"Finally, do not ever imagine that your world cannot collapse, as ours did."
This.
People like to imagine that there is some kind of corrective force to history, some invisible hand that will, inevitably, push things into balance and restore normality.
There is not. Many times in history -- for many peoples, nations, and civilisations -- the world has ended. That is a completely normal thing to happen, albeit extremely unpleasant and very often lethal for those involved.
Things are not different this time. If civilisation survives, it will be because people have laboured with great difficulty and courage to make it survive. It has always been thus, and always will be.
On the flipside, worrying that the world could collapse at any moment is not a way to live. If things are going to collapse, there is likely nothing you can do as an individual to stop it from happening, so why worry about it. As far as I can think of, all you can reasonably do as an individual to prevent this outcome is try to vote for decent political candidates and do your best to be good to the people around you. These are things that decent, responsible people do to begin with. I don't see how I could use this lesson in any other possible way.
Things aren't "going to collapse", anymore than things are "not going to collapse". From any given point point in time, there are multiple possible futures. Some of them may be tremendously dire, others tremendously positive. And there is a lot that you can do to influence which future you end up in.
Prepping to ride it out is a fool's game. I mean, sure, stock up your cupboards, get a couple weeks worth of bottled water, etc. Learn how to sew. That sort of stuff is never a bad idea. But if things go really pear-shaped, the main thing that'll get you through it other people. I've seen too many "preppers" stockpiling ammunition while burning their social capital. Idiots. They should be learning to rely on others, and be relied on by others. That's how you survive the bad futures. (That and a lot of luck).
Voting is somewhere something like the second least useful thing you can do. I mean, sure, do that too -- but it's kind of like steering a ship through choppy waters when you're only allowed to put your hand on the rudder once every couple of years. Certainly you should still do so, given the chance, but don't kid yourself about the efficacy or utility of voting.
What else can you do?
- Run for office.
- Speak at public meetings.
- Lobby your representatives.
- Provide financial, material, and moral support for others who do so.
- Educate your friends, family, and neighbours.
- Go out of your comfort zone and filter bubble. Learn from what's going on there. Help them understand you.
- Get a job that builds the kind of infrastructure that makes the good scenarios more likely.
- If your job is actively pushing the world towards the bad scenarios, then quit it. Or sabotage it.
Most people don't have the time, energy or will to do most of these things. Many others who do would simply be very unhappy doing those things. My whole point was that people should just try to enjoy their lives, not have it revolve around some very low probability event.
Just as an counter example to your reasoning... there are actually whole movements of people focusing on dangerous low probability events to increase the odds of good worlds coming out of them. Given very real prospects like dangerous races towards AGI or pandemics in the future, it seems like a very bad strategy to advocate for the status quo of not caring. If you are not willing to do anything yourself look at the possibility of donating. That does not disturb your world too much but actually makes a difference. I would love to see comments like yours point out this possibility more prominently as we would all be better for it, you too :)
For more concrete insights regarding the role that everyone can play have a look at: www.80000hours.org or more generally at www.effectivealtruism.org
You can't stop it from happening. But if you believe that it is likely, then you can at least prepare, so that you might have a better chance of riding it out.
This is a lesson that people learn fast when it happens to them, and retain for the rest of their life - my grandma was a small kid in German-occupied Ukraine during WW2, and to this day, when something on TV spooks her, she goes and tops up her larder. Most people from her generation do the same... but not the younger folk. Why worry about something that has never happened to you? Starvation is something very abstract for most these days.
I mean, you shouldn't be all too complacent, but you should also not stop living and watch political youtube videos all day instead of going to work. And, you should consider more and more active forms of political engagement if you can. And it need not be 50-50, but the ratio should depend on how imminent catastrophe is.
I guess everyone sort of does this already but it helps to reiterate it I guess.
> If things are going to collapse, there is likely nothing you can do as an individual to stop it from happening, so why worry about it.
Because there are some incredibly easy, low cost things you can do to increase your odds of surviving a collapse. Most people aren’t prepared to survive 2 weeks without a grocery store and electricity.
> Because there are some incredibly easy, low cost things you can do to increase your odds of surviving a collapse.
Seriously? Even if you had extra food and water to last years, you're totally screwed as soon as people around you who have run out find out that you're hoarding all that. No matter what you had to prepare, if enough people get together they can always come and take it from you.
If you don't have several days worth of water then you are well and truly fucked no matter what you do. If you do have several days worth of water then your odds of surviving just went way up, even if they still aren't great. The same logic applies to having food, first aid supplies, guns, etc.
One very easy and still possibly higly impactful way of making a difference without having to concern yourself too much with dangerous low probabilities events is to donate to charities which focus and work on these matters effectively.
