jews being attacked all over the world, and there is a very good timeline of recent hate crimes against Jews that you can find right here. These are Jews, by the way, who have nothing to do with Israel or Palestine. They are Americans or Europeans or Canadians who are living their lives. In some cases, they are at pro-Palestine rallies and they are trying to help, but they just look visibly Jewish. God Forbid we are the wrong ethnicity for your rally, even if we agree.

This is really serious. There are people calling for the death of all Jews. There are people calling for another Holocaust.

There are 14 million Jews in the world. 14 million. Of 7.6 billion. And you think it isn’t a problem the way people treat us?

Anyway (aside from, you know, compassion), why does this matter? This matters because stuff like this deters Jews who want to be part of the pro-Palestine movement because they are literally scared for their safety. I said this before, and I will say it again: Zionism was, historically speaking, a very unpopular opinion. It was only widespread antisemitic violence (you know, the Holocaust) that made Jews believe there was a necessity for a Jewish state. Honestly, it wasn’t until the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that I supported it the abstract idea too.

I grew up in New York City, I am a liberal Jew, and I believe in the rights of marginalized and oppressed people to self-determine worldwide. Growing up, I also fit the profile of what many scholars describe as the self hating Jew, because I believed that, in order to justify myself in American liberal society, I had to hate Israel, and I had to be anti-Zionist by default, even if I didn’t always understand what ‘Zionism’ meant in abstract. Well, I am 27 years old now with two masters degrees in history, and here is what Zionism means to me: I hate the Israeli government. They do not speak for me. But I am not anti-Zionist. I believe in the necessity for a Jewish state — a state where all Jews are welcome, regardless of their background, regardless of their nationality.

There needs to be a place where Jews, an ethnic minority who are unwelcome in nearly every state in the world, have a place where they are free from persecution — a place where they feel protected. And I don’t think there is anything wrong with that place being the place where Jews are ethnically indigenous to. Because believe it or not, whether it is inconvenient, Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel. I’ve addressed this in this post.

With that said, that doesn’t mean you can kick the Palestinian people out. They are also indigenous to that land, which is addressed in the same post, if you don’t trust me.

What is incredible to me is that Zionism is defined, by the Oxford English Dixtionary, as “A movement [that called originally for] the reestablishment of a Jewish nationhood in Palestine, and [since 1948] the development of the State of Israel.” Whether we agree with this or not, there were early disagreements about the location of a ‘Jewish state,’ and some, like Maurice de Hirsch, believed it ought to be located in South America, for example. Others believed it should be located in Africa. The point is that the original plans for the Jewish state were about safety. The plan changed because Jews wanted to return to their homeland, the largest project of decolonization and indigenous reclamation ever to be undertaken by an indigenous group. Whether you want to hear that or not, it is true. Read a book or two. Then you might know what I mean.

When people say this is a complicated issue, they aren’t being facetious. They aren’t trying to obfuscate the point. They often aren’t even trying to defend the Israeli government, because I certainly am not — I think they are abhorrent. But there is no future in the Middle East if the Israelis and Palestinians don’t form a state that has an equal right of return and recognizes both of their indigenousness, and that will never happen if people can’t stop throwing vitriolic rhetoric around. Is the Israeli Government bad? Yes. Are Israeli citizens bad? Largely, no. They want to defend their families, and they want to defend their people. This is basically the same as the fact that Palestinian people aren’t bad, though Hamas often is. And for the love of god, stop defending terrorist organizations. Just stop. They kill their own people for their own power and for their own benefit.

And yes, one more time, the Israeli government is so, so, so wrong. But god, think about your words, and think about how you are enabling Nazis. The rhetoric the left is using is hurting Jews. I am afraid to leave my house. I’m afraid to identify as Jewish on tumblr. I’m afraid for my family, afraid for my friends. People I know are afraid for me.

It’s 2021. I am not my great uncle. I cried for him, but I shouldn’t have to die like him.

Words have consequences. Language has consequences. And genuinely, I do not think everyone is a bad person, so think about what you are putting into the world, because you’d be surprised how often you are doing a Nazi a favor or two.

Is that really what you want? To do a Nazi a favor or two? I don’t think that you do. I hope you don’t, at least.

That’s all. You know, five thousand words later. But uh, think a little. Please.

#jumblr #free palestine #zionism #gaza #signal boost #antisemitism #jew tag

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fizzypadz · 2 years

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Why Tracy Bacon Should Stay Dead

This post is essentially me making a case for Tracy Bacon’s fate as it is in the book. I’ve seen his death referred to as a case of Bury Your Gays, but it was a meaningful death that ties into the symbolism and themes of the entire book. If Tracy Bacon had lived, the book would have been weaker.

(Also, this literally can’t be Bury Your Gays. Bury Your Gays is a trope in which gay characters are treated as more expendable than straight ones. Many people die in this book, and Tracy’s the only gay one.)

Under a readmore because this got long:

Out of all the main characters, Tracy Bacon is the flattest. He’s compelling and charming, but next to Sammy, Joe, and Rosa’s extensive inner lives and interests, Bacon, as a human being, feels threadbare. This is purposeful.

Superheroes and golems go hand in hand throughout Kavalier and Clay. They’re both superpowered creations designed by, well, Jews, to protect. Bacon is a symbolic manifestation of these things. He represents the superheroes and the golems and the power of escapism and the desire for freedom that the whole book is about.

Think about it: the book emphasizes parallels between the creation of golems and comic book characters, saying that both are “spoken into being.” Cleverly, Bacon is introduced as an actor in a radio show (an audio medium). What little the readers know about his life comes in the form of constantly-changing stories he tells other people. Tracy Bacon doesn’t resemble the Escapist just for the sake of irony–it’s because he is the Escapist. When Sammy first meets him and tells him he’s got his part down well, Tracy says, “Well, I am Tom Mayflower, Mr. Clay, and that's the explanation for that.”

The Escapist gives Joe a sense of control and an escape into fantasies of tearing apart Nazis. He gives Sammy a lukewarm dinner atop the Empire State building and a visit to the World’s Fair. I once read a review that called Bacon Sammy’s “personal Golden Key,” which is a great way to put it.

Tracy helps Sammy overcome the physical limitations that come with his disability, hoisting him over fences and pulling him up into places his weak legs normally bar him from. He helps Sammy explore his sexuality by taking him to gay nightclubs and helping him join circles of other gay men. He helps Sammy reach places socially he wouldn’t have otherwise, getting Sammy into Love’s previously “no-Jews” estate or introducing him to influential figures (Sammy literally gets to speak with Orson Welles). Sammy feels more comfortable being alive when Bacon’s around.

Then Bacon dies.

It was an “off-screen” death delivered in a single line. But there’s a reason for that. He wasn’t “killed off” for a cheap shock or to arbitrarily “make the story sadder.” He dies because the Escapist and the Golem do, too.

At the end of the book, the DC lawsuit ensures the legal death of the Escapist and the Golem arrives at Rosa’s doorstep as silt in a coffin. They’d been away from home for too long. The Golem spent years circling the globe, away from Prague and the Moldau. Without his creators, writers twisted the Escapist into a flanderized, comic-relief version of his original self: “In later years, in other hands, the Escapist was played for laughs…Later writers and artists, with the connivance of George Deasey, turned the strip into a peculiar kind of inverted parody of the whole genre of the costumed hero. The Escapist's chin grew larger and more emphatically dimpled, and his muscles hypertrophied until he bulged, as his postwar arch-foe Dr. Magma memorably expressed it, ‘like a sack full of cats.’” Tracy Bacon, away from the man he was created for, was shot down and killed.

The thing is, these things all end for a reason. Sammy and Joe won’t be returning to their shared creation, their Escapist. Sammy is leaving for LA for a fresh start and Joe is working on sprawling new comic ideas. They’re moving on. The Golem Joe dressed in a suit in Prague crumbles within a coffin, and the Golem Sammy kissed atop the Empire State building is buried in one. These three things end, and they won’t be returned to.

If Tracy Bacon lived, it would go against the idea of “moving on” at the end and his strong symbolic ties to the Escapist and the Golem. Following the themes of the book, the way the story was ending, and what had happened with the Escapist, Sammy wouldn’t return to Bacon even if he had survived. Or, at least, Bacon didn’t survive because Sammy wasn’t meant to.

#kavalier and clay #the amazing adventures of kavalier and clay #this has been sitting in my drive for a long time and i was like yea i just need to post it #this also btw is not being condescending to ppl who called it bury your gays or thought it was unnecessary #because when i first read it i felt vague pangs of that too #but i think realizing what tracys death means symbolically is really interesting and #its a better way of looking at his death

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fromthefishbowl · 3 years

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Oh i love you for saying Lazaefair's name outloud.Not just you, I appreciate everyone in this fandom who had the guts to call her out.I understand people who are hesitant to call her out, cause she's a snake who have an exceptional knack in gaslighting and turning anything and everything in her favour. Lazaefair, Len and their cronies have hurt so many people inside and outside tog fandom and i won't be surprised if people come out saying they had suicidal thoughts because of these people.These racist antisemitic people needs to be called out ( and i loved the way how you mentioned the cronies without saying their name) . Their 'All and more' discord server is the most toxic racist discord in this fandom cause all they do is cover up all the racist and antisemitic bullshit done by their mods. (well, people do have reciepts of all the things they said in that server)

They should be held accountable for the things they did. They should apologize for every horrid things they did to poc, muslims,jews, writers, content creators and even fans.

Then there are the 'silent ones' ( theres a lot) or the blind devotees (yeah they too follow lazaefair and lens bible) who just keeps on making their cute little posts and a reblogging posts as if nothing happened in this fandom. All i have to say is they are straight up racist. Its like they are all part of this cult.

I am really holding myself back from naming the cronies because its not my place.But they all need to be called out by their victims.

Remember these people have been decieving and bullying people in the tog fandom for a year. For a YEAR they disguised as adults engaging in race conversations and fighting racism but they were like actual 12 year olds making "lists" and sending death threats to people.

But i have to warn you a particular "newb" or a different crony is gonna send you some death threats for mentioning lazaefairs name. Just be prepared to fight that anonymous 12 year old.

They better not start sending anon hate or threats or nasty comments, because everybody will know it's them and their reputation is already six feet under as is. Making it sink even lower would be embarrassing even for their standards.

And I have already mentioned this to a couple of friends, but... it's hysterical that these people are literally know for sending death and rape threats - across multiple fandoms too!!! -, pushing people out of fandom, harassing, bullying, and vagueblogging, and yet they took time to create a secret Discord server to recruit people into and "make the fandom great again" or some shit, as if they weren't the ones who ruined it in the first place - also by spreading actual misinformation and accusing actual MENA people of not telling the truth, with Lazaefair who worked real hard to spread the rumor that one of the MENA bloggers who were writing informative posts was actually an evil sockpuppet, and rejoicing when they wrote their last post before leaving fandom after receiving weeks worth of death threats, because we can't forget that! How dare anybody cross the ignorant American woman and her equally ignorant French bestie and their shit takes???

I was never in A&M, literally the only TOG servers I've ever been in are Top!Joe and the Zine one, but... if things are how people told me... whew, guys. And they are supposed to be the good guys? The righteous ones who put us on the right road and teach us how to be better people?

Them having a secret server also explains how it was possible that all the "big names" in the fandom who supported discourse, from Miss Finland to Miss Racefaker and their little cronies too, went real quiet just before the beginning of Pornathon and the day the event began they suddenly began yapping and whining about racism again, reblogging from each other, spitting out the same two takes - I loved, loved, when I pinned Len down when she was trying to shit on people for being """antisemitic""" and reminded her that Lazaefair is actually antisemitic, and Len pretended that she didn't know her lmao. If I were Lazaefair, just for that I would've thrown her under the bus as soon as the exposé was posted. Now that I think about it... was I the catalyst that caused her to write that racist as hell post? The one with the MENA boys who conveniently look like Majid because that's totes how all MENA boys look like in Europe?

Here's the thing: you don't suddenly go online and become antisemitic or racist or xenophobic because you read rambling posts that barely make any grammatical and syntactic sense. You don't suddenly begin sending death and rape treats, insults, threatening people to post about them on KiwiFarms - someone is trying to be edgy here lmao - if you are a decent person. And you don't go out of your way to defend people who are. They were always shitty, they were always antisemitic and racist and awful people. Len and Lazaefair just gave them the authorization to let it all out.

And I agree with you: they absolutely should apologize for the shit they have done and said in the past months, but would that be enough? Would that repair the hurt they caused? Like... apologies are nice, but will they delete Len and Lazaefair's posts from their blogs? Write down that they are awful people who say awful things? Because at this moment I've seen a looooot of excuses but not a single apology - and I very much doubt that any is gonna come from any of them. Their little antisemitic, racist, xenophobic hearts cannot bear to have been proven wrong and that their savior is a flavorless, privileged French lady who is paler than the people they have harassed in her name - me included, which is so, so funny.

#fishie answers #anon

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nickyhemmick · 3 years

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Hi, be careful what information you post on the conflict as it’s not as one sided as you’re making it out to be. Israel is being attacked as well. I’m not saying everything Israel is doing is correct, by no means is that true. But innocent people are getting hurt on both sides and that’s not okay. A lot of the posts I’ve seen have just been thinly valid antisemitism, so be careful the ones you reblog as well. You can be anti Israel without being vitriolic to the innocent people who live there. Palestine is not as innocent as everyone claims they are, but they don’t deserve to be kicked out of there homes either. Israel is complicated but innocents don’t deserve to be killed either. A lot of people post about Palestine blindly, I just encourage you to look into both sides a bit more and not make it out to be a situation with one right answer. If it was then this problem would have been solved a long time ago.

~ A Very Stressed American Jew

blah blah blah both sides blah blah blah Palestine isn’t innocent blah blah.

For the stuff about anti-semitism: yeah I agree. People can be posting things that are anti Semitic while pretending to be anti-Israel. I’ve reblogged stuff abt that fact, too. And I always try to make sure what I’m reblogging is talking abt Israel’s cruelty and doesn’t mention anything anti-Semitic. If you see something that I’ve reblogged and you feel it’s anti-Semitic, then let me know.

Second of all: the only 2 sides there are is the oppressor and the oppressed. Palestinians are the fucking oppressed, and I say this as a Palestinian (and an American!) If you want to see how “complicated” this problem is then go onto Twitter and watch the videos Palestinians are sharing and THEN tell me we aren’t innocent. Like bro, throwing rocks or rockets in SELF DEFENSE is 1000000% justified and something I will always defend. Don’t go to Israeli media (which, anyway, doesn’t mind showing you the gang beat-ups of Palestinians lol)

Also, while you are saying there are Israeli citizens that are innocent (which yes, 100% true) you seem to ignore the Israeli citizens out in the streets calling for lynching of Palestinians, entering homes to kill fathers in front of their children, raping the women, forcing themselves into Palestinian homes, and calling for the death of all Arabs, all with the help of the IDF and police. Don’t fucking tell me the citizens are all innocent, many of them are part of this and have been for generations. They are just as complicit as their government in this. I don’t care if they were brainwashed into all the hate they feel, they still are out there adding more fire to the problems. (And NO, I am not referring to IDF soldiers who are forced into duty in this).

The US has brainwashed you into thinking that Palestinians are horrible, that there are two equal sides, that it is a very complicated mind-boggling situation that can’t be solved! That’s all false. I implore you to look at Palestinan sources, both videos, pictures and websites like decolonizepalestine dot com. You already have some awareness of the reality from your ask, but you telling me there’s “both sides” is telling me you have some more work to do. This has been a 73 year old war. Simple. Israel, when attacked, has the Iron Dome, their citizens have bomb shelters, they have a million other protections Palestinians don’t. Palestinians, when attacked, have none of that. They suffer. They die. They get raped. We always pay the larger cost in whatever rocket fire is expelled. Netanyahu said he will bomb Gaza until there is silence. Yeah, that totally sounds like a complicated situation!

