Bertrand Russell on Zionism [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
He held a variety of views and I hope this particular dude doesn't intend to paint Russell as source of truth.
> In 1929, he wrote that people deemed "mentally defective" and "feebleminded" should be sexually sterilised because they "are apt to have enormous numbers of illegitimate children, all, as a rule, wholly useless to the community.
No comment. Now we just need The Authority or a committee to decide who is feebleminded (maybe based on religious belief, why the hell not) and we're good to go. For the good of humanity! 5 years later: no one from the authority or committee member relatives was judged feebleminded, so coincidental.
> On 20 November 1948, in a public speech at Westminster School, addressing a gathering arranged by the New Commonwealth, Russell shocked some observers by suggesting that a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union was justified. Russell argued that war between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed inevitable, so it would be a humanitarian gesture to get it over with quickly and have the United States in the dominant position.
As Russian I'm surprisingly on the fence about this. In hindsight maybe cold war was actually better but considering how it's developing lately...
> In the Middle East, Russell suggested that the West avoid opposing Arab nationalism, and proposed the creation of a United Nations peacekeeping force to guard Israel's frontiers to ensure that Israel was prevented from committing aggression and protected from it.
It's interesting how he wants to oppose one people's nationalism and but not another people's nationalism.
> He also suggested Western recognition of the People's Republic of China, and that it be admitted to the UN with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
Also tongue in cheek:
> Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression
That guy should read about Muslim conquests circa 600.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell
"No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate?" -- Russell
It's telling that a bunch of my comments were flagged. (The guy who pointedly suggested that I must be a Jew to have this view however wasn't.)
I think the difference matters. "I'm not living with those people in charge" and then fighting for the better part of a century to throw them out, gets less sympathy from me than "they threw me out".
On the other hand, I have some sympathy for Cuban exiles, so maybe I'm inconsistent...
Both, the fleeing was a direct result and the very intention of the massacres to achieve the ethnic-cleansing[1] of Palestinians. Those who fled were not only refused back onto their land and homes, but were also shot at and killed when they tried going back into their homes.
[1] The Masterplan for the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3cnRcfp_us
https://www.connexions.org/CxLibrary/Docs/CX5576-RussellMidE...
http://www.russfound.org/RToP/RToP%20BRPF%20Message.htm
BTW, this trend of sharing videos of some rando fluencer reading someone elses article aloud? Almost always they put their own (or worse...) bias into it, hurting the understanding of the naive viewer. You know how to read, just read it yourself first.
because my point is this guy had different views and the fact that this guy said it does not mean this is automatically "truth".
People will cut and paste and just take/use the pieces of facts/opinions/history that support their political opinions, and ignore the rest and the whole context.
It happens with dead people as well as with people currently alive. Some get cancelled, some don't.
It's largely arbitrary.
EDIT: i'm not taking sides in this specific topic, just a comment on the pattern of behavior that i see across various discussions.
That was my reaction to the video and why I think posting the Wikipedia page would have been much better.
I'm not gonna pretend I'm on some moral high ground or whatever. As a Jew I'm just happy I wasn't actually born in Israel and didn't inherit all the problems that come with it.
Before Oct 7 I was seeing more and more of the arab world normalize relations with Israel. Now it's all gone down the drain again.
I also don't think Israel is demographically sustainable, all the ultra religious people have like 8-12 kids, the seculars maybe 3. Sooner or later that's just gonna explode in people's face.
My position on the whole conflict is along the lines of "everybody sucks". The descendants of the arabs that chose to cooperate with Israel became Israeli citizens, the descendants of the arabs that chose to not, are in a world of sh*t.
It's kind of hard to be reasonable when you have every reason to be resentful. Even when there are reasonable people, if they try to change something they'd mostly be pissing in the wind because the established leadership is funded by Iran and has no interest in improving the situation for anyone but themselves.
Israel also is very good at making their neighbors hate them by pulling all sort of dick moves and giving far right wingers a green light to do whatever the hell they want.
It's all bs and I want none of it. I will on purpose not marry a Jewish woman just to make sure my kids aren't Jewish and they're less likely to be tempted to swallow the nationalistic bs that makes gullible young people who want to be special and different sign into getting themselves blown up or shot for a cause that's just not worth it.
Wow I got more emotional than I thought I would.