It would be awesome if you would consider this possibility when this topic comes up again in the future or even better investigate this possibility for yourself. It is not that hard and you can really have an impact :)
For more information have a look at 80000hours.org or effectivealtruism.org
> all you can reasonably do as an individual to prevent this outcome is try to vote for decent political candidates and do your best to be good to the people around you.
There’re many non-free countries. There, all you can do as an individual is to move out.
> People like to imagine that there is some kind of corrective force to history, some invisible hand that will, inevitably, push things into balance and restore normality.
See "politics of inevitability" and "politics of eternity", as defined by Timothy Snyder.
> If disaster comes, you will find that all the myths you once cherished are of no use to you.
This spring I visited Notre Dame in Paris. I saw four soldiers patroling the street, spread out a few meters apart from each other, one finger close to the triger, barrel pointing to the ground. Reminded me of a patrol in a vietnam movie.
A similar scene I saw last year in Italy altough the soldiers were much more relaxed.
In Bern, Switzerland the Christmas market was protected by huge concrete blocks wrapped in gift paper.
This may be all security theatre. Or the times are really changing.
I found "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century" a good read (the lessons, not the comment). I depends on us simple citizens to carry and defend civilization and avoid disaster.
When the IRA was still conducting bombing attacks in London in the 1990's, there were armed soldiers near every government building and landmark. This doesn't seem materially different from then, just omnipresent due to having to defend against the last successful attacks in Europe. Having bollards or the equivalent just seems like good preventative measures after the last few attacks on pedestrians with vehicles - it would be negligent not to do that.
> This doesn't seem materially different from then
It may not be materially different for some limited set of attributes, but it may be materially different for other attributes, like "how did this situation come to be?", or "did certain political decisions contribute to this situation?".
I was visiting Paris and versaille in summer 2014 and also saw soldiers patroling several places like palace of Versailles, la Fontaine St Michel, Notre dame and probably much more. They were generally very disciplined as they did not allow any Smalltalk.
In Germany things have gotten worse over time. Security staff is checking the trains now daily for suspicious behaviour, normally you don't see those guys at all.
In Berlin main station you now can occasionally see policemen patroling with a MP5, which was a very very rare find (if it's not a hotspot kind of thing like demonstrations)
These are just my personal observations and maybe I have just been ignorant before, but I see things really changing
Back in the 1970s, during the heyday of far-left terrorist groups, it was quite common for foreign tourists to be shocked at soldiers patrolling with guns in Germany or Italy. There may have been a lull in such things in the following decades, but what you saw is not particularly unprecedented historically and I wouldn’t be too concerned.
Even if high security was around for those later events, it was the Bader-Meinhof Group that really set Germany off to begin with. And as abhorrent as the Bader-Meinhof Group was to the majority of people on the left, its members still identified themselves as left (they definitely didn’t see themselves as on the right), and so “far-left” is a fair tag. The same is true for some of the Italian movements from the same era.
> what you saw is not particularly unprecedented historically and I wouldn’t be too concerned.
Are you saying we shouldn't be concerned about anything provided it has historical precedent, or do you have other reasons for not being concerned about an increase in soldiers patrolling with guns?
To add some context, the German constitution states that the German military may not operate within German borders (with some exceptions, e.g. disaster relief during natural disasters). Seeing armed soldiers would be very out of the ordinary.
Yes, I am sure inasmuch as I have heard this vividly recalled by relatives who frequently visited Germany in the 1970s. But if my anecdotal account isn’t enough, do a Google search or Google Books search for e.g. "frankfurt airport machine gun" and you will see this made an impression on other foreign visitors to Germany in years and decades past.
> This spring I visited Notre Dame in Paris. I saw four soldiers patroling the street, spread out a few meters apart from each other, one finger close to the triger, barrel pointing to the ground...This may be all security theatre. Or the times are really changing.
I don't think times are changing...thirty years ago I crossed the border in north Ireland, which was heavily militarized and patrolled, and drove past police stations there, which were heavily militarized. Then went to Paris and ran across sandbag covered watchpoints around the US embassy, possibly because of the recent CSPPA attacks. Then we went to the FRG a few weeks after Reagan made a Berlin speech (protested by tens of thousands of people in west Berlin), and the US/FRG/NATO presence even in cities like Nuernberg were ever-present, especially amid tensions between the Warsaw Pact and NATO.
Things are changing. They're changing (at least in part) to what you've seen 30 years ago, but that's not a good sign, when you look at what was the norm during those 30 years.
> This may be all security theatre. Or the times are really changing.
The whole point of terrorism is to convince you that "times are really changing" and that nothing is safe anymore. It only works if you let it. Try not to.
I spent 6 months in Paris when it was being bombed by Algerian Terrorists. All the garbage can lids were welded shut and soldiers patrolled the subways with bomb sniffing dogs. There were a couple bombings while I was there. My intention is not to romanticize it because people died and were hurt but as a young person feeling invincible, man was it exciting living dangerously (well maybe not that dangerous but still).