No. That simply won’t do. And if you do want to do your readings, do not read Zionist powered publications like the New York Times and the New York post and the like. I repeat that I agree that there is a lot of anti-Semitism in anti-Israel posts, but none of my posts have reflected that, and if they have let me know and I will take them down. This isn’t a religious matter and I understand that, there are Palestinian Jewish ppl as well! They are also suffering under this racist colonial rule

But Palestinians are innocent. We are. We one MILLION percent are. Just because we are fighting back after generations of colonialism, abuse, murder and rape doesn’t make us any less innocent. It makes us fucking fighters for our rights, because a lot of people don’t give a fuck about us and haven’t for 7 decades. Don’t forget that Israel is the instigator of the violence, all the way from 1948. Israel is being attacked because we’re fed up, and it’s not like we’re making much damage anyway, so don’t try to make it out to be that there are both sides that are equal here. Because that isn’t true.

#tala gets asks #anon #palestine tag #plus theres a lot of islamophobia in both pro israel posts & israeli propaganda #also read articles from previous idf soldiers that are now palestinian activits #activists* i have a few if u want them #and also i have BEEN to palestine a handful of times #ive BEEN to jerusalem #ive seen some of this crap with my own eyes #so dont u dare come here and tell me we arent innocent #we are #i have family in the middle of this conflict rn #my aunt who is a doctor is sheikh jarrah who is seeing all this horror #i know how one sided it is #do u?#free. palestine.

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a-student-out-of-time · 3 years

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There's a good and a bad way to subvert expectations. Unfortunately what's been happening a lot lately is that many works go for twists for the sake of being twists, the Star Wars Sequels being a prime example of this. Or the later sessions of Game of Thrones. There is a fine balance between being able to surprise your audience and not being extremely predictable.

//I’ve absorbed more complaints and feelings from both those series through pop-culture osmosis than I have from watching them. I’m more of a casual observer, but I do have some feelings on both these points (which I will put under here if you’re interested.)

//tl;dr version: I think we should unbiasedly judge media on its own merits and look over what works internally within the story and what doesn’t, be willing to make our own judgements rather than jump on bandwagons and tell people what they should or shouldn’t like, and not treat opinions as straight facts.

//And also that I’m honestly tired of hearing about the sequels and GoT ^^;

//I disagree with a lot of people on the Star Wars sequels (aside from 9, fuck 9), but I’d rather not start a debate about it nor their quality overall. Only that I think people really overreacted to them and many others jumped on the hate bandwagon when emotions were running high.

//Frankly, many of the criticisms I saw about the films felt either wildly inconsistent about what they’re upset about or what they wanted it to be (7 was criticized for being too much like old Star Wars, 8 for not being enough like old Star Wars) and others felt like they came from bad faith and I can’t take them seriously.

//And yes, the last season of Game of Thrones is trash and wrecked everyone’s storylines for the sake of being shocking, but let’s also be real: GoT was never going to have a happy ending if it wanted to stick to its “realism.” Whoever got on the Iron Throne was inevitably going to have to purge all opposition to consolidate power. That’s just how real revolutions and coups work.

//To be clear, Daenerys’ turn to evil murderousness was stupidly executed, but it wasn’t necessarily unprecedented. What I frankly dislike about fantasy in general is its tendency toward the Divine Right of Kings. That only certain bloodlines have the right to rule and you just need to put the “rightful heir” on the throne. In other words, giving absolute power to a magically omnibenevolent person will fix everything. I may be an optimistic humanist, but I know that simply doesn’t happen.

//The entire point of GoT is that DRoK is stupid and royalty in general really kinda sucks. If you go back, you see most of the lords we follow, including “good king” Eddard Stark, are either totally indifferent to the masses or are completely sadistic and torture them for funsies since the legal system doesn’t protect peasants.

//The Starks are no better than the Lannisters simply by virtue of being overall “nicer” than them. Both sides start wars that get thousands of people killed. Also, everybody loved John Snow, but he also fucking hanged a kid and I’ve never heard anyone bring that up since.

//Most importantly, Daenerys was a likable character with a sympathetic backstory, but even before the last season, she was fully embracing being a Targaryen by blood and was openly murdering people who got in her way while she was conquering territory after territory.

//Yes, a lot of the people she killed were slaveholders, but let’s be real for a moment: not everyone who participates in an evil system is evil themselves. It’s easy for us as the audience to judge them for participating in a slavocracy, but living in one comes with being told slavery is okay. That doesn’t make them evil by nature, just subject to the biases of their culture.

//Also, slavery is evil but conquering people is fine? And burning people to death for opposing you is acceptable since you’re going to be better and free everyone, or because you had a sympathetic backstory? These are the kinds of things that get villains criticized for, but is treated as a necessary evil at worst for the protagonists.

//This is protagonist-centered morality. The show is framing it in a way where you’re being drawn in to see it that way, but also telling you not to see blatant hypocrisies for what they really are. Daenerys was even called as mad as her father by Tyrion. It wasn’t well-executed, but it was going to happen regardless of how much anyone liked her.

//Violence for a good cause is still violence. If you’re going to burn people for disagreeing with you, then say that other people shouldn’t and should listen to others, that’s full-on hypocrisy. That goes for most of the characters in the show, frankly, and the message is executed well for most of it.

//That being said, don’t think this means I think the last season of GoT is good, that the Star Wars sequels are perfect, or that I hate all fantasy books ever. That’s not what I’m saying. I try to enjoy what’s good about them and point out their flaws regardless.

//What I’m saying is it’s important to, when you want to be critical of media, put your feelings and biases aside and judge the media you’re criticizing on its own merits. In my opinion, the claims that the sequels only did things to subvert expectations is unfounded. They were going their own direction, which was admittedly controversial and not what many people wanted, but just because you don’t want it to happen doesn’t mean it’s a bad twist

//Just like how a character isn’t a Mary Sue just because they’re too OP or you don’t like them. That’s not what that term means and hearing people use it like that irritates me. While I do have my complaints about characters, people use that term as if it’s a form of literary criticism that has more use than is necessary.

//If a character is OP, they’re OP. If a character is flat, they’re flat. If a character is poorly written, they’re poorly written. If a character is at the center of the universe and literally everything else exists just to amplify them and their role in things, then they’re likely a Mary Sue/Gary Stu. It’s not a label to slap on a character you don’t like or to give a critique (or complaint) more weight.

//This is why I say DR3 Chiaki isn’t a Mary Sue, she’s just not a very well written character. All Mary Sues are poorly written characters, but not all poorly written characters are Mary Sues. She’s not terrible, but she’s not explored much and her only big roles are being the person who brings Class 77-B together and her death turns them to despair.

//While her death was tragic and brutal, we didn’t really get a good look at who she was as a person beyond just being nice and opening up to her friends. If they’d expanded on that a little more, maybe it would’ve been more effective, but the way she died felt...manipulative and shock baity in a lot of ways since it banked mostly on our familiarity with her despite it being a totally different person.

//DR3 honestly had a whole host of shocky and just plain gross scenes that I really don’t think needed to be there.

//But likewise, if a story has a plot twist that you don’t like, that doesn’t automatically make it purely shock bait or subverting expectations just for the sake of doing so. There’s a difference between “this character was evil all along and there were a lot of clues and we just didn’t want to believe it” and “this character was evil all along for reasons we’re dumping on you now.”

//Just so I don’t seem like a hypocrite, while I personally don’t like what happened with Mikan in chapter 3 of SDR2, it was an effective way of foreshadowing the truth of them being the remnants of despair. It was set up that every had lost their memories and this was a sign that getting them back wasn’t necessarily going to have a good outcome.

//And I’ll be real: I can’t take a lot of the complaints about the Sequels or GoT seriously because much of it carries overtones of racism, sexism and antisemitism. For those more into Star wars, I think you know what I mean already and that’s all I’ll say. As for GoT, I’ve seen reddit posts viscerally attacking the writers directly and even saying that we should’ve expected the ending to suck since it was “written by Jews.”

//Yeah, go figure I can’t read any of that. I know not all people who hated the show’s ending or the films are like that, but it’s impossible to deny that those attitudes are very real.

//In the end, if you want to be critical of media, the worst way to do that is to just watch a video of someone complaining about it for half an hour. Yes, those video essays can be fun, but the only way to be truly critical of media you enjoy is to examine it yourself and look closely at what’s in it and how it’s presented. That goes doubly for shows you like.

//I know not everyone will do that and all opinions are ultimately subjective, but don’t let someone else tell you that you should hate something or that something is bad just because they didn’t like how it ended. Watch or read it yourself and draw your own conclusions. Don’t just follow the crowd and also be respectful of people who don’t agree with you. You can learn a lot when you talk to someone with a different opinion.

#mod talks #mod rambles #a student out of time #just giving my thoughts #Anonymous #cw: racism #cw: sexism #cw: antisemitism

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quicklyseverebird · 4 years

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Why I became politically activated (agitated), or why I became a Trump supporter.

All the cards on the table, I doubt anyone will read this, especially anyone to whom it might make a difference or change a mind. This is a textual equivalent to shouting into the wind, and at the moment of writing these words, I don’t even know if I will post them anywhere. Yet I find clarity in writing things out, and in light of the state of our country, I want to organize my stream of consciousness to see why and how I got here, to where I stand now, at this point of time.

I used to pride myself on my lack of political involvement. I used to all but sneer when people got all worked up about political issues. Such things were distant and had no seeming impact on my life, though I did my civic duty and voted whenever possible, because that’s what you do in a republic, and you have no right to complain about the results if you did nothing to affect them.

So, when Trump first mentioned that he was running for president, I just rolled my eyes and chuckled like anyone else. He was vain, self-promoting and way too quick on the Twitter finger. He’s no one I would want to have over for dinner, but now I’m glad he won and I hope he wins again. I don’t think anyone else’s ego would have been able to weather the storm we’ve gone through over the past 4 years. Especially not a politician, who survives mainly by going wherever the wind of public opinion blows.

But I’m not a Republican, so I can’t vote in their primaries, so when he rose to the top, I was as surprised as anyone else. So, who was my other option?

Hillary Clinton, the poster child of political corruption and cronyism, whose scandals and crimes make a bigger volume than all the books she’s written explaining(complaining) about her loss.

2016 is when I had my political awakening and started to really look around at what was happening in the culture around me. Perhaps it was because I was a parent to a child on the cusp of adolescence who would soon start to be immersed in it. What I saw terrified me.

America had a rising group of Nazis infiltrating our culture. And I don’t mean the stereotypical skin heads we all revile and view with disgust. And I don’t mean the paltry 10-11k white supremacists in our country of 365 million (per Anti-defamation League data). No one took them all that seriously, because their bigotry was all too obvious, easily exposed, and they were, quite frankly, too few to matter.

No, I mean a real group of extremists who were Nazi’s in all but name. Who actually made a point of labeling anyone who disagreed with them a Nazi, in fact. Who with seeming ignorance of the historical irony of their actions, re-enacted every deed performed by the black and brown shirts of pre-WWII fascist Europe. They worked to shut down free speech (of anyone whose position differed from their own), attacked and intimidated anyone who challenged them with threats physical, verbal, professional and political, advocating literal book burning, public destruction of property, and most sneaky of all, enacting a new form of acceptable racism into a form that some have compared to a state-sponsored cult or religion. I saw the blossom in 2016, and now I am seeing the fruit.

A couple weeks ago, I watched, in horror, live on television as the Krystal Naught was reenacted in my own city and cities across the country. Since then I’ve seen these groups claim territory, terrorize and destroy businesses and residents’ homes. Most often—again in seeming unconscious irony—those belonging to the very people they claimed to be fighting in support of. The term terrorist is apt, as well as zealot. They subvert groups of well-meaning people to their own political ends and rain down terror on anyone who disagrees with them, up to and including actual physical harm, and provoking situations that wind up in death.

They are left wing, just as the Nazi’s were, born from a communist/Marxist foundation with an emphasis on race, instead of class, as their dividing point. It’s not the proletariat and bourgeoisie anymore, it’s <insert minority group> vs white. The irony that most of these individuals are themselves, white, seems—of course—to be lost on them. Fascism is socialism with a nationalistic and racial focus. It was invented by a student of Marx as a way of making socialism feasible. Apart from the nationalistic bent, this group follows the same formula. Anyone who disagrees with them is a Nazi or some kind of “-ist” or “-phobic.” It’s a marvelous rhetorical device. Say you’re not racist, well that that’s proof that you are! Try and bring up a factual point that disagrees with them, and they slap you with a label and claim through intersectionality politics that they don’t have to listen to you or any facts you might have to offer because you are from the “wrong group.” They only have to listen to details or views on an issue from a group appointed and designated by their ideology. No one else could ever offer a differing position. And those from the group in question who DO disagree with them? Well obviously, they are “race traitors” and their views don’t matter either. After all, a person is only a part of the “right group” if they agree with these people. If this took place in Nazi Germany, they would have been called “Jew-lovers.” I’ve literally watched people of color assaulted, abused, called racial slurs, by white people. (yes, there’s that irony again.) I’ve watched POC being told by these individuals, unaware of their actual skin color, to check their white privilege because obviously they have to be white if they disagree with their position. I see this inherent and rampant racism every time I post my own views and watch as people assume I’m a white man because…I hold the “wrong view.” Why would race even matter to whether or not what is being said is true or accurate, unless you're a racist? They have all their groups in neat and tidy boxes, with their assigned positions and “proper,” “permitted” viewpoints and anyone straying from the herd must be culled. I’ve watched them tear down statues of the men who gave them their rights, and statues of the men who freed slaves or died to free them, even black heroes! They’ve torn down statues built to commemorate abolitionists in the name of…racism… They paint a street, claiming that it is free speech, but when someone else paints on the same street, it’s a hate crime.

They are, in fact, the most racist people in our country, and they revel in it because they feel it’s justified. Place any of these people in Nazi Germany and they would be chomping at the bit alongside the Fuhrer at the "outrages" the Jewish race had inflicted on their country and the "privileges" they possessed. Their racism is “justified!” It is “right!” I have no doubt that, if our skin color didn’t already distinguish us from one another, the mobs roaming our cities now would be demanding something akin to pink triangles or stars of David be worn by the designated parties. We can see their racism clearly wherever they find a position of power and are allowed to organize themselves. We watched an utterly self-unaware Chaz/Chop re-institute Jim Crow laws and create race-designated locations, parks, gardens, etc. Whenever they find themselves in power, they organize themselves along racial lines. Given enough time, they would probably have created separate bathrooms and drinking fountains.

Like the Nazi’s of Germany, they thrive on division and fear. It gave the Germans a sense of purpose and pride coming out of the Great Depression following WWI. In today’s world, they never would have risen so far or so fast if not for the economic devastation following Covid-19 and the many frustrated, unemployed, frightened people it left in its wake.

And they do it all in the name of “racial” or “social” justice, and justify their rampant racism that way. They excuse their racism in the name of…racism. It leaves one wondering if these are either the most historically ignorant and self-unaware people in human history, or if they are literally evil. And I don’t use the term evil hyperbolically. I don’t mean mustache-twirling villains in black. No one really evil believes they are evil. The Devil himself thought his actions justified. Evil always justifies itself, masks itself as good, and this allows them to do even greater harm, for no one does more damage than an intellectual fool who believes they are doing the right thing. The only thing greater than mankind’s tendency towards evil is our ability to convince ourselves that it is good. And oh, they lie, and they lie, and they lie. They lie about events where they were the aggressors. They lie and even post videos of the event proving they are lying, boasting about their lies, because they know that they won't be held accountable, and their lie is being spread faster than the truth, and the people in authority will allow this. Far from being counter-cultural, they are now a state-sponsored, state-supported non-theistic religion. The similarities with a cult are creepy.