That's like calling the holocaust a "conflict" and that in that "conflict" everybody sucked. That's the kind of bothsidesism you would have gotten away with before Israel's genocide[1] of Palestinians which led people to studying the history[2] of Palestine and the history of Zionism and realizing that this "conflict" is not some random accident but the outcome of a carefully crafted colonial project by secular european-jews with nationalist ambitions - long before the holocaust. For these secular jews, who also considered colonizing Uganda, Madagascar, Cyprus, Argentina (Baron Hirsch's colonization project), Birobidzhan - USSR (Jewish Autonomous Oblast), Alaska (Slattery Report proposal), British Guiana, judaism was simply a useful tool to legitimize their colonial project: "Most Zionists don't believe that God exists, but they do believe that he promised them Palestine".
[1] https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/prof-amos-go...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20231029055310/ojp.gov/ncjrs/vir...
With the current administration that's not gonna happen anytime soon and I doubt you'll see it change in the next 20-40 years. Do you think you'll decide to be more constructive in that time?
That's nothing but peak genocide denial rhetoric. There are Neo-Nazis who use the exact same rhetoric as you to deny the holocaust. How would it be "career suicide" for Amos Goldberg to argue against it being a Genocide as long as he provides credible arguments? It only would be "career suicide" because anyone with half a brain can see that it's a Genocide. Anyone who is not a Zionist and has just seen a fraction of the mountains of evidence can conclude without a doubt that it's a Genocide. One has to be completely delusional to deny it.
Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-inter...
Press releases UN body, UN Special Committee finds Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/11/un-special-c...
You more reasonable and patient than I am. Well said.
>The bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender, but will stiffen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment...
In practice Israel's attacks on Egypt led on to their one Arab peace treaty nine years later. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93Israel_peace_tre...)
On the Palestine problem; Britain in Palestine 1917-1948 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOJqLTc6RkU
The British Empire Was Much Worse Than You Realize - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/04/the-british-em... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42558142
There is a reason that the term Perfidious Albion exists - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidious_Albion
Finally; Bill Clinton did negotiate a two state solution to the Palestine/Israel problem but Yasser Arafat/PLO rejected it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTC5bq-lfoI
Absolutely fascinating historical lesson. tl;dw - the Brits and US along with other colonial powers needed oil, and this region was blessed/cursed with gobs of it, and destabilizing or corrupting governments allowed the colonizers to get more direct access to the goods.
*Specifically the imperial agents in the Middle East strongly distinct from the new Labour government back home.
And I am not talking about people or religions. Jews, Arabs, Christians, etc all lived there for a long time. Under Ottoman empire with all its faults they had fair autonomy and religious pluralism. After the empire fell someone thought let's just put them in different places and everything will be fine. That guaranteed chaos and displacement.
Palestinians have horrible PR (carrying dead bodies on the crowd's hands in tiny streets, is not something westeners relate to).
In Europe a large part of a generation believes that the holocaust is the reason the state of Israel needs to be. Why is Israel not founded on a repurposed piece of Germany then?
I suspect that is because older generations remember the PLO as a major terrorist organization supported by numerous other terrorist organizations. Although most of the world still sees Hamas as a terrorist organization younger generations haven’t witnessed any notable Palestinian sponsored terrorist act until the Oct 7 attack. Even then as horrible as that attack was Israel still found a way to completely over shadow it with something much worse.
At the same time the world is also watching wholesale increases of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank will reading about illegal settlements.
That is astoundingly bad PR. It’s so bad now that any action Israel takes against Iran is seen as unilateral, excessively aggressive, and unprovoked which was absolutely not the case just 20 years ago.
Then to somehow still make that much worse the typical response to disagreements from political hardliners is to call people antisemetic. Older generations used to cautiously appreciate the sensitivity of such and tread carefully. Younger generations seem tired of hearing it from Israeli politicians.
I think it's much simpler than that. Younger Generations are just sick and tired of walking on eggshells when it comes to calling out jewish-exceptionalism[0] and that trend was accelerated after having witnessed the self declared "jewish-state" commit livestreamed terrorism and genocide for more than a year with absolute impunity. Israel was[1][2][3] and Israel still is the biggest terrorist organization in the region by far and has been since its inception[3].
[0] The Appeal to Jewishness Fallacy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0MAJ6nSRYA
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_extremist_terrorism
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20231029055310/ojp.gov/ncjrs/vir...
In the long run not. That's I believe why we see so much aggression: time's running out for 'm.
> I suspect that is because ...
I think it is because the older generations believed corporate media. Younger gens get their news from elsewhere. If you picture the "conflict" in numbers you will see the Palestinians suffered much greater losses, while Israel plays the victim card on every occasion. Kids simply dont buy it.