WRT the difference between soldiers in Paris and Italy: "Finger close to the trigger" usually means a proper drill in trigger discipline - I'd take that anytime over "relaxed" soldiers.
From all the dozens of soldiers I've seen in France, since I live here, I've rarely seen finger close to the trigger. Even more, for most of the 3-man patrols, only one carried a loaded weapon.
I don't know why, I have never been to Italy neither France, but from the pop culture diet I've been fed, I'd rather be subjected to French soldiers AND police than their Italian counterpart. Commisar Montalbano, I'm sorry.
Last year in Belgium, soldiers who were patrolling the station were able to "neutralize" a terrorist who was carrying explosives, and therefore were able to prevent another attack in Brussels.
If you think it's all theater here in Europe, you have your head stuck up your ass.
The "opération Sentinelle" (the soldiers patrolling in France) is mostly for the show... It's currently the most expensive military operation run in France, and is one of the main factors in the rise of desertion in the army. The only time these soldiers had to fire was to protect themselves, since they are magnets for wannabe terrorists or crazy people...
AFAIK, there's not a lot of actual desertion, it's more that a lot of soldiers who enlisted after the 2015 attacks have not renewed their contract once their first term was finished, since standing for two in front of a Synagogue was not what they had in mind when they enlisted to "protect their country"
that book looks pretty interesting. here are a couple quotes from a review in the washington post[1].
>The author dwells on “the politics of the everyday” to show the small ways people succumb to or fend off the encroachment of tyranny. Much of the initial power granted to nondemocratic leaders is given freely, via “heedless acts of conformity,” long before popular docility is requested or required. Snyder recalls how, when Hitler threatened to invade Austria, regular Austrian citizens looked on, or joined in, as local Nazis detained Austrian Jews or stole their property. “Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy,” the author writes.
Seen the backlash I’m getting with the comment, would like to clarify that what sparked it was this sentence:
> "No nation has a monopoly on virtue – something that many people, including many of my fellow Israeli citizens, still struggle to understand."
Where the author seems to hint to consider all that follows himself.
TIDE
Very powerful message. I would really want to know what Aronson thinks about the situation in Israel with the Palestinians. Of course not to compare the fate of the Jewish people during the savage years of the Holocaust with this of the Palestinians. But Israel seems to have forgotten the humanity of the Palestinians, striping them from their human rights, or passing laws that could affect the rights of Israeli minorities [0].
Obviously condemning the actions of terrorists, atrocities committed against the people of Israel by Palestinians, and that deserving it’s own discussion, just pointing out that because the number of dead Palestinian people is relevant enough and the author who fought for and lives in Israel, was speaking of when countries do dehumanize people and was hoping that in this case there would be voices in Israel that could disagree with the current situation.
No offense intended (really!), but you're talking about a very complicated situation, which it appears that you don't really understand fully.
> But Israel seems to have forgotten the humanity of the Palestinians, striping them from their human rights, or passing laws that could affect the rights of Israeli minorities [0].
The situation of the Palestinians is terrible, IMO. But there is simply no simple solution that anyone has for how to solve it. Sure, some Israelis are terrible people, and are racist, etc, as are many Americans, Europeans, etc. But as a whole, the reason the Palestinian situation continues is partly because no one really has a good answer to how to solve it! It's probably also partly because Israel has more power right now, and the feeling is that the longer the situation continues, the better for Israel, so why not let it drag out? But if there were a decent solution, many people in Israel would push very hard to implement it. The truth is, most Israelis just don't know what to do anymore (and solutions have been tried before, negotiations have happened).
And btw, the new law that you talk about isn't really going to affect Palestinians so much as minority citizens of Israel (and it probably won't actually affect them either, it's more a symbolic thing I think).
> just pointing out that because the number of dead Palestinian people is relevant enough and the author who fought for and lives in Israel, was speaking of when countries do dehumanize people and was hoping that in this case there would be voices in Israel that could disagree with the current situation.
If you think there aren't voices in Israel who disagree with the current situation, you're very wrong. Unfortunately, as I said, many people have "given up", or at least have no idea what to do anymore.
> But there is simply no simple solution that anyone has for how to solve it.
I think the problem can be less complicated if there is a sincere open conversation around it.
Let's put some context. In 1948 lots of people were dispossessed of their land and properties, this is still a very controversial thing that is very difficult to talk about. Just go to Jaffa in Israel and ask any Israeli person living in an Arab looking house how their family got to own it and you will realise how of a taboo subject this is. Of course there is no reparations or right of return in the pipeline of the talks.
So the first step to solve a problem is realising of it's existence. Instead, Israel seems to continue putting pressure onto the Palestinians with the appropriation of more land and the creation of more settlements [0].