The truth is, they aren't interested in eliminating racism. In fact, as we can see from these protests, they make racism worse! And they do so deliberately. Why? Because they aren't interested in lives, no matter the color. They aren't interested in actual justice. More black lives alone have been killed by these protests, by actual BLM and Antifa people, than unarmed black men were killed by cops across the country in all of 2019. Perhaps we should defund/disband them. They are militarizing racism the same way the Nazi's did, to gain power. It's not about lives, it's not about actual violence or inequality, it's about the Movement. It's about gaining power and influence in society. And it is working the same way it did back in Germany. When you have literally white, leftist people attacking and calling black people racial slurs because they don't agree with their positions, and then claiming they are against racism....

So, let’s see here. We have an international organization born from the German Communist Party, with localized cells but a unified ideology, cooperative networks, shared finances, a common uniform, trademarked logos and merchandise, who ferment racial tensions to gain political power, create divisions between communities, seek to destroy anyone who would stand in their way through threat of violence and intimidation, destroy history, hide in screens of “useful idiots” seeking to be a part of a cause that they stir into “protests” so they can create further unrest and violence, all so they can gain power for their ideology. And all the while, claiming to be the victims of the people they attack so they can claim the moral high ground. Self-defense in the face of the mob is “racist.” Protecting your property is a sign of “privilege” that must be purged, even as they loot, burn, destroy homes and businesses of the people whose lives they claim to want to protect.

Explain to me how, exactly, they aren’t exactly like the Nazi’s before the rise of Hitler? They are a socialist organization, with a racial element that use intimidation, threats of violence, doxing, actual violence and harm to anyone who disagrees with them or stands in their way to gain political and social power. A literally evil ideology that has caused more death and suffering to mankind than any other in history, that has failed everywhere it was implemented.

And all the while the media propaganda praises them, just as they did Hitler (who himself won Time’s Man of the Year award, recall).

If you want to know if you are one of the good guys, then ask, which side supports freedom of speech? Which supports liberty? Which side doesn't advocate for violence as a means to their ends? Which side are literally attacking their opponents? Are people better off when you are in control, or not? I think we can look at the smoldering ruins of our cities to decide where these extremists stand.

So, why did I become politically activated/agitated? It wasn’t some YouTube channel “radicalizing” me. I am not a MAGA fanatic or Trump fan. What motivated me was seeing the rise of a new, evil authoritarian power in America. They wear a different mask, but their actions speak for themselves. They are the REAL neo-Nazis. It doesn’t matter what they call themselves now. You can change your name, but your deeds remain. Your title doesn’t define you; your actions do. If it quacks like a duck…. The Right didn’t pull me to their side, you on the left drove me here in fear for my life and the future of this country. The fear is only growing now as I see official after official bow (sometimes literally) to these groups. If they gain any more political power, I shudder to think of the world my daughter will inherit. Will she be the new Anne Frank? The Right isn’t the one making threats or calling me names if I disagree with them. You are. They don’t threaten my life or my family’s future. You do. They aren’t the people approaching with devastation in their wake. You are. You activated me. I can only hope enough other people will see you for what you are and be activated as well. God help us all if you ever gain power. Some of them are literally already calling for anyone who disagrees with them to be imprisoned in "re-education" camps. No lie. This cannot happen. Never again.

#antifa #trump #politically activated #america #BLM #fascist #leftist #right

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jew-flexive · 4 years

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Hi! Your post about Crowley being one of the most Jewish characters you've ever seen helped me so much to understand my "issues" with some points made in Good Omens and made me realise that those weren't really issues at all - they were just differences between Christian philosophy and Jewish philosophy which I hadn't known about (I'm Christian). Thank you so much for making me aware of it, changing my perspective and making me more open-minded to other points of view. I'm very grateful. (1/2)

That being said, I’d be very interested if you could shed a similar light on the crucifixion scene, especially the fact that it stated it was Crowley who tempted Jesus in the desert. I found this choice peculiar, but then again, I’ve read that in judaism there isn’t such an Ultimate Evil Person that satan is for christians. I’d really love to learn something more about it to gain some perspective, I hope you don’t mind. (2/2)

I do not mind! I love me some interfaith discourse– I’m actually from an intermarried family, so I have some pastors and priests in my family and let me tell you this shit? It’s my favorite thing. I’m so glad that you felt comfortable enough to reach out to me. This is one of the longest posts I’ve ever written, so bear with me.

(A note on my expertise: I am attending the Jewish Theological Seminary, the premier Jewish educational institution in the Western Hemisphere. Of the many courses I have taken since I started here, many have been in conjunction with Union Theological Seminary– a Christian seminary– and Columbia University. I am not going to call myself an expert by any means, but I am studying ancient Judaism and the development of Christianity for my degree and can be trusted enough to have a certain level of authority. Of course, if you see anything that needs correcting, please let me know! I’d love to learn from you.)

One of my biggest pet peeves in the whole world is the word “Judeo-Christian” because the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition are fundamentally incompatible on a theological, methodological, philosophical, and messianic level. Christianity was founded with a supersessionist approach to the Brit, the Covenant, that Jews share with God– indeed, this mindset is the main reason that Paul’s Christianity had to break from the Jewish-Christianity that flourished in Jerusalem under James after Jesus’ death. Jewish thought is wildly different from Christian thought– we don’t value asceticism, we don’t believe that God can be corporal or Triune, we are a legalist tradition that explicitly says that blind faith is not enough, and, as you say, we have no “Big Bad.” Instead, Jews believe that every person has a Good/Selfless Inclination and an Evil/Selfish Inclination.* Christians believe in individual salvation from sin through receiving Jesus Christ as their God and savior**, while Jews believe in individual and collective participation in an eternal dialogue with God through tradition, rituals, prayers, and ethical actions. We also don’t have any unified afterlife narrative, but what we do believe is that Hell shouldn’t be a permanent punishment and that gentiles as well as Jews can reach whatever form of Heaven exists without having to believe in God.

So, looking at those differences between our two faith traditions, I completely see how parts of Good Omens, especially the character of Crowley, might be alien to a Christian reader. He fits into a legalist tradition and actively rejects the Christian ideas of salvation and faith.

So the crucifixion scene. I also found it interesting that it was Crowley that tempted Jesus***– honestly, I thought it was a narrative choice to emphasize the importance of Crowley within the story arc and the Ineffable Plan. But if I imagine there is a greater reason… I would argue that it was Crowley that tried to tempt Jesus away from his path because Crowley knows that Jesus is going to die and it won’t bring about the Messianic Age that Jesus had promised. In GO, we don’t have any sympathy for Satan– he’s wicked and rebelled knowingly, but Crowley we do sympathize with, since he just asked questions.

If we read Crowley as somebody who sees all the casualties of the Ineffable Plan (i.e. the kids that couldn’t board Noah’s arc) as fundamentally unnecessary, then we can see his attempt to tempt Jesus as his way of trying to save a kind man from what Crowley sees as an abuse of power by God, who isn’t telling Jesus the full story. Jesus doesn’t bring the fabled Messianic Age, at least according to what that meant in ancient Israel. Now, many Christians understand the crucifixion of Jesus through an inaugurated eschatology– Jesus’ first death was the first stage of bringing about the Messianic Age which will be finally realized during the Second Coming, but back in the ancient times? It would have looked like Jesus had died for nothing, especially considering that Christianity initially did not see him as the literal son of God.

Early Christian literature, most notably the Synoptic Gospels, started out understanding Jesus as a “Chosen One” whose Divine blessing was gifted to him when he reached adulthood not unlike the other great men of the Torah. It’s only with the Gospel of John and other contemporaneous works that we read of Jesus as Divine (“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” etc.) So, in the GO universe, perhaps Crowley tried to move Jesus away from the Ineffable Plan because he knew enough to think that his crucifixion would be meaningless, because Jesus was only understood then as a man.

Look, I could go on and on about Jewish and Christian theology and the way they play off of each other. If you want to hear more from me on the subject, drop me a line. Thank you again for reaching out and for being so open minded! I will say that if you really want to know what Jews think about anything, you’ll need to reach out to several Jews if you want a truly complete picture. Because we are a legalist tradition, many of us hold by different standards and principles as dictated by different schools of thought. For instance, Jesus held more with Beit (House) Shammai in the Sermon on the Mount when he discussed divorce but many of his most famous one-liners are directly attributed to Rabbi Hillel, the teacher of the other major proto-rabbinic power during the Second Temple period. So if you’re super interested in learning more, keep doing what you’re doing! I know that there are so many Jewish blogs on Tumblr that would be happy to answer any of your questions. Thank you again for reaching out! I hope this was helpful.

* Jews believe that the Good/Selfless Inclination and an Evil/Selfish Inclination are both equally necessary for living a good life. If you are too selfish, you are obviously not a good person, but if you are too selfless, then you aren’t able to provide for your family, improve your educational prowess, or take care of yourself. Both paths are unacceptable.

** Many sects of Christianity also require good works to achieve salvation, most notably the Catholic Church, but the foundation of Christianity is centered around personal salvation via worshipping God and Jesus.

*** Jews usually understand Jesus as one of the many freelance teachers that were roaming around ancient Israel at this time. Academics see him through a variety of lenses, but one that I find super interesting is the idea of Jesus as a political revolutionary sowing the seeds for the Bar Kokhba revolt. That’s a whole other conversation, but it’s one I’d love to share with anyone reading if they’re interested.

#good omens tv #good omens #crowley #jewish Crowley #aziraphale/crowley #Aziraphale #aziraphale x crowley #good omens meta #jewish good omens #judaism #chrisitanity #early christainity #ancient judaism #jesus #jumblr #jewish #jew-flexive

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bloojayoolie · 5 years

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Alive, America, and Ass: Ale city 40 points 15 hours ago Maybe, just maybe, you should investigate about showers Reply Share Save Edit Jamaicancarrot 18 ponts 15 hours ago 12 children) bonkbonk14 0 points 37 minutes ago Maybe, just maybe, you should investigate about showers. Author of the original post here (different account of course): Unless jets of flames shot out of showers, burning the jews alive, none of the were holocausted. You know? The word that means: killing by (nuclear) fire? That word. Also, hydrogen cyanide is lighter than air, you know, like helium. You stand under a helium shower and try to inhale it, Go on. Do it. Do you even know the physical properties of hydrogen cyanide? You seem like a scientific fellow with your mention of "investigate", so do you? Do you know the chemical (aka physical) properties of hydrogen cyanide? It's sublimation point? For example? You know, the temperature needed to turn it into a gas? Spoiler: It's 25.5C, quite balmy, unlike the "we were huddled up and shivering in the freezing shower room" kind of story. And if the ambient temperature is that high, then the gas forms in the can, too, and opening it would be like opening a can of soda, since zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide) is lighter than air and would just rush out at the soldier who's opening it up to throw it down into the shower room from the ceiling. the ambient temperature is only that high in the shower room then you can't just blow the gas out, it would im nrath mieh immediately since Poland Also, hydrogen cyanide is lighter than air, you know, like helium. You stand under a helium shower and try to inhale it. Go on. Do it. Do you even know the physical properties of hydrogen cyanide? You seem like a scientific fellow with your mention of "investigate", so do you? Do you know the chemical (aka physical) properties of hydrogen cyanide? It's sublimation point? For example? You know the temperature needed to turn it into a gas? Spoiler: It's 25.5C, quite balmy, unlike the "we were huddled up and shivering in the freezing shower room" kind of story. And if the ambient temperature is that high, then the gas forms in the can, too, and opening it would be like opening a can of soda, since zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide) is lighter than air and would just rush out at the soldier who's opening it up to throw it down into the shower room from the ceiling. If the ambient temperature is only that high in the shower room then you can't just blow the gas out, it would precipitate (turns into solid fallout) the moment it drops under 25.5C, which is pretty much immediately since Poland isn't exactly tropical. Especially in the minimum of 400m2 big gas chambers (you know, the ones that kill 2000 jews at once), and jews take up space, even when thin, and the tightest packing is 5 per square meter, and a 400 square meter room (which is ginormous) would have to be, end to end ,side to side, packed like that, any more spread between the inmates and the room would have to grow even further. And again hydrogen cyanide is lighter than air and needs warm temperatures, so throwing pellets in from the ceiling would just make it rise up, not spread out in that huge hall, unless there's many apertures in theceiling, which there were not Furthermore, heating up such a room requires a boatload of energy, even when taking in the body heat from the froctimemy which ie never euaranteed to be true. like the And again hydrogen cyanide is lighter than air and needs wwarm temperatures, so throwing pellets in from the ceiling would just make it rise up, not spread out in that huge hall, unless there's many apertures in theceiling, which there inmates and shiverinaceld were not Furthermore, heating up such a room requires a boatload of energy, even when taking in the body heat from the inmates, and shiveringcold is a very common piece of testimony, which is never guaranteed to be true, like the shrunken heads and lampshades from skin from Buchenwald, refuted by jewish scholars themselves Did you investigate things like that, too? Herr Investigator? Anyway, again, the only holocausts are deaths by (nuclear) fire. Gassing is not nuclear fire, and cremation of bodies is cremation of bodies, it's not a holocaust since corpses are generally dead and cannot be extra killed. Reply Give Award Share Report Save 4Ale city 1 point-22 minutes ago you know the showers were a distraction and the gas came from the "sinks" right? it goes up, and there's no soldier to run to as they are traped in the room and the soldier is not on sight but far from the entrance for security reasons. If you light the gas when it is just being released it doesn't have time to turn into liquid and burns the people, and even if the gas was released from the ceiling it would fill the hall with enough gas. Not all the jews were murdered with fire (and what's that about "nuclear"? that's in the meaning of in the core of the fire), many were gassed or fusilated; and other less used forms of execution. after that cremated. But as death by fire was the most horrifying to think of, it was called after it. Especially in the minimum of 400m2 big gas chambers (you know, the ones that kill 2000 jews at once), and jews take up space, even when thin, and the tightest packing is 5 per square meter, and a 400 square meter room (which is ginormous) would have to be, end to end,side to side, packed like that, any more spread between the inmates and the room would have to grow even further trying to sound smart and in middle of all that saying ginormous. eucomunooryv mments/aucioa/wait.un that doeshnt compute/ reddit r/HistoryMemes Q Search 1/HistoryMemes bonkbonk14 0 points minutes ago It's all bullshit, bro. Filling the chambers with the cremation exhausts would have made more sense than rube goldberg Not a single jew was murdered with fire, much less zyklon B, you're simply insane or don't know any better if you think they did. and what's that about nuclear Nuclear holocaust, a very commonly used word. You could do a web search right now and come across many mentions of it trying to sound smart I'm not trying to sound smart, I could write my post in pig latin while going GUEHEHEHEHE HONK HONK after every sentence and it would still be true. In order to have 2000 people fit into a room standinq, you would need a 400m2 room filled side by side, back to back with 5 people per square meter. You can investigate this. Here "standing crowd density", do a websearch. It's real world physics, you know? The thing one must suspend in order for the "jewish holocaust of WW2" to be possible? The fact that in order to reach a mere 6 million, you would have to retrieve, transport, house, navigate through halls, put into killing implements, getting them out of implements, disposing the bodies of about 3500 people PER DAY for FIVE YEARS, WITHOUT A SINGLE DAY OF LESS, lest it would increase the requirements for all future dates. That's a large village, per day. It only works if you go "They were magically collected, killed, and disposed" matter of factly without any thought inbetween. Then the 'holocaust' works. if you mentally bend everything to make it work, regardless of physics, then, yes it works. Otherwise, it simply does not but the pictures and stuff, so horrible, have you seen the piles ofcorpses I have seen the piles of corpses, and I've counted them, too. You will not find a SINGLE picture where the bodycount goes over 200, and going over 50 is RARE AS HENS TEETH. In fact, only one picture, the one in the forest with corpses strewn anywhere comes barely into that range A far FAR cry from 3500 DAILY Why y'all gotta be so doublethink dumb? Thats why you have to suffer people like me who don't buy it. Because you NEED to bend reality (aka LIE) to even make it work on a rudamentary level. Ch Mreadit.com/t/historymenmes/commensodo/wauraouesComp hutzpah is a mental illness, and its the only Q Search r/HistoryMemes reddit r/HistoryMemes if you mentally bend everything to make it work, regardless of physics, then, yes it works. Otherwise, it simply does not but the pictures and stuff, so horrible, have you seen the piles of corpses I have seen the piles of corpses, and I've counted them, too. You will not find a SINGLE picture where the bodycount goes over 200, and going over 50 is RARE AS HENS TEETH. In fact, only one picture, the one in the forest with corpses strewn anywhere comes barely into that range A far FAR cry from 3500 DAILY Why y'all gotta be so doublethink dumb? Thats why you have to suffer people like me who don't buy it. Because you NEED to bend reality (aka LIE) to even make it work on a rudamentary level. Chutzpah is a mental illness, and its the only way the 'holocaust' works Say some completely idiotic,unrealistic bullshit and expect people to just go with it. A nasty package of narcisissm reality inversion and sociopathy. But hey, jews have infant mutilation as a basic cornerstone of culture, where mothers instead of cherishing their newborn, give it away to be butchered up, scarred for life, because the father, likewise, becomes the opposite of his natural role, lets it happen, followed by a medical worker who, instead of reducing harm, inflicts it. It's the most quintessential jew thing, the inversion of goodness and virtue Oh, and if they're extra observant, then have the bleeding dickwound of the INFANT get sucked off by a grown man, a mohel. Fucking DISGUSTING And dumb, too, because nobody is antisemitic enough, jewish boys even in ISRAEL have less legal protection against this mutilation than Fidowitz, the family dog. You are not allowed, by law, to dock Fidowitzes tail, or crop his ears, but you can take your own newborn son and mutilate him for life, nerve loss included, scarring him at his weakest, most defenseless point in time, because mother father and circumciser are the worst possible inversion of a natural mother, father and medical worker possible Fucking DEGENERATES, and they STILL DO THIS. To this day, they even infected the US with it, poor fucking idiots So yeah, I wish the 'holocaust' were real, but nothing indicates that it happened the way its presented, including how jews behave today All nations participating in WW2, who have suffered great losses are demure and peaceful, only America and Israel are warmongering out of the ass, America having more jews living in it than Israel, which is number two. sinca tha 60s reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/ddcl8d/wait uh that doesnt compute Q Search t/HistoryMemes reddit r/HistoryMemes FuCKing UISUUSTING And dumb, too, because nobody is antisemitic enough, jewish boys even in ISRAEL have less legal protection against this mutilation than Fidowitz, the family dog You are not allowed, by law, to dock Fidowitzes tail, or crop his ears, but you can take your own newborn son and mutilate him for life, nerve loss included, scarring him at his weakest, most defenseless point in time, because mother father and circumciser are the worst possible inversion of a natural mother, father and medical worker possible Fucking DEGENERATES, and they STILL DO THIS To this day, they even infected the US with it, poor fucking idiots So yeah, I wish the 'holocaust' were real, but nothing indicates that it happened the way its presented, including how jews behave today. All nations participating in WW2, who have suffered great losses are demure and peaceful, only America and Israel are warmongering out of the ass, America having more jews living in it than Israel, which is number two. At the same time being callled nazis and evil white surpremacists now, too, and full of holocaust museums since the 60s and co. "Never again, you damn evil naz,I mean saviors and liberators and giving us a new home after Ww2:3 Holocaust= death by fire, a privilege that jews have evaded, but I wish it on them, of course Reply Give Award Share Report Save Ale city 1 point just now Nuclear holocaust, a very commonly used word. You could do a web search right now and come across many mentions of it Nuclear holocaust is literally a fictional concept of apocalipsis by nuclear warfare, doesn't have a mention in the discussion In order to have 2000 people fit into a room standing, you would need a 400m2 room filled side by side, back to back with 5 people per square meter You can investigate this. Here "standing crowd density", do a websearch. t's real world physics, you know? The thing one must suspend in order for the "jewish holocaust of WW2" to be possible? The fact that in order to reach a mere 6 million, you would have to retrieve, transport, house, navigate through halls, put into killing implements, getting them out of implements, disposing the bodies of about 3500 people PER DAY for FIVE YEARS, WITHOUTA SINGLE DAY OF LESS, lest it would increase the requirements for all future dates. That's a large village, per day. It only works if you go "They were magically collected, killed, and reddit.comisposed" matter of factly without any thought inbetween. Then the 'holocaust works m/r/HistoryMemes/comments/ddcl8d/wait.uh that doesnt compute/ reddit r/HistoryMemes Q Search r/HistoryMemes Nuclear holocaust, a very commonly used word. You could do a web search right now and come across many mentions of it Nuclear holocaust is literally a fictional concept of apocalipsis by nuclear warfare, doesn't have a mention in the discussion. In order to have 2000 people fit into a room standing, you would need a 400m2 room filled side by side, back to back with 5 people per square meter. You can investigate this. Here "standing crowd density", do a websearch. It's real world physics, you know? The thing one must suspend in order for the "jewish holocaust of WW2" to be possible? The fact that in order to reach a mere 6 million, you would have to retrieve, transport, house, navigate through halls, put into killing implements, getting thern out of implements, disposing the bodies of about 3500 people PER DAY for FIVE YEARS, WITHOUT A SINGLE DAY OF LESS, lest it would increase the requirements for all future dates. That's a large village, per day, It only works if you go "They were nagically collected, killed, and disposed" matter of factly without any thought inbetween. Then the 'holocaust' works the thing is, as I mentioned, not everybody was killed with fire, those rooms weren't for 2000, they varied in size and all were smaller than fitting 2000 people in them. and they made more than one filling per day. The way they transported all those people was through train, packing trains with jews, slavs and gipsies, 40 people per wagon. the average concentration camp had rooms for 5000 people. Killing 3500 a day is not hard, if the people are already captured. I repeat that not all of them were killed by fire, not even most of them, but a large number of people were. They fusilated, they gassed, they gave poison. some starved because of how little food they were given. The method of persecution was the SS going house by house checking, interrogating and if there was still incognita they returned days later. The SS when finding a persecuted group arrested them by force, and lead them to the trains I have seen the piles of corpses, and I've counted them, too. You will not find a SINGLE picture where the bodycount goes over 200, and going over 50 is RARE AS HENS TEETH In fact, only one picture, the one in the forest with corpses strewn anywhere comes barely into that range. A far FAR cry from 3500 DAILY I never mentioned the pictures, but now that you do, let's remind you that you can't visually count them as bodies are also behind and under the piles of bodies, that they didn't kill everybody at once, and that there was many more than concentration camp Killing 3500 a day is not hard, if the people are already captured. I repeat that not all of them were killed by fire, not even most of them, but a large number of people were. They fusilated, they gassed, they gave poison, some starved because of how little food they were givern. The method of persecution was the SS going house by house checking, interrogating and if there was still incognita thew returned days later. The SS when finding a persecuted group arrested them by force, and lead them to the trains. I have seen the piles of corpses, and I've counted them, too. You will not find a SINGLE picture where the bodycount goes over 200, and going over 50 is RARE AS HENS TEETH. In fact, only one picture, the one in the forest with corpses strewn anywhere comes barely into that range A far FAR cry from 3500 DAILY Inever mentioned the pictures, but now that you do, let's remind you that you can't visually count them as bodies are also behind and under the piles of bodies, that they didn't kill everybody at once, and that there was many more than 1 concentration camp. And the rest of your coment is not only anti-semitic but admits to it and says it's needed. Let me remind you the penis is not fully cut, only the scrotum. Let me remind you that muslims also do this. Let me remind you that soem christians and atheist, specially in the USA, also do circumcition to their newborns, it's even quite popular (and it isn't a thing popularized by jews how you said). Let me remind you that the practice of sucking the scrotum is forbidden by groups within judaism itself and even in ones that aren't it isn't allways done. And also there's the classical negationist bullshit of "it didn't happen but I wish it did" Please, go fuck yourself. You're the one who needs to doublethink because it's dumb Reply Share Save Edit marxist-teddybear 4 points 12 hours ago Dresden was a strateaic.tarnet Escribe aqui para buscar Holocaust denier has his head up his butt that it goes outside of his mouth again. Speceted from disgusting being. (sorry for taking screen photos, can't take screenshots on my laptop)

#funny #lol #humor #memes #meme #memehumor #dank memes #funny pics #rolf #lmao #Alive #America #and A

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schizo-spoon-blog · 5 years

Text

Spoonbender Society: Selected Schizoepistles

FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE:

We Live In A Society

People say we live in a democracy/democratic republic, a form of government intended to amplify what people think and address problems they find to be important. But it doesn’t ever seem to function that way.

The issue is in voter suppression, but as always not in the way people generally think voter suppression works. The issue is psychic, spiritual, and social suppression of citizens. Systemic over-development of senses of rationalization, neuroticism and anxiety, industrially incentivized narcissism.

People develop a deathly fear of what others think, or may think, or what they may have thought about them or what they think, what they may think, or what they may have thought.

A democracy where we’d rather not hear what other people have to say, because we find their thoughts offensive and retarded. That’s one thing people are happy to share. But because we suspect that there are so many offensive retards in the world, we fear... "Perhaps I’m a retard too?" You wonder that even for just a second in your life, if you have a soul. It’s OK to be a retard really, but you’ll never believe that it’s OK, and that's probably What Your Fucking Problem Is.

The opinions of us purported non-retards, to avoid sounding like complete retards, end up soft, ambivalent and stale, phrased like True Neutral Orgasm in Ego-Death Nirvana, but less Chad, less gratifying, and nobody cums. To not be reminded of the possibility of our own retardation, we like to pretend that if the retards just shut up and nobody can hear them, they go away. If they are Physically Removed from our presence, their evil thoughts and their malicious intentions will go away with them. We win. But they don’t. They never do.

We always fail to Psychically Remove them. We lose.

We can hypothesize a law of conservation of hatred, correlate one too of love, but the truth is banal. How can it be in light of our timeline? Why are these Hate Groups all over the place? Hitler’s corpse is rotting or burned to a crisp, or embalmed in a tomb or made a toilet for Some Rich Dude ((parenthetical removed)). (Or was he cloned?)

Great Fatherland Germany - defeated by the "untermensch" and partitioned like a cheese between rats. That Great "Faustian" and "Supreme" "Aryan" Race is subjugated by the hated "Juden" and all the "vermin" of the world, humiliated, castrated to be reunited a shadow of its former self. Yet the Nazi threat is omnipresent nearly a century later, in an era which may be an alien planet to those who lived in Hitler’s time.

How is it that the Great Allies, our fathers and grandfathers, achieved such total victory over so loathsome a foe, so unsympathetic and vile, only to see his Evil infect their own countrymen and posterity? How can something so thoroughly defeated still persist in what could be our neighbors or our co-workers our bosses or our employees? Each one could be a secret Nazi now. In parenting blogs moms worry that their children are becoming Nazis from goofy men they see in videos on line. Marriages are ending in divorce because the husband or wife is allegedly or apparently a Nazi. How could this happen?

Have you ever seen “The Matrix? Who hasn’t? You know all about the red and blue pills, and all the rainbow-flag DLC that it comes with, black and pink and green and brown and in configurations invisible to the human eye, I’m sure. If you don't know, the pills are portals to different realities. Take the black pill and you only see death, take the white pill and everything’s alright, take the blue pill you vote for Hillary, take the pink you become genderqueer. But this is not about taking any pills. This is about going off your meds. Going straight edge - except for whiskey, cigarettes, cocaine and pussy. It’s about the spoon - no, not for shooting up. It's for bending - with your mind. Remember? That spoon - The Spoon That Isn’t There.

That spoon is a Nazi.

If you are aware that there is no spoon you can tie it into knots. You can make it into a balloon animal. That Nazi Spoon could be a Jewish Socialist from Vermont, or a kosher Brooklyn Zionist, or a Dominican Taxi Driver. It could be an evil copy of your own son from Bizzaro World. It's probably your uncle. It could be Rottweilers, and Chihuahuas. Whether Pitbulls are Nazis or Jews/Blacks is an ongoing debate in the contemporary discourse.

But imaginary shit can be whatever the hell you want. You don’t have to be "The One" to Bend the Spoon. You don’t have to be anyone at all. What was the name of the kid who said the line about the spoon again? Nobody knows, nobody cares, and that's the beauty of Spoonbending.

"The Nazi" is the guy who keeps talking when he should shut up. He might be autistic, but he could just be an asshole. There is a strong possibility he could be both. Why does he keep saying all of this ridiculous stuff? He’s more offensive and more retarded than the usual, but it feels like He Has To Be This Way. Like it’s his curse, He Knows Too Much. He fell down some rabbit hole and ended up gorged on Fascist Propaganda. He mentions some girl named Celine. He rambles on about some guy you’re pretty sure is a Tekken character... the guy who turns into the Devil maybe. He mentions a vacation in Turkey with his family but insists on saying Constantinople and there’s a wild-man tear in his eye. He insists he knows about Atlantis and calls you gay for saying you liked Aquaman. Instead of saying goodbye he says “Subscribe to Pewdiepie.” The Nazi belongs in an institution. You wonder if he has guns and if maybe he should have them taken for a while. He probably doesn’t, but you can’t be sure. He’s 12.

When is it too early to become a school shooter? Is 12 too early to be an incel?

12 is probably the age at which incels hatch from their human hosts.

“Who is Pewdiepie, and how has he groomed my nephew into the Hitler Youth?” many families today are asking. They think they’re looking at a spoon. Conditoning fills your heart with a desperate desire to see the spoon. A fact, pure fact, logical, reasonable, peer reviewed, widely accepted, So True, a Textbook Fact. The spoon. Everyone else sees it too. That goddamn Nazi Spoon.

You ever try to ask this at a party as an ice-breaker and see how the guests react?

“So, anyway, was The Holocaust Real?”

“Excuse me, what?”

“What do you think, was it real, how many people do you think died, don’t the gas chambers sound goofy to you?”

”Um… no… they don’t sound goofy. What are you talking about?”

“You ever hear about the Nazi Roller-coaster they had at one of the camps? They’d put Jews into a roller-coaster except they’d fly off the edge and get splattered. That’s how the Nazis killed ‘em. I swear. I read it in a book by a Holocaust Survivor. Impossible to believe if it weren’t so True. No shit. You hear about that?”

”I’m… gonna get another beer.”

Of course there’s a Correct answer to that initial question. It’s also the Right answer. Who would ever get this wrong? It's the 2+2=X of History. Well…

Pop-Quiz, Random Nazi Check, Anybody here Hate Jews? You a Groyper, Son? What’s so funny? You think the Cookie Monster committing genocide is a laughing matter boy? We don’t take kindly to your kind around here.

Maybe you should give the Nazi-check thing a try, it’ll separate sheep and goat real easy for you.

If you do this everyone will think you are The Nazi.

The Nazis hated Jews, but did they hate real Jews as Jews exist, or did they hate the Fascist Propaganda Jew who was a work of fiction? On that note, were you in love with your last failed relationship, or just pretending you were? Have you ever had one impression of a person, but then learned they were another kind of person entirely? That first impression you had, the one that wasn’t True, was that a Real Person, or Imaginary? But you still spent all that money and sweat on an imaginary girl, huh?