> I think the problem can be less complicated if there is a sincere open conversation around it.
While I wish that was true, I don't think it is.
For one thing, I don't think the subject is nearly as taboo as you imagine - Israelis love to talk politics, after all!
However I think that most Israelis would disagree with your characterization of what happened in '48. The (I think typical) view is that the UN decided to split Israel into two states, one for Jews and one for Palestinians. However, the Arab countries urged the Palestinians to leave Israel, as they were preparing to attack Israel. They attacked, Israel won, and ended up with all the original land, with most of the Palestinians having fled to neighboring countries in the meantime. Israel didn't really do anything wrong - it simply won a war, which would likely have ended up with Israel destroyed if it had lost. Reparations wouldn't really make sense in that view. (That summary is basically my view of the history as I understand it, so assume the summary would probably be told differently by someone with a different opinion.)
The other issue with your statement is that even with open conversation around this issue wouldn't really change anything. At the end of the day, the right of return is something that simply can't be granted, not if Israel wants to remain a Jewish country, which is the entire reason it was founded (and in my view, in light of the historical precedents, a totally valid and moral reason). And Israelis simply don't trust the Palestinians with having a state right next to it - which probably doesn't matter much, since Palestinians don't appear to accept such a solution either.
So simply saying "well let's just talk about it and it will work out" is ignoring the fact that, no, there probably isn't a solution right now that both sides will find acceptable, unfortunately, and the structural forces of the situation are probably such that nothing will change anyway (e.g. as I said, Israel being in power and thinking it's probably better to delay action on this as much as possible, Hamas being in power in Gaza and preferring to keep the situation mostly as is).
> The (I think typical) view is that the UN decided to split Israel into two states, one for Jews and one for Palestinians. However, the Arab countries urged the Palestinians to leave Israel, as they were preparing to attack Israel.
Haha. No. The UN decided to split Palestine in two states, giving half of it to the Jews. Of course the Jews had everything to gain from this partition and the Palestinians everything to lose, since they were the sole owners of the place. Of course they rejected the partition and there was a war, but the Palestinians have been actively expelled by the Israeli army. In fact, 200 thousand of them had already fled their villages before Israel's declaration of independence, to escape from violence- episodes like that of Deir Yassin, where a Jewish commando massacred the inhabitants of a Palestinian village- women and children included-, throwing grenades inside the houses. It was a proper ethnic cleansing operation.
> Israel didn't really do anything wrong
No, as far as ethnic cleansing goes, Israel didn't do anything wrong.
> At the end of the day, the right of return is something that simply can't be granted, not if Israel wants to remain a Jewish country
I agree with this. However, I also think that the right of return is mostly aspirational, and given good will on Israel's part, the issue could be just ignored long enough until it's not an issue anymore. By good will on Israel's part, I mean: establish a border once and for all (on the green line), abandon all settlements beyond that border, either renounce completely to Jerusalem east or share the undivided capital with a Palestinian state, completely remove the blockade of Gaza (and create a wide corridor between Gaza and the West Bank). Stop opposing the creation of a Palestinian state, and contribute to it with aids and reparations (that would make up for the right of return).
You'll say: this is a lot to ask from Israel. And it is, because Israel is currently enjoying great profits from its illegal and immoral actions, and there will be no end to the conflict until it decides to abide to international law and moral standards.
> Haha. No. The UN decided to split Palestine in two states, giving half of it to the Jews.
You're right of course, I misspoke, it wasn't yet Israel.
> Of course the Jews had everything to gain from this partition and the Palestinians everything to lose, since they were the sole owners of the place.
I'm not sure that's true - the territory was under British control, then was given over to the UN.
> Of course they rejected the partition and there was a war, but the Palestinians have been actively expelled by the Israeli army. In fact, 200 thousand of them had already fled their villages before Israel's declaration of independence, to escape from violence- episodes like that of Deir Yassin, where a Jewish commando massacred the inhabitants of a Palestinian village- women and children included-, throwing grenades inside the houses. It was a proper ethnic cleansing operation.
Look, this is, to say the least, disputed. I'm not going to say I know any more than you about this - and I think even the most pro-Israeli version of events would still leave a lot of Israelis looking pretty bad (Deir Yassin being one obvious and horrific example). Many of the more pro-Israeli historians will point out the calls from Arab leaders for Palestinians to flee, the pretty clear reasoning that if the Arab countries had won the war, most likely Israel would have been largely exterminated, given even more reason for the Palestinians to flee, etc. I don't either of us can know for sure just how much of the Palestinians fleeing was because of Israeli actions, real fear, imagined fear, or what.