Hope her hole was real.

I think that fake bitch of an ex you dated was a nazi. Your ex was a fascist. Oh, was she Jewish? It doesn’t matter, changes nothing. I’ve never met her - wouldn't matter if I did. When I imagine her, she's in Hugo Boss black and got skull-and-bones on her officer's cap, and she's saying racial slurs as she ruins your life, cheats on you, drains your bank account and kills your dog after getting custody over it in court. I imagine all bad people this way. All women who rejected me were exactly like this.

But I must breach working-class anti-fascist solidarity, and admit, on That Question ("Would you?").... Yeah, I would. Sorry bro. Take me away Comrades, I admit it, I'd give it to that Nazi Jew raw. Would I do that to her as she exists, or the Fascist Propaganda her who is a work of fiction?

That depends. You still got her number?

haha it's ok you can call me an incel, it's a step up from what i actually am

(User was banned for this post.)

The Nazi and the Fascist aren’t my hallucinations. That’s not my mental illness. But it’s adjacent to me, it’s thrown at me without my Consent, and it's a Trigger. I'm paranoid about commies myself.

In the multicultural cyberpunk year of 2019, with its trans-human gender-sex-orientations, anti-racist ethno-narcissism, fanatic anti-normalism, cultish critical theory intersections, grand byzantine minimalism, placidity, in such splendid predatory banality… In the absolute state of the world! – Aah! An undead ideology conceived by a salty Frenchman in the badlands of South Dakota in the 1890s shambles forth the devour all that is Good and Holy in the Great United States of AmeriKKKa, God Help Us All! And A Child Will Lead Those Dreadful Legions of Corruption Upon All The Meek Of Our Fallen World!

Or it’s just a spoon that isn’t real.

Nobody wants to be straight-forward, and I gotta navigate the labyrinths of euphemism. Maybe there's something weird going on - how people talk, how people act, how people think, none of those correlate to each other. It makes you feel schizo when you do all your mental rain-man calculus and realize there's a fucking Elephant in the living room and he's not wearing any goddamn pants. Once that little ray-of-sunshine blesses your tiny bug-man brain to enlighten you that the elephant is real, and the spoon isn't, it's only a matter of time before you're crowned in tinfoil a Potato King on your off-grid Bug-out estate in the Idaho Panhandle, or start drinking yourself to death and bullying mailmen (or both).

If you'd like to avoid that sort of Elephant-Mania Spoon-denialism, maybe you should try answering Uncomfortable Question instead of being so Weird about it, oh wise Mr. Kirk, Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Talking-Head, Mr. Important-Guy, Mr. Movement, Mr. Politics, Mr. Voice of Reason, Mr. Metatron. Take it from a schizo-maniac with a manifesto, you’re freaking out the hoes.

Try Praeger U talking points out on a Tinder date and watch her shrivel up from instathot to instahag -- she will go through menopause before your very eyes, that's how dry her pussy will get. Trying not to sound racist while talking about the Antarctic Nazi base and the importance of craniometry in ethnocultural anthropology will get you more action than anything that sounds like a paraphrase of Charlie Kirk -- because even if you're still being cringe at least you aren't being fake. Point and laugh at that fucking elephant - the moron isn't even wearing pants! That'll get her thinking about taking your pants off. Or not - it's not foolproof. If she doesn't laugh, red-flag, she's a Nazi so Begone Thot!

Please, for the love of God, go off-script! See the damn elephant and forget the spoon, and forget the wise Mr. Kirk, Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Talking-Head, Mr. Important-Guy, Mr. Movement, Mr. Politics, Mr. Voice of Reason, Mr. Metatron. Take it from a schizo-maniac with a manifesto, you'll go insane if you don't.

[. . . ] [T]hen there's that neuroticism, that narcissism, that fear. The whole point of these politics groups and gatherings and Q&As is what, anyway? Is it really just basic marketing tactics, like a live-action advertisement you expect for people to passively consume as though it is persuasive? To shove free-markets and free-speeches down my throat and have me swallow it without having anything that’s been bothering me answered? What do I look like to you, an Ideology Whore? You don't even reciprocate a good time, huh? I'm not that kind of girl. You didn't even buy me dinner. You made me pay to bore me. I'd cuck you if we dated just to make a very important point -- fully aware it'll go over your head. Fuck you.

We gotta hear The Script. We gotta recite The Script.

Real Conservatives Think Like This. Real Progressives Think Like This. White People Walk Like This. Black People Walk Like This.

Gotta hear that joke ten thousand times so you can recite it like a mantra in your sleep.

Free markets mean free people. Facts don’t care about your feelings. Private Companies can do what they wish. What you do in your bedroom is your own business. We want legal immigration, not illegal.

Abolish ICE. Your childhood hero says Trans-Rights. Do you not want me in the movement? Abolish whiteness.

The Racism of Lowered Expectations.

Reparations.

A white nation.

Workers of the world unite!

Abortion is a human right.

Have you got it memorized?

Let’s go over it a few more times.

Say it with me! Hillary was found innocent in a hundred hearings and it is sexist to besmirch her reputation.

Repeat after me! Trump’s economy is the best in history, and if he's racist why is black unemployment is at historical lows.

You benefit from unearned privilege. You suffer from toxic masculinity.

The world is about to end and everything you know and love will die, and it is your fault, for not believing in the correct things at the correct time.

Are you laughing yet?

I’m dying. I feel like an e-girl, and my orbiters are sides.

But do you wanna know what I really think? The whole bit about psychic and social suppression? You ever hear about the Procrustean bed? Well, what if we put your political, social, moral consciousness and your psychic abilitys into a bed like that. We could talk about it. You ever play Xenogears?

Or you could just put me in a box. I really wouldn't mind. I'm Houdini. Hey, was Houdini a Nazi, like Henry Ford? Can we get a fact-check? I didn't mean to be problematic.

Break the Conditoning - Step outside the box, and use it as a step ladder. Ascend, Beyond the Box - use The Spoon.

Bush did 9/11, the Israeli’s danced, the Aliens killed JFK - sure - but I only say this because of my MK Ultra Schizo-brain. It’s true, it’s false, it’s fact, it’s myth, I don’t have to believe any of it -- I also don't have to believe any of you if I don’t want to. My feelings do not care about your facts, and did you know that some of the world's most uncomfortable facts are manifested into being by uncomfortable feelings? Is it the fact of the bullet that kills the political dissident, or the feelings of his executioner? Is it the deranged lust of the rapist that violates his victim, or the fact of his power to do so? I guess it depends on whether the perpetrator said "nothing personnel kid" before he committed the act. I don't know about that Nazi Rapist's feelings, but MY feelings are valid and I can believe or disbelieve whatever I want on the basis of my feelings, and my feelings alone. My feelings bend the spoon of your facts.

Are you going to say I don’t have the right, Adolf? Sucks for you, bud, I may be a commie by blood, but the heart that pumps it was assembled in the ole USA -- and we got the Right to be a Retard here in America. It's a Free Country.

[Note: please insert image of Jonathan Frakes from Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction]

Now that the dust has settled: Was the Nazi Roller-Coaster Real? Or did we put the Truth in a Mass-Grave? We will let you know at the conclusion of our program.

Sincerely and Full of Suffering Your Friend Always, Orcbrand

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theculturedmarxist · 5 years

Link

Goldner on Elbaum

Commune has a new review out of the 2018 reissue of Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air, which recounts the trials and travails of the New Communist Movement in the US. Written by Colleen Lye, “Maoism in the Air” is very sympathetic to the book’s central thesis: namely, that three distinct strands of American Maoism (Cultural Revolutionary, Third World nationalism, and orthodox Marxism-Leninism) shaped the politics of the post-’68 generation in a novel and generally beneficial way. Lye even goes a step further than Elbaum, remarking on the NCM’s institutional legacy that “today’s academic field of critical ethnic studies might well be described as a space where anti-racism and anti-imperialism continue, in a different key and perhaps even unknowingly, the Marxist-Leninism of the ’68 generation.”

She may well be right about this, but I hardly think this is a legacy to be proud of. Usually the so-called “long march through the institutions” is seen as a political defeat held up as an intellectual victory. Marxism’s relegation to the academy is a sign of its neutralization, in other words. I can only speak to the field of Jewish Studies, which is what I’m most familiar with, but for the most part I find it a useless discipline — despite my persistent interest in the history of Jews. Regardless, I was somewhat surprised to see such a positive review of Elbaum’s book in the pages of Commune, a magazine that I am very excited about. (For any readers who haven’t already, I encourage you to check out Jay Firestone’s ethnographic survey of alt-Right NYC and Paul Mattick’s outstanding piece on the centenary of the German Revolution.)

Admittedly, I’ve never understood the appeal of Maoism for American communists, either in the seventies or today. Perhaps it possessed some exotic aura back then, or was maybe just a dope aesthetic. Either way, the theory and practice of the Chinese brand of Stalinism ought to have been long discredited by now. Virtually all of the national liberation movements that were supposed to destabilize global capitalism and pave the way for international socialist revolution have been seamlessly reintegrated into the world of commodities. Nowadays, of course, there is the added association of Maoist ideas with the Black Panther Party, which is still celebrated as a high point in the history of revolutionary politics in the US. How much of this is simply mythologization after the fact is difficult to say, but it was certainly influential.

But even in light of this association, the attraction of Maoism is difficult to grasp. It was recently revealed, in fact, that the person who introduced the Black Panthers to the writings of Mao was an FBI snitch. Richard Aoki, the Berkeley radical and leader of the ethnic studies strike, informed his Bureau contact: “The Maoist twist, I kind of threw that one in. I said so far the most advanced Marxists I have run across are the Maoists in China.” Despite this ideological straightjacket, BPP spokesmen like Fred Hampton were able to say fairly interesting things (all this before he was gunned down in Chicago at the age of 21). While it gave Hampton the perspective he needed to denounce the empty culturalism of Stokely Carmichael, whom he referred to as a “mini-fascist,” it otherwise limited the Panthers’ scope of inquiry into capitalist society.

Loren Goldner’s review, lightly edited and reproduced below, provides a much-needed corrective to the laudatory reception Revolution in the Air has met with so far. Goldner grounds his critique of Elbaum in the left communist and heterodox Trotskyist tradition he belonged to at the time, even though he likewise went to Berkeley and knew many of the same characters. Other Maoists, such as Paul Saba, have gently criticized Elbaum’s book over the last few months. Saba contends that the main fault of the NCM — of which he was also a veteran — was its theoretical poverty, and that it might have benefited from a more sophisticated Althusserian-Bettelheimian viewpoint. Quite the opposite holds for Goldner: the New Communist Movement was wrongheaded from the start.

You can read a 2010 interview with Elbaum by clicking on the link, but otherwise enjoy Goldner’s blistering review. Maoism may still be “in the air,” as Lye contends, if the various Red Guard formations are any indication. According to Goldner, however, it might be in the air the same way smog and other pathogens are.

Without exactly setting out to do so, Max Elbaum in his book Revolution In The Air, has managed to demonstrate the existence of progress in human history, namely in the decline and disappearance of the grotesque Stalinist/Maoist/“Third World Marxist” and Marxist-Leninist groups and ideologies he presents, under the rubric New Communist Movement, as the creations of pretty much the “best and the brightest” coming out of the American 1960s.

Who controls the past, Orwell said, controls the future. Read at a certain level, Elbaum’s book (describing a mental universe that in many respects out-Orwells Orwell), aims, through extended self-criticism, to jettison 99% of what “Third World Marxism” stood for in its 1970s heyday, in order to salvage the 1% of further muddled “progressive politics” for the future, particularly where the Democratic Party and the unions are concerned, preparing “progressive” forces to paint a new face on the capitalist system after the neoliberal phase has shot its bolt.

I lived through the 1960s too, in Berkeley of all places. I was in an anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialist milieu (then called Independent Socialist Clubs, which by the late 1970s had spawned eight different offshoots) a milieu the author identifies with “Eurocentric” Marxism. We argued that every state in the world from the Soviet Union to China to Cuba to North Vietnam and North Korea, by way of Albania, was a class society, and should be overthrown by working-class revolution. We said the same thing about all the Third World “national liberation movements” and states resulting from them, such as Algeria, and those in the then-Portuguese colonies (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau). We were dead right, and Elbaum’s “Third World Marxists,” who cheerleaded most or all of them, were dead wrong. This is now clear as day for all with eyes to see. We based our perspective on realities that did and do not to this day exist for Elbaum and his friends: the question of whether the Russian Revolution died in 1921 (Kronstadt) or 1927 (defeat of the Left Opposition). In Elbaum’s milieu, the choice was between 1953 (death of Stalin) and 1956 (Khruschev’s speech to the Twentieth Party Congress). “Eurocentrics” that we were, we took note of Stalin’s treacherous and disastrous China policy in 1927 (which Mao Tse-tung at the time had criticized from the right); of Stalin’s treacherous and disastrous Third Period policy and its results in Germany (above all), but also throughout the colonial world (e.g. the 1930 “Communes” in Vietnam and China). We critiqued Stalin’s treacherous and disastrous Popular Front policy, which led to a mutual defense pact with France, the reining in of the French mass strike of May-June 1936, and above all to the crushing of the anarchists and Trotskyists (and with them the Spanish Revolution as a whole) in Barcelona in May 1937 (it also led to the abandonment of anticolonial agitation by the Vietnamese and Algerian Communist Parties in the name of “antifascism”). We were disturbed by the Moscow Trials, whereby 105 of 110 members of Lenin’s 1917 central committee were assassinated, and by the Stalin-Hitler pact, through which Stalin handed over to the Gestapo dissident factions of the German Communist Party who had sought refuge in the Soviet Union, We read about Elbaum’s one-time hero Ho Chi Minh, who engineered the massacre of thousands of Vietnamese Trotskyists in 1945 when they advocated (with a real working-class base) armed resistance to the return of English and French troops there after World War II (Ho received them warmly under the auspices of the Yalta agreement, wherein Uncle Joe had consented to further French rule in Indochina). Stalin had done the same for Greece, where again the Trotskyists were slaughtered while pushing for revolution, and in western Europe, where the French and Italian resistance movements were disarmed and sent home by their respective Communist Parties. We studied the workers’ uprising in East Berlin in 1953, and the Hungarian Revolution (and Polish worker unrest) of 1956; we distributed the brilliant Open Letter to the Polish Workers’ Party (1965) of Kuron and Modzelewski. We were heartened by the Polish worker uprising in Gdansk and Gdynia in December 1970, which arguably heralded (through its 1980-81 expansion) the end of the Soviet empire. Elbaum mentions none of these post-1945 worker revolts against Stalinism, which were undoubtedly too “Eurocentric” for him — they did after all take place in Europe — assuming he heard about them. At the time, he and his milieu would have undoubtedly described them as revolts against “revisionism.”

From 1970 onward I moved into the broader, more diffuse anti-Stalinist milieu in the Bay Area. We read Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary and Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia; we discovered Georg Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness, and the Situationists; we saw Chile’s 1970-1973 Popular Front once again crushed by the same collaborationist policies which Elbaum’s Stalinist lineage had first perfected in France and Spain in 1936, and unlike Elbaum and his friends, we were hardly startled when the Chinese Communist Party embraced Pinochet. It had not escaped our “Eurocentric” attention that China itself had pushed the Indonesian Communist Party to adopt the same Popular Front strategy in 1965, leading to the massacre of hundreds of thousands (a success for US imperialism that more than offset the later defeat in Indochina), or that it had applauded when the Ceylonese regime (today Sri Lanka) bloodily repressed its Trotskyist student movement in 1971. We were similarly not shaken, like Elbaum and his friends, when China went on to support the South African intervention against the MPLA in Angola, or call for the strengthening of NATO against Soviet “social imperialism,” or support the right-wing regroupment against the Communist-influenced Armed Forces Movement in Portugal in 1974-1975. We “Eurocentrists” snapped up the writings of Simon Leys, the French Sinologist, documenting the crushing of the Shanghai proletariat by the People’s Liberation Army in the course of the “Cultural Revolution,” the latter lasting from 1966 to 1976. Elbaum and his friends were at the same time presenting this battle between two wings of the most elephantine bureaucracy of modern times, as a brilliant success in “putting politics in command” against the capitalist restorationists, technocrats, and intellectuals, and burning Beethoven for good measure. All of these writings of Chinese Stalinism struck us more as the second-time farce to the first-time tragedy of the worldwide ravages of Soviet Stalinism from the 1920s onward. Elbaum and his friends cheered on Pol Pot’s rustification campaign in Cambodia, in which one million people died; no sooner had they digested the post-1976 developments in China after Mao’s death (the arrest and vilification of the Gang of Four, the completion of the turn to the U.S. in an anti-Soviet alliance) when, in 1979, after Vietnam occupied Cambodia to depose the Khmer Rouge, China attacked Vietnam, and the Soviet Union prepared to attack China. How difficult, in those days, to be a “Third World Marxist”!

We had been shaped by the worldwide renaissance of Marxism set in motion by the serious diffusion of the “early Marx” and the growing awareness of the Hegelian dimension of the “late Marx” in the Grundrisse, Capital, and Theories of Surplus Value. We leapt upon the “Unpublished Sixth Chapter” of vol. I of Capital as demonstrating the essential continuity of the “early” and “late” Marx (though we did not yet know Marx’s writings on the Russian mir and the ethnographic notebooks, which drew an even sharper line between a truly “late Marx” and all the bowdlerized productivist versions coming from the Second, Third and Fourth Internationals). A familiarity with any of these currents put paid to the “diamat” world view and texts which were the standard fare of Elbaum’s world. It was of course “Eurocentric” to rethink Marx and official Marxism through this new, unexplored continent, “not Eurocentric” to absorb Marx through the luminosity of Stalin, Beria, and Hoxha. The Marx who had written extensive journalism on India and China from the 1840s onward may have been “Eurocentric” but the braindead articles emanating from the Peking Review about the “three goods” and the “four bads” were, for these people, decidedly not.

Rosa Luxemburg and everything she stood for (including her memorable writings — no doubt “Eurocentric” — on primitive accumulation in the colonial world and her rich material on precapitalist societies everywhere in Einführung in die Nationalökonomie) meant nothing to these people. Her critiques of Lenin, in the earliest months of the Russian Revolution (not to mention before 1914), and of the right to national self-determination, did not exist. Elbaum and his friends were not interested in the revolutionaries who had criticized Lenin during the latter’s lifetime (or at any point), and they remained blissfully unaware of Bordiga, Gorter, and Pannekoek. The philosophical critiques of Korsch and Lukács similarly meant nothing to them. They never heard of the 1940s and 1950s CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, the early Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, the French group Socialism or Barbarism, Paul Mattick Sr., Maximilien Rubel, the Italian workerists, Ernst Bloch, or Walter Benjamin. They seriously argued for the aesthetics of China’s four “revolutionary operas” and songs such as “The Mountain Brigade Hails The Arrival of the Night Soil Carriers” while the serious Marxist world was discovering the Frankfurt School (whatever the latter’s limitations) and Guy Debord.

Then there was the influence of “Monthly Review” magazine and publishers. Baran and Sweezy had migrated from the Soviet Union to various Third World “anti-imperialists” to China; they were infused with the “Bandung” climate of 1955 and the brief moment of the Soviet-Chinese-neutralist “anti-imperialist” bloc. Names such as Sukarno, Nasser, Nkrumah loomed large in this mindset, as did the later “Tricontinental” (Latin America-Africa-Asia) consciousness promoted by Cuba and Algeria. The 1966 book of Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, (which, years into the crisis of the Bretton Woods system, did not even mention credit) became a major theoretical reference for this crowd. This was supplemented by international names such as Samir Amin, Charles Bettelheim, Arghiri Emanuel, and the South American “dependency school” (Cardoso, Prebisch, et al.). But the lynchpin was Lenin’s theory of imperialism, with its idea of “imperialist superprofits” making possible the support of a “labor aristocracy” and thereby the reformism of the Western working class, against which this whole world view was ultimately aimed. Even today, after everything that has discredited Sweezy’s economics, Elbaum still uses “monopoly capital” as one of his many unexamined concepts.

Because in the world of Elbaum and his friends, while the reading of Capital may have been on the agenda of many study groups (in reality, in most cases, the study of Volume I, which is tantamount to reading Hegel’s Phenomenology only on the initial phase of “sense certainty” of English empiricism and skepticism), it was far more (as he says) the pamphlets of Lenin, or if the truth be known, of Stalin, Beria, Mao, Ho and Hoxha which were the main fare. (My favorite was Beria’s “On The History of Bolshevik Organization in the Transcaucasus,” reprinted ca. 1975 by some long-defunct Marxist-Leninist publisher.) Elbaum is honest, in retrospect: “the publishing houses of the main New Communist organizations issued almost nothing that remains of value to serious left researchers and scholars.” He might have added that it wasn’t worth reading at the time, either, except to (briefly) experience ideology run amok. Whereas for the political world I inhabited, the question was the recovery of soviets and workers’ councils for direct democratic worker control of the entirety of production (a perspective having its own limits, but far more interesting ones), by Elbaum’s own account the vision of the socialist society in Marxist-Leninist circles was rarely discussed beyond ritual bows to the various Third World models, today utterly discredited, or the invocation of the “socialism in one rural commune” of William Hinton’s Fanshen, or the writings on Viet Cong “democracy” by the indefatigable Wilfred Burchett (who had also written lyrically about Stalin’s Russia 30 years earlier). The real Marxian project of the abolition of the law of value, (i.e. the regimentation of social life by the socially necessary time of reproduction), existed for virtually no one in the 1960s, not for Elbaum, nor for me. But the Monthly Review/monopoly capital world view, in which capitalism was understood not as a valorization process but as a quasi-Dühringian system ultimately of power and domination, meshed perfectly with the (in reality) populist world view of Elbaum et al. Through Baran and Sweezy a kind of left-wing Keynesianism pervaded this part of the Left, relegating the law of value to the capitalism of Marx’s time and (following Lenin) seeing everything since the 1890s as power-political “monopoly capital.” This “anti-imperialism” was and is in reality an ideology of Third World elites, in or out of power, and is fundamentally anti-working class, like all the “progressive” regimes they have ever established. It did not trouble Elbaum and his milieu that the role of the Third World in international trade had been declining through from 1900 to the 1960s, or that 80% of all direct foreign investment takes places between the three major capitalist centers of the US, Europe, and East Asia (so much for Lenin’s theory of imperialism); the illusory prosperity of the West, in their view, was paid for by the looting of the Third World (and, make no mistake, the Third World was and is being looted). The ultimate implication of this outlook was, once again, to implicate the “white” (e.g. Eurocentric) working class of the West in the world imperialist system, in the name of illusory bureaucratic-peasant utopias of labor-intensive agriculture. This working class in the advanced capitalists countries had meanwhile, from 1955 to 1973, carried out the mounting wildcat insurgency in the US and Britain, May 1968 in France and the “creeping May” of 1969-1977 in Italy, apparently not having been informed by Elbaum’s “Third World Marxists” that they were bought off by imperialism.

A number of unexamined concepts run through Elbaum’s book from beginning to end: revisionism, antirevisionism, Leninism, Marxism-Leninism, ultraleftism. Elbaum never explains that “revisionism” meant to this milieu above all the ideological demotion of Stalin after 1953, and that therefore those who called themselves “antirevisionists” were identifying, implicitly or explicitly (usually the latter) Stalin’s Russia with some betrayed “Marxist orthodoxy.” In his counterposition of “revisionism/antirevisionism” Elbaum does not devote one line to the consolidation, in 1924, of the grotesque concept of “socialism in one country,” a concept that would have made Lenin (whatever his other problems) wretch. (Not for nothing had Lenin’s Testament called for Stalin’s removal as General Secretary, another “fact” that counted for nothing in the mental universe of “Third World Marxism.”) For someone who is writing about it on every page, Elbaum has, in fact, no real theory of Stalinism whatsoever. Whereas the milieu I frequented stayed up late trying to determine if the seeds of Stalinism were in Leninism, Elbaum and his friends saw mainly or entirely an unproblematic continuity between Lenin and Stalin, and affirmed it. As for “Marxism-Leninism,” Elbaum does admit that it was a concoction of Stalin. In its subsequent career “Marxism-Leninism” could mean anything to anyone, anything of course except the power of soviets and workers’ councils which in every failed proletarian revolution of the twentieth century (Russia 1905 and 1917-1921, Germany 1918-1921, Spain 1936-1937, Hungary 1956, France 1968) had more genuine communist elements than all the large and small totalitarians in Elbaum’s “Third World Marxist” pantheon put together.

“Ultraleftism” for Elbaum means little self-appointed vanguards running amok and demarcating themselves from real movements. Elbaum seems quite unaware of the true historic ultraleft. One can agree or disagree with [Anton] Pannekoek (whose mass strike writings influenced Lenin’s State and Revolution), [Herman] Gorter (who told Lenin in 1921 that the Russian revolutionary model did not could not be mechanically transposed onto western Europe) or [Amadeo] Bordiga, who called Stalin the gravedigger of the revolution to his face in 1926 and lived to tell the tale. But such people and the genuine mass movements (in Germany, Holland, and Italy) that produced them are a noble tradition which hardly deserves to be confused rhetorically with the thuggish antics of the (happily defunct) League for Proletarian Socialism (the latter name being a true contradictio in adjecto, inadvertently revealing bureaucratic dreams: Marxian socialism means the abolition of wage-labor and hence of the “proletariat” as the commodity form of human labor-power). As indicated above, figures such as [Karl] Korsch, [Paul] Mattick, [Cornelius] Castoriadis, and the early CLR James (whatever their problems) can similarly be considered part of an ultraleft, and unlike the productions of Elbaum’s milieu, their writings are eminently worth reading today. One Dutch Marxist organizing in Indonesia in 1908 had already grasped the basically bourgeois nature of nationalism in the then-colonial world, an idea Elbaum was still catching up with in 2002.

“Internationalism” for Elbaum means mainly cheerleading for the latest “Third World Marxist” movement or regime, but in reality his vision of the world is laughably America-centered. He refers on occasion (as a source of inspiration for his milieu) to the French mass strike of 1968, which swept aside all self-appointed vanguards, “Marxist-Leninists” first of all. This is lost on Elbaum. By the early 1970s, Trotskyist groups had clearly out-organized the Marxist-Leninists, and for what it’s worth, today the two largest Trotskyist groups, Lutte Ouvrière and Ligue Communiste, together account for 10% of the vote in French elections and are now larger than the Communist Party, without a Marxist-Leninist in sight. In Britain, similarly, Trotskyist groups out-organized the Marxist-Leninists hands down, played an important role in the 1972 strike wave (never mentioned by Elbaum), and today the British Socialist Workers’ Party (not to be confused with the American rump of the same name) is the largest group to the left of the Labour Party. Elbaum refers in passing to the Japanese far left of the 60s as an influence on some Japanese-Americans, but he seems blissfully unaware that the Zengakuren was overwhelmingly anti-Stalinist and mainly viewed Russia and China as state-capitalist. The most creative and internationally influential currents of the Italian 1970s, the so-called operaisti or workerists, were breaking with Leninism from the early 1970s at the latest. (To be fair, in Italy and in Germany large Maoist and Marxist-Leninist groups did exist, and the Trotskyists were basically marginal.)

On the subject of Trotsky: I am not a Trotskyist, and have basically (as previously indicated) since my callow youth viewed all so-called socialist societies as class societies, and not (as Trotskyists do) as “workers’ states.” But I have more respect for Trotsky (who should be distinguished from the Trotskyists) than I ever had or will have for Stalin, Mao, Ho, Kim il-Sung, Castro, Guevara, or Cabral.

Wearing the blinders of his milieu, Elbaum shows real ignorance of Trotskyism. (“Third World Marxism’s” philistine hatred for Trotsky, while generally not stooping to 1930s “Trotsky the agent of the Mikado”-type slanders, was exceeded only by such ignorance.) Blinded by his milieu’s acceptance of complete and positive continuity between Lenin and Stalin, the world events of the early 1920s, which decisively shaped both Trotskyism and the aforementioned ultraleft (and the last eighty years of human history) have no importance for him. Hence (as indicated earlier), the triumph of “socialism in one country” after 1924 and the total subordination of all Communist Parties to Soviet foreign policy are totally unproblematic for these people, as were all the debacles of the Comintern mentioned earlier. Similarly, the question of the relationship of the Bolshevik party and Soviet state to the soviets and workers’ councils, i.e. the question of the actual working-class management of society, which was settled (in the negative) by 1921, is of no consequence either. It is Eurocentric to be concerned about Soviet history before the rise of Stalin, not Eurocentric to admire Stalin’s Russia with its ten million peasants killed in the 1930s collectivizations, its massacre of the Bolshevik Old Guard in the Moscow Trials, its factories operating with killing speed-up under direct GPU control or its twenty million people in slave labor camps at the time of Stalin’s death. For such a view, “revisionism” must therefore be Khrushchev’s (equally top-down) attempt to decompress (a bit) this nightmare. The memory of Stalinist Russia still weighs on the consciousness of masses of people around the world as the seemingly inevitable outcome of trying to do away with capitalism, and reinforces the still potent neoliberal mantra “there is no alternative,” but why the people Elbaum describes as the “most dynamic” part of the American left in the 1970s were so taken with the Stalinist legacy never seems to strike him as a major problem to be addressed.

Elbaum might also inform himself about Trotsky’s (and Marx’s) theory of permanent revolution, which was the centerpiece of the Bolshevik internationalist strategy in 1917, and its repudiation by Stalin the key to all the post-1924 politics swallowed whole forty-five years later by Elbaum’s “Third World Marxists.” Permanent revolution-rightly or wrongly-meant the possibility that a revolution in a backward country like Russia could link up with (or even inspire; cf. Marx’s preface to the 1882 Russian edition of the Manifesto) revolution in the developed European heartland, and in that way be spared the bloody primitive accumulation process which every capitalist country from Britain to Russia to contemporary China has necessarily undergone. It is this theory, and not some “Eurocentrism,” that made (the small minority of) honest Trotskyists keep their distances from regimes using “Third World Marxism” as a fig-leaf for capitalist primitive accumulation. Most Trotskyists were howling with the wolves that “Vietnam Will Win!” Well, we have seen what won in Vietnam (and even more so Cambodia).

This is hardly the place to describe the devolution of Trotskyism since Trotsky, but honesty and courage of convictions were not the strong suit of the [Ernest] Mandels and [Jack] Barneses and [Michel] Pablos who shaped it after 1940. Elbaum sees the American SWP as the main face of Trotskyism for 1960s and 1970s leftists in the US (and he is right about that), and claims that Trotskyism’s involvement with “old 1930s issues” and “European questions” was the main hindrance to a larger impact of Trotskyism when the Third World, from China to Vietnam to Cuba was supposedly sizzling with revolution and the building of socialism.