Still, even after all this - is what happened so unprecedented by historical standards that leaves most people singling out Israel as a particularly immoral country? I mean, barely 3 years earlier WW2 had ended, in which millions were killed, in bombing of civilian populations, in the use of nuclear weapons, and in many other ways. Do you consider Germany to be an immoral country today because of what they did during WW2? Or England, the States, Japan? What bothers me is the (seeming) double standard, where people consider Israel to be so much worse, for doing so much less than almost any other country. The main reason we're still talking about this is because there are a lot of vested interests in keeping the Palestinian population in their terrible situation (including Israeli interests, but not only!). The birth of Israeli was far less terrible than many contemporary episodes (e.g. the situation in Syria, in which the death toll was sometimes as high as 10k per day iirc; not to say that this is the bar I set for Israel).
> By good will on Israel's part, I mean: establish a border once and for all (on the green line), abandon all settlements beyond that border, either renounce completely to Jerusalem east or share the undivided capital with a Palestinian state, completely remove the blockade of Gaza (and create a wide corridor between Gaza and the West Bank) [...] You'll say: this is a lot to ask from Israel. And it is, because Israel is currently enjoying great profits from its illegal and immoral actions [...]
First a minor point - the blockage isn't Israel's alone. It's also Egypt's.
Secondly - I personally agree with a lot of your points and wish Israel behaved differently. E.g. I think the settlements are terrible. I understand why many people support them from a real-politick perspective (and of course some support them from a religious/"greater Israel" perspective too). Many Israelis don't support the settlements, but the right has been in power here for a long time.
Still, you're ignoring the main issue for people like me - most of what you ask puts Israel at great risk. Splitting our capital, helping create a Palestinian state that's right on our border - it's pretty hard to do with a population of people who appear to be pretty hell-bent on killing us. Of course not all Palestinians would really want the destruction of Israel, and of course a big part of the reason they continue to attack Israel is because of their terrible situation, largely caused by Israel itself. That's the unfortunate reality we have to contend with - would you agree to put a bunch of people who are currently constantly trying to kill you, right on your border, and give them total freedom?
Again, I'm not saying (nor have I ever said) that the situation is good - I think it's terrible. I just said that there are no simple good solutions here - and it's not just a matter of "Israel needs to sacrifice" - not when the sacrifice is opening up Israel to people who might kill 10s and even 100s of thousands of people.
Btw, just to give one example - Hamas is constantly smuggling in things through the border, and using funds given to aid Palestinians, in order to do things like build tunnels into Israel, to allow them to perform terror attacks on Israelis (usually - go in and kill a bunch of civilians). Under this circumstance - which is the reality right now - do you really not see why Israelis are reluctant to open up the borders more? It's pretty obvious that doing so will directly result in more Israelis being killed. Do I think steps like this must happen to bring about peace? Yes. But that doesn't make it easier to take these steps.
> the territory was under British control, then was given over to the UN.
It doesn't really matter who had control of it. Ireland wasn't any less of the Irish people when it was controlled by England, or Poland less Polish when it was controlled by the Nazis. The Palestinians lived there, therefore it was their land.
> the pretty clear reasoning that if the Arab countries had won the war, most likely Israel would have been largely exterminated
You don't "exterminate" a country, you exterminate people. And I don't think the idea of the war was to exterminate the Jews, but to get back the country to their legitimate owners.
> Do you consider Germany to be an immoral country today because of what they did during WW2?
No. I consider Israel immoral today because of what it is doing today. Germany did unspeakable things, but it suffered all the consequences, and has paid to the last cent, and there is practically no relationship between what the country is today and what it was 70 years ago.
> What bothers me is the (seeming) double standard, where people consider Israel to be so much worse, for doing so much less than almost any other country.
I find it almost sweet that Jews seek their normalcy by trying to catch up on all the horrid stuff that other countries did before we could call them civilised by the modern standards. Jokes apart, what bothers me as a European observer is not only, and maybe not mainly, the substance of what Israel is doing. In your comment you mention Syria- and there are a lot of conflicts, ethnic cleansing and genocides going on in the world. What really bothers me is both the fact that Israel is a western country, and the level of support it gets from other western countries. There's a lot of people that get caught red-handed stealing, big deal; it's a completely different thing if it's a family member that gets caught, and then keeps insisting, beyond any plausibility, that he wasn't in fact stealing, that the purse was disputed. Pure chutzpah. I hope this expresses well my feelings.
> the blockage isn't Israel's alone. It's also Egypt's.
I'm not sure about this, but I believe that Egypt does it to appease Israel- what other reasons would it have for the blockade otherwise?
> Many Israelis don't support the settlements, but the right has been in power here for a long time.
The settlements are the occupation of somebody else's land to settle your own civilian population in it. This is not just any political disagreement. It's utterly unacceptable. You should storm the parliament and the government until every single Israeli has been relocated inside the borders. How many people living in a settlement you know? How easy is to choose to do it because it's probably cheaper than renting of buying in Israel?
> it's pretty hard to do with a population of people who appear to be pretty hell-bent on killing us
We were talking about de-humanising the enemy in order to better kill it. There it is. Palestinians are not hell-bent on killing you, they're rightly enraged for what you're doing to them. Stop doing it now, be cooperative, and their rage will fade. But of course it's much better to proclaim, as Israel does, that you'll be taking and taking until the Palestinians will stop hating you. Which is of course, never.
> But if there were a decent solution, many people in Israel would push very hard to implement it. The truth is, most Israelis just don't know what to do anymore (and solutions have been tried before, negotiations have happened
There are perfectly good solutions. The problem is that they require Israel to give up what has appropriated during these years of violence, and stop appropriating more. And Israel doesn't want to do it, because it knows it can get away with it.
I'm gonna give the answer you don't wanna hear, and that is incredibly unpopular on HN and really any left of center arena.
Israel has not forgotten the humanity of the palestinians(1). It has not striped them of their human rights(2) and it has not passed laws that "could affect minorities."(3)
(1) Israel takes great care to protect all human life in any conflict and tries especially hard not remove the dignity of or prejudge people who are bent on murdering its people. When rockets are being launched from hospitals and "army" headquarters are in the backrooms of pre-nurseries innocent civilians and children will be caught in the crossfire, whether it's mortar misfires or drone counter attacks. Anyone asking about the imbalance in death counts is really just a dog whistle for "why don't more jews die". When you have an entire city refusing to give up the names of the people responsible for the stabbing and cold blooded murder of a 1 year baby in it's crib (along with the rest of the family) or the kidnapping and murder of 3 teenagers, it may appear like the Israelis don't care about those whose house they are turning upside down but in reality they could just raze the city in a matter of minutes like Assad does in Syria, or SA reacts in Yemen. the fact is that Israel does its utmost to avoid loss of life while being stabbed from behind by Hamas and being led-on by the PLO who do not want peace and are doing everything to destabilize the region at every turn.
(2) The laws here are not so clear cut, but at the very least Israel is not responsible to give people living in what is essentially another country free access to its own services, if that means 3 hour long lines because a visa process has been proven ineffective at preventing terrorist attacks then so be it. I'm not really sure if you have anything specific in mind here but until you can show how Israel is stripping people of human rights I don't know what else I can say.
(3) This law is no different from many laws that exist across the European and Asian continents. If you would like to argue that all those laws are racist, I wouldn't agree with you, but by singling out Israel for special scrutiny and failing to mention them on a discussion that in fact is about the rise of racism in European countries, you do appear to be guilty of at least some anti-semitic sentiment.
I'm not arguing that Israel is faultless but the way you've tried to frame the argument appears at least ignorant or else decidedly malicious.
> (1) Israel takes great care to protect all human life in any conflict
For example by having snipers shooting unarmed protesters, women, children, journalists. Sometimes they kill them, but preferably they hit them in the thighs: many of the injured will lose a leg or be in a wheelchair for the rest of their lives.
> "why don't more jews die".
Yes, how many innocent Palestinian lives is an Israeli life worth, exactly?
> Israel is not responsible to give people living in what is essentially another country free access to its own services
You're lying. Queues are to move between one city and the other inside the West Bank. Israel has cut the Palestinian territory into little controllable pieces, building a wall inside that territory and around their illegal settlements.
Finally, while the Palestinian minority is essentially just tolerated in Israel, what makes Israel an apartheid state is their treatment of both populations outside its borders: citizens if they are Jews, people without any right if they are Palestinians. Your house or your entire village might be razed to the ground, fanatic settlers can fence off your land or take your home, or build entire roads or cities where you're not allowed to enter. And if you protest, it's the military court for you- while Jews are subject to a normal tribunal.
I disagree with most of your post, which I don't think accurately portrays the behavior of Israel. I mean, Israel does a lot of bad things, as do many countries, but it is by no means the standard. And a lot of times, things are reported inaccurately, by e.g. talking about unarmed civilians being shot, when it later turns out that most of the people shot were in fact armed (or among armed protesters).
> Finally, while the Palestinian minority is essentially just tolerated in Israel, what makes Israel an apartheid state is their treatment of both populations outside its borders: citizens if they are Jews, people without any right if they are Palestinians
I mean, this is literally what every country does though - US citizens have rights in the US, and everyone else doesn't. English citizens have rights in England, and everyone else doesn't. (And to prevent other people being pedantic - of course other people do have rights and I'm not being literal, but Palestinians also have rights in Israel, so you're not being literal here either).
If your concern is with Israel singling out Jews as the only ones that are automatically citizens of Israel, that's a valid concern, but it does not make Israel an apartheid state, any more than if England decided that anyone who can prove that in the last 5 generations had English ancestors, was automatically an English citizen.