In point of fact, watching the SWP (like their French counterparts Ligue Communiste) in the 1960s and 1970s, I could only laugh up my sleeve watching the way they buried their critique of Stalinism (as in the case of the Vietnamese NLF) in the fine print of their theoretical journals while rushing after popularity, waving NLF flags, in exactly the milieu influenced by Elbaum’s “Third World Marxism.” To take only one anecdotal example: In a 1969 debate in Berkeley between the ISC and the SWP, we put SWP spokesperson Pete Camejo up against the wall about the 1945 massacre of the Vietnamese Trotskyists in front of a large New Left audience. And Camejo conceded that, yes, Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh had in fact oppressed the Vietnamese comrades of the Fourth International. I am sure most of the New Leftist cheerleaders present considered our point to be “ancient history” — just twenty-four years earlier! Today, as they watch Vietnam rush into “market socialism” with investment capital from Toyota and Mitsubishi, I am sure they do not think about it at all. I remember Camejo’s brother Tony telling a similar audience that we should not be too critical of black and Latino nationalism in the US because blacks and Latinos had not yet passed through their “bourgeois revolution,” as if American blacks and Latinos did not also live in the most advanced capitalist society in the world. But he had put his finger on a certain reality, since many of the black and Latino nationalists of the 1960s and 1970s were in fact on their way to middle-class careers, once the shouting died down, as uninterested in genuine proletarian revolution (and the true twentieth century examples of it) today as they were then. (They were and are in this way no different from the great majority of the white New Left.) Elbaum approvingly quotes Tariq Ali attacking those who (such as myself and the ISC to which I belonged) saw no difference between “Mao Tse-tung and Chiang Kai-shek, or Castro and Batista,” whereas all of world history since Ali uttered that remark has demonstrated nothing except that the main difference made between old-style US-backed dictators and “Third World Marxist” dictators with state power is that the latter better prepare their countries for full-blown capitalism, with Mao’s China exhibit A for the prosecution, and Vietnam following close behind.

Further, Elbaum never seems to notice that many of the twentieth century Marxists still worth reading today (and he apparently has not read them), such as the early Shachtman, James, Draper, and Castoriadis, made their most important contributions in a break to the left of Trotskyism. In 35 years in leftist politics, I have met many ex-Stalinists and Maoists who became Trotskyists and council communists; I have never met anyone who went in the opposite direction. Once you have played grand master chess, you rarely go back to checkers.

Finally, while Elbaum rightly says that the turn ca. 1969 of thousands of New Leftists to the American working class was largely fruitless, he does neglect one important counterexample, namely the success of the International Socialists (the renamed ISC after 1970) in building the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and through it being the sparkplugs for the election of Ron Carey as President of the Teamsters in 1991. There is no question that this development, however much it turned into a fiasco, was the most important leftwing intervention in the American labor movement since the 1940s. I no more wish to go off on a long tangent about that terribly-botched episode than I wish to expound on the history of Trotskyism; I left the IS milieu in 1969. It is rather, again, to show Elbaum’s blindspot to the real flaws of his own tradition. The IS’ success with TDU came at the price of burying (at least for the purposes of Teamster politics) the fact that they were socialists, not merely honest trade-unionists (It turned out that Carey wasn’t even that.) Anyone educated in a Trotskyist group (and the IS, despite its rejection of the socialist character of the so-called “workers’ states” was Trotskyist on every other question), in contrast to most Stalinist and Maoist groups, develops a healthy aversion to the trade-union bureaucracy and to the Democratic Party. Elbaum provides a long history of how Maoism evolved out of the wreckage of the old CPUSA after the 1960 Sino-Soviet split. Some of these groups looked back to the CP under Browder; others preferred William Z. Foster. But almost all of them saw something positive in the CP’s role during the Roosevelt era, both in the Democratic Party and in the CIO. The problem of those working off of Trotskyism was, on the contrary, the “bureaucracy” that developed in exactly the era of CP influence; the problem of those working off of Marxism-Leninism was “revisionism” (Stalinists and Maoists for some reason don’t have too much to say about bureaucracy, except-as in the “Cultural Revolution,” when they are supporting one bureaucratic faction against another). And the concept of “revisionism” rarely inoculated these people against seeking influence in high places, either with Democratic politicians or with trade-union bureaucrats, as the CP had done so successfully in its heyday. It is certainly true that many of Elbaum’s Marxist-Leninists did neither. But he seems to ignore the fact that the ability of a group like the IS to intersect the Teamster rank-and-file rebellion of the 1970s and thereafter had something to do with the fact that they, in contrast to every Marxist-Leninist around, were not approaching the American working class with tall tales about socialism in Cuba or Albania or Cambodia or North Korea. The oh-so-radical defenders of Beijing’s line, whether for or against the “Gang of Four,” turned out to be defending a considerable part of the global status quo.

Finally, if Elbaum would lift his head from the rubble of “Third World Marxism,” he might notice that, in Britain and France, Trotskyist groups have a solid mass base (whatever one thinks of the politics involved), whereas Marxist-Leninists are almost nowhere to be seen; and even in the politically-backward U.S., groups such as the ineffable ISO, not to mention the youthful anarchist scene, are attracting more young people interested in revolution than any Marxist-Leninists. Being for the overthrow of every government in the world lets you see and do things that the baggage of Pol Pot or Shining Path or Kim Jong-Il conceals.

It is now time to turn to the merits of Elbaum’s book, which, contrary to what the reader may conclude from the above, it indeed has. First — and with this I have no quarrel — Elbaum attacks the “good sixties/bad sixties” vision of figures such as Todd Gitlin, for whom the late-sixties turn to revolution was the “bad sixties,” compared to the early sixties Port Huron vision of participatory democracy. Revolution was necessary then, and is necessary today, whatever the current ideological climate might favor. Elbaum is also right in critiquing Gitlin’s (and many others’) almost exclusive focus on the white New Left, seeing the movement essentially collapse with SDS in 1969-1970, and not recognizing its extension, particularly among blacks and Latinos (not to mention the thousands of white New Leftists who went into the factories, and the wildcat strike wave which lasted until 1973).

But Elbaum does put his finger on the fact that the Third World Marxist/Stalinist/Marxist-Leninist and Maoist milieu was much more successful, in the 1960s and 1970s, in attracting and influencing militants of color. And he is equally right in saying that most of the Trotskyist currents, not to mention the “post-Trotskyists” to whom I was closest, were partially blind to America’s “blindspot,” the centrality of race, in the American class equation. The ISC, when I was in it in Berkeley in the late 1960s, was all for black power, and (like many other groups) worked with the Black Panthers, but itself had virtually no black members. Trotskyist groups such as the SWP did have some, as did all the others. but there is no question that Elbaum’s milieu was far more successful with blacks, Latinos, and Asians (as was the CPUSA). To cut to the quick, I think that the answer to this difference was relatively straightforward. As Elbaum himself points out, many people of color who threw themselves into the ferment of the 1960s and 1970s and joined revolutionary groups were the first generation of their families to attend college, and were — whether they knew it or not — on their way into the middle class. Thus it is hardly surprising, when one thinks about it, that they would be attracted to the regimes and movements of “progressive” middle-class elites in the Third World. This was just as true, in a different way, for many transient militants of the white New Left, similarly bound (after 1973) for the professional classes, not to mention the actually ruling class offspring one found in groups such as the Weathermen. Elbaum does point out that the white memberships of many Third World Marxist groups were from working-class families and were similarly the first generation of their families to attend college. He also shows a preponderant origin of such people in the “prairie radicalism” (i.e. populism) of the Midwest, in contrast to the more “European” left of the two coasts, one important clue to their essentially populist politics. These are important social/historical/cultural insights, which could be developed much further. Charles Denby’s Black Worker’s Notebook (Denby was a member of Raya Dunayevskaya’s New and Letters group) effectively identifies the middle-class character of the Black Power milieu around Stokely Carmichael et al., as well as black workers’ distance from it; the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers similarly critiqued the black nationalist middle class, though it was hardly antinationalist itself.)

It is undeniable that the 1960s movements of peoples of color in the U.S. were influenced by the global climate of the decolonization of most of Africa, the Middle East and Asia following World War II, and the “decentering” of actually Eurocentric views of Western and world history, following the 1914-1945 “decentering” of Europe in the new lines drawn by the Cold War. They were similarly influenced by — and themselves were the main force enacting-the shattering of centuries of white supremacy in American society. It would be idealistic and moralistic to explain their attraction to “Third World Marxism,” Maoism and Marxism-Leninism by the meaningless assertion that “they had the wrong ideas.” One important part of the answer is definitely the weight of arriving middle-class elements in these political groups, who are today to be found in the black and Latino professional classes. But the typical black, Latino or Asian militant in the U.S. waving Mao’s little red book or chanting “We want a pork chop/Off the pig” was not signing on for Stalin’s gulag, or the millions who died in Mao’s “great leap forward” in 1957, or mass murder in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or the ghoulish torture of untold numbers of political prisoners in Sekou Toure’s Guinea (where the black nationalist Stokely Carmichael spent his last days with no dissent anyone ever heard about), any more than the working-class militant in the CP-USA in 1935 was signing on for the Moscow Trials or the massacre of the Spanish anarchists and Trotskyists. All the above real history and theory blotted out or falsified by “Third World Marxism” was available and known in the 1960s and thereafter to those who sought it. The question is precisely one of exactly when groups of people in motion are ready to seek or hear certain truths. What Elbaum can’t face is that the entirety of “Third World Marxism” was and is anti-working class, whether in Saigon in 1945 or in Budapest and Poznan in 1956 or in Jakarta in 1965 or in case of the Shanghai workers slaughtered in the midst of the “Cultural Revolution” in 1966-1969. Workers, white and nonwhite, in the American sixties sensed this more clearly than did Elbaum’s minions, blinded by ideology. As Marx said, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, speaking of the English Revolution of the 1640s:

…in the same way but at a different stage of development, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed for their bourgeois revolution the language, passions and illusions of the Old Testament. When the actual goal had been reached, when the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke drove out Habbakuk.

When the upwardly mobile middle class elements of the 1960s and 1970s New Left and Third World Marxism, both white but also important numbers of blacks and Latinos, had established themselves in their professional and civil service jobs and academic tenure, suburban life and VCRs drove out Ho, Che, and Mao. Things went quite differently, above all for blacks without a ticket to the middle class, as one can see in the difference between the ultimate fates of even the Weather Underground after years on the run, and black political prisoners such as Geronimo Pratt.

But, to conclude, if Elbaum has offered us hundreds of pages on the wars of sects and ideologies that no one — himself included — misses, it is not from an antiquarian impulse. The real agenda is spelled out in one of the effusive blurbs on the dust cover: “Finally, we have one book that can successfully connect the dots between the battles of the 1960s and the emerging challenges and struggles of the new century.” The giveaway is Elbaum’s treatment of the Jesse Jackson presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988, which are presented as something almost as momentous as the 1960s, and which offered the few Marxist-Leninist groups (“Marxist-Leninists for Mondale” as someone once called them) still around their last chance at mass influence. In contrast to the 1960s, the Jackson campaigns came and went with no lasting impact except to further illustrate the dead end of the old Rooseveltian New Deal coalition and the Keynesian welfare-statism that was the bread and butter of the old Democratic Party and of the CP-USA’s strategy within the Democratic Party. And when all is said and done, this fatal legacy of the CP’s role at the height of Stalinism in the mid-1930s is Elbaum’s legacy as well. Just as he tells us nothing about the true origins of Marxism-Leninism and Third World Marxism, Elbaum tells us nothing about the CP-USA coming off its 1930s “heroic” phase, herding the American working class off to World War II through the enforcement of the no-strike pledge, the calumny of any critic of US imperialism’s moment of arrival at world power as a Hitlero-fascist, and applause in the Daily Worker for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So it is necessary to connect some further dots: this book aims at being a contribution to some new “progressive coalition” wedding the American working class to some revamping of the capitalist state in an all-out drive to “Beat Bush” around a Dean campaign (or something like it) in 2004. It joins the groundswell of dissent among capitalist forces themselves, currently being articulated by the likes of George Soros, Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stieglitz, and Paul Krugman as the still-dominant neoliberal paradigm of the past twenty-five years begins to seriously fray. While Elbaum’s book makes occasional passing reference to economic hard times times the 1970s, he does not see the extent to which American decline has circumscribed any possible agenda of “reform,” which can only be some kind of “Tax The Rich” scheme, share-the-wealth — the declining wealth — kind of left populism, with suitably “diverse” forces that will probably be the final fruit of the “progressive” middle classes, whites and people of color, that evolved out of Elbaum’s “Third World Marxism.”

Despite what Elbaum thinks and what he and his milieu thought thirty years ago, the fate of the world is in the hands of the world working class. In contrast to thirty years ago, however, this working class is no longer limited to North America, Europe and Japan, but is now spread through many parts of the “anti-imperialist” Third World, led by China. The East will be red again, not as the bureaucratic-peasant hallucination of the “Third World Marxists” of the 1960s and 1970s, but as a genuine working-class revolt against precisely the forces that used “Third World Marxism,” in the Third World as in the U.S. and Europe, to muddle every social question and advance their social stratum. The remnants of these forces are positioned today in and around the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy, as well as in the antiglobalization movement, readying themselves to again revamp the capitalist system with torrents of “progressive” rhetoric, as they did in the 1930s and 1940s.

The only thing that is “progressive” in today’s world is working-class revolution.

#maoism #maoism third-worldism #socialism #communism #20th century communism #book reviews #dialectical materialism #communist history #new communist movement #communist theory #communist critique

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soulfulauror · 6 years

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The topic I’m bringing you today is one that I’ve grappled with for nearly as long as I’ve played Tina: Jewishness and the Wizarding World with respects to Tina.

Let me preface this that while I’m a conversion student (reform) I’m not from a Jewish family myself. Although I’ve started to practice religiously I cannot and will not call myself an authority on the matter for ethnic/secular Jewish people. As this is also a headcanon post while I will touch on minute details of my research I will not express every nuance, but I am happy to share texts and ideas.

Being a wizarding Jew: Religious or Ethnic? One of the biggest misconceptions I’ve seen in the FB fandoms in regards to the Goldstein sisters is that their relation to their Jewishness has to be religious. It does not. The Jewish people are one of the oldest people with written history, language, and culture in the world. There are people born Jewish, by Jewish law, that do not practice religiously and don’t believe in a higher being. This is the first thing I like to make a point of when writing either of the girls: They don’t have to be religious.

America in the 1920s in relations to Judaism: Like many different ethnic and religious groups there was a spike in immigration by the Jewish people in the 18th through 20th centuries. In particular, in the 19th century immigration happened due to Russian pogroms. Antisemitism was on a global level with Henry Ford in the United States writing propaganda in the early 20th century.

The 19th century also saw the introduction of a new form of Jewish movement in Baltimore, the Reform movement. Jewishness on a religious level within the United States was broadening. There were “modern” Jewish plays on Broadway. The introduction of the reform movement was considered a revitalization by some and in other ways, it was pulling away from a traditional Jewish identity in a time where being Jewish was dangerous and on a global scale unwanted by peers. This only heightened post WWI where the Jewish people were considered the “problem” and we know what happens from there.

New York in the 1920s had one of the largest Jewish populations on the planet and today still holds the second largest (after Israel). Different census says that the Jewish population at the time was anywhere between 30-50% of the population and reached a high in the 20s*. This means the wizarding population of New York would have, subsequently, had a large Jewish population and their own cultural identity.

Religion and witchcraft. This is a topic that I consider on all types of levels-- For a strict, orthodox Jewish person the idea of witchcraft would be considered against the Torah. For Conservative and Reform Judaism it might change a bit. But even for Orthodox Jews for the wizarding world it might be considered “an exception”. For this I’d like to direct you to a fanfiction about an orthodox Anthony Goldstein: here who explains the concept far better than I can. The idea essentially is that if not doing something (practicing/learning sorcery) will become a danger to others is it strictly wrong. And in this case, we know that magic can act explosively if not handled properly and, if repressed, results in an Obscurial.