And I'd argue that it's a completely valid and moral thing to do to create a state that automatically makes all Jews citizens - considering the reasoning for the existence of such a state in the first place. Hell, I'd rather live in a world in which the fact that I am Jewish doesn't mean that I have to protect myself from other people - I'd rather an ethnicity-blind world. But unfortunately, I don't live in that world, so I think it's very valid for me to want to be part of a country in which I will not be discriminated against.
Definitely. It has settled 1/10th of its civilian population in an occupied territory, something that is for obvious reasons forbidden by the Geneva Convention. It declared undivided sovereignty on Jerusalem, has annexed the Golan Heights. It has closed almost 2 million people in a total embargo- nothing goes through the land and sea borders or the airspace of Gaza without the approval of Israel, be it people or goods- this means that the entire region is close to the collapse. In the recent border protest (which took place inside Gaza's border) Israel has fired live ammo on protesters day after day, killing 168, wounding 17 thousand! The UN General Assembly passed a condemnation resolution that was voted against only by Israel, the US, Australia, and a few tiny atolls of the Pacific. Every other nation in the world condemned Israel or (cowardly) abstained. Among those who voted to condemn Israel are Switzerland, Ireland, Japan, France, Finland, Norway, Belgium, Spain and Portugal.
> as do many countries
No other country that we consider civilised, no.
> this is literally what every country does though - US citizens have rights in the US, and everyone else doesn't.
Here I'm not sure whether you don't understand or just pretend not to. It's not that non-citizens don't have political rights inside Israel. It's that Israel is applying its law and jurisdiction outside its borders- so on Israeli and Palestinians alike- but only the former have political and civil rights. It's almost a clever technicality: Israel is not an apartheid state, it's just that, in the Occupied Territories, the State is wherever the Israelis are. The others, even if they happen to live only a few hundred metres away, have no rights.
> Hell, I'd rather live in a world in which the fact that I am Jewish doesn't mean that I have to protect myself from other people
The precondition to not have to protect yourself from other people is to be in peace with your neighbours. Tit-for-tats, or imposing your dominance, don't work (unless you want to just exterminate your enemy- which today is not an option). Israel was born with the original sin of seizing half of the country from their original inhabitants. We can't and don't want to go back on this, but Israel has to find a firm moral rule, define its own borders once and for all in agreement with what was established (at least the 1967 borders) and start building a cooperation with Palestinians. The issue with Israel is that it lives in a conflict of interest: on one hand, it wants not to be attacked; on the other hand, it's more than happy of acquiring new territory, which is only possible if the borders are ill-defined and through the cycles of provocation, violence and retaliation.
I'm sure it's incredibly difficult to defend your country against endless attacks and probing for weaknesses, as Israel faces. But I think they aren't doing a good job protecting the lives of non-combatants like the Palestinian protesters who have been killed over and over again, met with live fire, as happened this summer. It's just not acceptable to shoot relatively indiscriminately into crowded areas when you aren't under immediate attack. I've never really heard any explanation about why shooting hundreds of people, including aid workers is necessary. Here's an article I found at Reuters that talks about some of these things. The situation looks like a border defense area, and there has probably been shelling and the shots toward the station. There's some kind of fence, and at this time there are many hundreds to a thousand protesters. They approach the fence. You can't just shoot them. You've got to figure out how to control you military and not just maim protesters.
> I'm sure it's incredibly difficult to defend your country against endless attacks
I'm not Israeli. I just find the left leaning dialog on this topic to myopic and one sided.
> as happened this summer
It was shown following an investigation that most of those killed with live fire were in fact armed terrorists. There was no "relative indiscriminate shooting into a crowded area." There was targeted sniper fire at terrorist hiding among agitated people intent on breaking through a recognized border in an attempt to do real bodily harm to Israeli citizens. The fact that you've phrased things the way you have makes it pretty clear that you do not in anyway believe that Jews have a right to life.
In addition this was in no way a peaceful protest of civilians, it was an angry mob that was flinging molotov cocktails, burning and bomb laden kites and balloons, burning tires and all sorts of other things in an attempt to break through a designated border area that they were repeatedly warned away from. There was a "nurse" who turned out to be throwing grenades who was shot but for a good 48 hours the left-leaning publications ran with a story that the Israelis had killed her in cold blood until the video was released of her throwing grenades. There was video of a child "shot and killed" who was later "shot and killed" again in different clothing before being seen in a later video getting up from the ambulance and walking away.
More innocent civilians have been killed in the ukrainian civil war in the last two years than by Israel in the last 10.
> You've got to figure out how to control you military and not just maim protesters.
The military is under rigid control, so much so that their lives are often in the balance because they're afraid to use the necessary force for fear of unfounded international condemnation.