Jewishness also has pagan roots and it’s own mysticism in Kabbalah. Early temple era practices involved ritual sacrifice (largely of animals that eventually got written out). I haven’t done enough research into Kabbalah itself to want to firmly say anything on it but a quick definition is, “ Practical Kabbalah in historical Judaism, is a branch of the Jewish mystical tradition that concerns the use of magic. ... “ Sukkot is, in a sense, still one of the most pagan-like traditions held.

So what does this mean for Tina and how does she handle her Jewishness? Well, not that we got the highlights of what I consider about her identity itself down let’s discuss Tina’s history itself:

Regardless of what debates may come up I will always write Tina as ethnically and religiously Jewish. Full stop. However, I also consider the effect that having lost her parents would have here. For my version of Tina I write as if her parents died somewhere in between her being 8 to 9-years-old. By this age she has a more firm grip on how her parents treated their own identities and it’s part of the cultural values she grew up in.

However, that was over fifteen years ago and for 9 of those years she would have been in most of my verses an orphanage (and I have reasons for that and I’ll write a headcanon on that one day). And when she wasn’t she was at Ilvermorny which, instead of collaborating cultural identities seems to be like England and no-maj America more Christain based. I’d like to think in a perfect worl children would be excused for religious holidays to practice, but given how religion is non-existent in this world it’s doubtful. So she went to a secular boarding school where Christmas, Easter, etc would have been the major holidays.

Still with me? Cool. So now that we’ve gotten all of the bits and pieces together that I’ve considered for Tina the fun part comes in:

I write Tina as culturally Jewish, led by Jewish morals and ideals, without a belief in g-d.

By the time her parents died Tina’s morals would have been formed and these are the things I have written into her character. Without dwelling on it long I’ll lift some titles from one of my favorite works Jewish Wisdom by Rabbi Joshua Telushkin on this. “When to Give, What to Give, How to Give,” “Helping the Helpless,” “The Obligation to criticize, How to do So, and When to Remain Silent,” “Listen to her voice,” “Either friends or death,” “A Person is Liable by his Actions”.

These are just some of the passages in this work that I feel plays into Tina’s character and I try to subtly put in. Because I do feel like that I shouldn’t have to constantly say she is Jewish for her to be Jewish-- Action speaks just as loudly as words and that’s what, to me, fits Tina best. So when I write her I consider how the Torah and Talmud would work and this Jewish morality, not necessarily adhering to mitzvahs (though she does to many, but she doesn’t live by them).

Saying she doesn’t feel religiously Jewish, however, doesn’t mean I don’t feel like she does nothing either. The interesting thing about Judaism is that you are allowed to grapple with it and come at your own terms. It’s that reason that it’s completely possible for wizarding Jews to be religious too-- Because it’s all about finding your own identity with g-d.

Tina’s had a difficult life, though. She lost her parents at a young age, she’s seen cold nights with no food, struggled to be successful and it’s always been something she had to do on her own. It’s not necessarily that she doesn’t believe in g-d she’s just come to terms with h him in her own way-- And this way is more of a spiritual reflection than anything.

She does believe in the holiness of Yom Kippur, for example. It’s the one time of year that I write she asks for off and insists on. Any other holiday she’ll work if she has to, but this is the one time she pressed for because it’s a period of reflection for her-- She’ll work through the week leading up after Rosh Hashanah but she earnestly takes the time Yom Kippur gives to understand herself, come to terms with what she did during the year, and it’s also a time she pays respect to her parents.

Tina’s Jewish identity for me is directly connected to the loss of her parents. After they pass away she has no reason to go to shul anymore, no reason for prayer, other than daughterly obligation. Again, she lived in an over-crowded era where kids like her would have been extremely lucky to eat properly. She’d have no reason to believe in those circumstances, but se still tried.

Every year without fail Tina lights a candle on Yom Kippur. She’d save up whatever nickles she could find when she was little. And now on the anniversaries of their deaths she visits their gravestones and places a rock. When she was old enough to give Queenie anything on Chanukkah she’d present her a single present, not much and it took too long to get the money for it--

--But for Tina she’s a woman who holds onto those memories and moments with her parents. She lives in her mother’s old apartment, wears their old clothes, keeps a locket that I personally write as her mothers. Holding onto these small moments is like holding onto a piece of them.

Tina is also a bit of a scholar as seen with her various books and I don’t feel that ends on the magical spectrum. She does earnestly want to know about the background she comes from, so she’s read the Torah and she reads scholastic works. And occasionally if she’s off at the time she walks to the nearest shul on Shabbat mornings.

Her Jewishness is a part of her and it’s something she grapples with. A younger her was angry at the concept of g-d allowing her parents to die, an older her understands that some things happen and it’s how you deal with them, the strength that pulls you through that happens. That there are no guarantees and what you can do is by acting with just and moral decisions. And that’s exactly how she lives.

Kosher is something I waffle on and this goes back to the remarks of “Hot dog, again? ...Not a very wholesome lunch.” Which I and many others do think is supposed to go back to that, but again I think it’s much more complicated-- Technically eating pork/non-kosher/what not is allowed if there’s nothing else to eat and you’ll starve otherwise. So I think as a child, before her parents died, Tina ate kosher-- But after they died it became eating whatever came by. That included pork or dairy products or whatever was there.

As an adult she does try to eat kosher for the most part, but she also eats at a matter of convenience. Hot Dogs could be kosher, but stand ones are unlikely so she probably justifies it by she needs to eat and she doesn’t know (and Waterston has saidt hat Tina gets so stressed out/works so much that she forgets to eat). There’s also some Jewish people who eat kosher in the home by don’t outside of it simply because of the idea they don’t actually know if a place is entirely kosher (since strict Judaism calls for such foods to not even be cooked on the same utensils).

The last and final element I consider is the fact that Tina is a woman who has high morals, strong loyalty, and a constant work-ethic. What this means is that although I feel she asks for at least one holiday off a year she doesn’t stress the others-- Her spirituality is more important and she can’t justify taking many off. Especially not during the High Holidays in the fall when you’re not /technically/ supposed to work for a month. She simply can’t afford that and I’ve read a few articles where even on Shabbat if it’s a greater loss to you (ie: money/food/etc) it can be justified and since her Jewishness is more spiritual than religious...

Well. Tina is a practising Jew, within the confines of the life she’s been given. She is very culturally Jewish and knows Yiddish and Hebew passably enough, Yiddish more so. She’s even a scholarly Jew, wanting to learn what she can even if it’s not necessarily something she makes part of her identity. Tina is very proud of being Jewish and holds it close to her heart as part of her parents. She’s just not a Jewish person who has quite come to concepts with her own idea of g-d or if one exists for her.

I would go on but this is already long and I think this covers quite a bit of information without going into my feelings on Tina versus period-antisemitism.

Thanks for coming this far if you have!

#headcanon ✘ an uncomplicated act of kindness

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bougainvilea · 6 years

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I’m becoming more and more aware that people online don’t really know what it means to be Jewish, so I’m making a helpful list!

Under the cut, I deal with the following things:

the difference between Judaism and Christianity

the streams in Judaism and why they’re not denominations

Judaism as a culture

why Judaism is not an ethnicity (and why you can’t be half Jewish)

the word ‘goy’

historical antisemitism

Jewish rebellion

feel free to reblog, especially if you are not Jewish

To start off with, some definitions:

observant = the extent to which one considers themselves religiously Jewish as opposed to culturally/socially/historically/etc Jewish

to keep Shabbat = according to religious law, from Friday night to Saturday night you have to keep the sabbath holy, by following a bunch of rules like no starting a spark (which means no electricity or cars or anything), no picking up a pen, and a bunch of other things you can read about here.

It does not mean christianity without the new testament. We have our own traditions, laws, and an extra book known as the Mishnah. Our traditions center around different things, our sabbath day is different, our days start in the evenings.

On this note, I’ve seen a post going around saying that Judaism is inherently different to xtianity, and it is 100% accurate. By which I mean, our laws are debatable. Even if you are 10000% observant, you could differ in tradition to someone else who is equally observant. You might be in different streams (see next dot point), or different cultural groups. This is beacause the words are interpreted differently by different Rabbis, and consensus is not wanted or needed.

Judaism has streams. These are not similar to christian denominations. These streams are within similar communities and interact quite frequently. The difference between this and denominations is that Judaism is a culture (as I’ll get to later), which means that those who are “secular” (like me!) are not ‘just Jews not doing all the things they should be doing’ or ‘ignoring some of the laws’ - they have their own Judaism that is expressed through different practises and traditions, but they remain a community. Of course there are still people who consider themselves orthodox but only go to shul/synagogue on the High Holidays. But there are also communities of people who have interpreted Judaism’s multifaceted nature into their own unique brand of Judaism.

some examples are:

Ultra Orthodox - Usually what you see when you picture a Jewish person. Streimel (this hat so expensive), suit, study torah all day, pray very often, keeps Shabbat, etc. They are NOT NECESSARILY EUROPEAN.

Reform - usually centered around the idea of ‘tikkun olam’ - which means repairing the earth - this stream is known in the Australian Jewish community for singing prayers to unusual tunes - my personal favourite is Adon Olam to ‘I Want It That Way’ by the Backstreet Boys (0:52 is when it gets Jewish lmaoooo). They differ from ultra-orthodox and orthodox because they “emphasize the evolving nature of the faith, the superiority of its ethical aspects to the ceremonial ones, and a belief in a continuous revelation not centered on the theophany at Mount Sinai.”

Secular Humanist - that’s me! I am atheist, but I am a part of the Jewish people and identify with the history and people within it. I feel a connection to the Jewish people’s struggles, revolutions, and liberations throughout time. I believe that Jewish people can create change and that we can use Jewish values and traditions to better the world without a focus on god.

Judaism is a culture. This is the big one, and I feel that most people have heard this if nothing else. But let me specify; Judaism is also a religion. Judaism is associated with centurys worth of traditions and values and texts. And by texts I don’t just mean the Torah and the Mishnah - I mean every single Jewish philosopher or scholar or professor that has ever lived. Did you know that the famous 14th Century Spanish philosopher, Maimonedes, is known in the Jewish community as the Rambam (aka the Rabbi Moses ben Maimon = Rabbi Moses, son of Maimon) and wrote many a commentary on the holy books? Throughout the centuries, Judaism has gained an incredible collection of information and written arguments that have contributed to Jewish lives today. Synagogues, like churches, are great places of worship whilst also housing communities. Jewish people have stuck together throughout the years mostly out of necessity and safety and now have thriving communities of knowledge and culture!

Judaism is NOT an ethnicity. This post started as a response to a post I saw calling someone “half Jewish, half Irish”. I tagged that you “can’t be half Jewish” and two people asked my why. This is why;

Before I continue this point, I received an anonymous message from another Jewish person saying the following;

“we ARE an ethnicity (where do you think the curly jewish hair and aquiline nose on many jews - not all, but many - comes from?) but the reason we are considered 100% jewish if we are jewish at all is because we are a tribe and therefore if you are jewish you are considered 100% wholly part of the tribe to keep from any gatekeeping. but it is absolutely an ethnicity with an inherent religion, similar to native americans.”

this is a fair point, so maybe we are an ethnicity, but you can’t be “half Jewish” for the following reasons:

Part 1: Nuremberg Laws in Nazi Germany

Jews were outlawed from a lot of things in Nazi Germany, obviously. This started in 1933, but by 1935 the Nuremberg Laws passed. These (a) defined what it meant to be Jewish and (b) further separated them from society.

The image below defined a fully German person (a Deutschblütiger), a half Jew (a Mischling - “In German, the word has the general denotation of hybrid, mongrel, or half-breed.”), and a Jew (Jude). Essentially, if you were anywhere from 1/8 -1/4 Jewish, you could have Reich citizenship but still were at risk, whereas Jews (more than 1/4 Jewish) were obviously much more at risk.

this is still today used to distinguish a Jewish person, but not in an antisemitic context. It is in fact used by Israel, so that all those who were targeted by Nazis are welcome to seek refuge and live in the intended state for the Jewish people, Israel. Anyone with 1/8 or more Jewish descent can very easily get Israeli citizenship.

Part 2: Jewish Religious Law

according to Jewish Religious law, anyone with a Jewish mother is inherently Jewish. (also, anyone who converts - which is a 7 year process, by the way)

The reason these are relevant is because my point is that you can be ANY nationality, any ethnicity, and still be 100% Jewish.

There are Jews of all nationalities - German Jews, Polish Jews, Ethiopian Jews, Latinx Jews, Israeli Jews, American Jews, Indian Jews, and many more! There are Jews of all ethnicities too - Asian Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, Roman Jews, Black Jews, and many many more.

You cannot be “half Jewish, half Irish” because Irish people can and are Jews. Judaism isn’t a racial or ethnic or cultural group - it is a community that transcends all these things.

A Goy is not a derogatory term, and you shouldn’t be offended by it. Honestly, I don’t think it’s fair for any non Jew to be offended by a word that Jews call them (see the next point), but regardless, goy is a normal word that I use a lot to refer to non jews. See this post for more information. I know some Jews still don’t use it because they know it makes people uncomfortable, but it shouldn’t. (plural is goyim)

We do carry the weight of one fucked up history. There’s a classic joke told at most Jewish Holidays - “They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat!”. It tends to accurately represent Jewish history. I honestly don’t know how much goyim know about Jewish history. I’m sure you have at least heard abut the Holocaust, because it was so systemic and systematic, but there are many other instances. If not, please read some online articles. Antisemitism is sometimes referred to as “the oldest hatred”, so here are some examples: (I apologise, this is mostly Europe centric)

destruction of both the first and second temple in biblical times by the Romans and the Babylonians

the spanish inquisition and the explusion from spain in the 1400s

Pogroms (especially in Europe, check out Fiddler on the Roof for an excellent representation)

an insane history of being shut off in our own communities - the first ghetto was created in Venice in 1516 and was seen as a positive thing because Jews had never had their own land before (that’s fucked up????)

blame for Jesus’ death evolved into the idea of a Blood Libel, which was the rumour that Jews liked to kidnap christian children and drink their blood or used it for ritual purposes (?????????) resulting in many christians lynching Jewish people

blame for the Black Death in Europe (because Jewish tradition cites that they have to be clean for Shabbat, so every Friday they bathed and therefore didn’t catch the plague??)

on a non-European note, Ethiopian Jews were in such danger as recently as 1980 that Israel carried out a rescue mission which took 10,000 Ethiopian Jews through the desert of North Africa so they could live safely in Israel

We have never been quiet. Jewish revolution and rebellion has always existed. Examples are:

The literal story of Hanukkah

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (led by young people from the youth movement I attend to! this! day!)

on this note: Jewish people have many youth movements made specifically for political purposes, and have historically always been very well educated and passionate. I won’t talk about Zionism here, though I want to. That’s for another post.

(note: Jewish bolshevism is antisemitic and just untrue)

refusing to convert to Christianity or any other religion the many, many times that we have been captured/the leadership in charge of us has changed (this is a big rebellious act in the spanish exile/the exile to babylon/etc)

the current head of the Jewish Agency (Natan Sharansky) was a rebel in the Soviet Union, fighting for freedom and democracy.

We were LITERALLY so sick of antisemitism that 18-25 year olds went to Palestine and built a nation based on the idea of a socially just society (and kibbutzim)????? how it went after is another story but you understand what I mean when I say that we did not sit silently in Europe.

So, there you have it - some Jewish facts and figures. I hope I taught you something new. If anyone has anything they’d like me to add, feel free to send me an ask!

#judaism tag #jewish things #jewish #jumblr

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