Can you provide a reference for the fact there were were armed terrorists? I just did a web search on this and found that there were investigations about the live firing by the Israeli military (https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-first-idf-opens-criminal-pr...) and that some of those protesting and injured or killed were in fact terrorists but they were just marching with the crowd and weren't armed (https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-says-5-members-among-16-...). I mean it could be that it was a massive terrorist tricky attack, but all evidence that I see is that it was not terrorists who were approaching the border.
Any you are very wrong that "I do not in anyway believe that Jews have a right to life". I do think they have a right to a safe life and protection, just like I want for Palestinians. But I don't think anyone's right to protection extends to indiscriminate killings just because they feel a little bit threatened; of course this applies to my own country too, the us.
I've been a member of some minority almost all my life. On more than one occasion I've been a refugee, a tourist, an immigrant, a high scoring student, the new person.
My rules for success as a minority.
- If you are the minority, never forget this. Ever.
- Don't congregate in a manner that excludes the majority.
- Sure, be proud of who you are and where you come from, but remember that the majority are also proud
and they have far superior numbers. So, be sure to operate in a manner that does not offend their pride: include them in your celebrations and be there for them in their time of mourning.
- Be useful. Find ways to be useful.
- Set your goals to be the best example of not just the minority that you belong to but the majority as well.
I've found that whenever a minority breaks one of these rules, they do so at their own peril. They needn't break any laws to gain the scorn of the majority.
I agree that the current generation has lost the lesson of World War Two: that war is never a good option. I personally believe that part of the success of the us post ww2, and part of the really nice culture we had (sans racism etc) is because a huge number of men walking around knew what the end result of violence is. Nowadays, men are very quick to get puffy and to provoke conflicts. They are fools. If someone forced all those belligerent idiots to hide in a fox-hole and watch their buddy’s head explode a few feet away, and all the rest, for months and months, they wouldn’t walk around acting like tough guys.
I have seen the most profound violence imaginable, the worst you might see in a war. It has done nothing else than to make me an adamant pacifist. I can not articulate it correctly — all I can say is that at a certain level, violence does things to your mind that you didn’t know about. It’s just not comparable with human existence.
> I agree that the current generation has lost the lesson of World War Two: that war is never a good option.
That is the exact opposite of the lesson of World War Two. The notion that war is not a good option and should be avoided by any means necessary is why it took six years and millions of lives to put Hitler down instead of what it would have taken to stop him before he finished building his war machine.
The “pacifists” of World War II were the traitors and collaborators who stood by and did nothing, other than surrender their armies and homelands and offer aid and comfort, as Hitler butchered an entire continent and murdered tens of millions of innocents.
> The “pacifists” of World War II were the traitors and collaborators who stood by and did nothing, other than surrender their armies and homelands and offer aid and comfort, as Hitler butchered an entire continent and murdered tens of millions of innocents.
You know, the Germans said something similar about jewish "traitors" who supposedly caused their defeat in WW1, and this contributed to the build up to the atrocities of WW2.
"That war is never a good option" is precisely the lesson of war, forget about who are supposedly the good guys vs the bad guys. The countries that comprised the allied forces in WW2 have waged aggressive, unjustified wars themselves since then. Are you saying such aggression is the result of them having learned the right lessons from WW2? (i.e., to not be pacifist?)
The point I have to make here was made far more effectively by Orwell in 1945, so I’ll just quote him:
> The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of the western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty. The mistake was made of pinning this emotion to Hitler, but it could easily be retransferred.
Forgetting is a double edged sword, but one needed for us to live in the present. Living in the future or the past is what really opens up for hatred and fear. Unless something acts as a reminder how bad it really was, it will become fairy tales eventually.. "it couldn't have been that bad right?". But it shouldn't hinder us for trying to make it better in the future.
Edit: It's up to us all to prove the author wrong, it makes me sad when I talk to people that try really hard to wrap everything in lies to make themselves feel better. Maybe the starting point that dooms is when parents/states tries to smooth over horrible events.
It's hard to remember the lessons without remembering how we learned them, but it happens sometimes. The founding ideals of the modern world rose from the ashes of the Thirty Years War, and they stuck around pretty well even after that war passed from living memory.
Sadly, the lessons learned from the 20th century didn't even seem to survive that long. If anything, the very ideas that the 20th century utterly discredited are poised to overturn even the Enlightenment.
Back then we were relying on tales told from grandparents, or for that matter trades learnt from parents, it seems now that much i dissolved by mega industries or common databases/search indexes. Like we used to remember phone numbers but now it's not needed. Wikipedia can hold all the bad memories so we don't need to.
From an energy conservation perspective it's great. But how far should we let it go?
It's not that we are doomed to forget it. It's that humans ultimately don't care. We are selfish creatures.
The most obvious example is what the jews did to palestines in palestine/israel a few years after ww2. Look at what we did in vietnam/laos/iraq/etc. Look at what the chinese are doing to their minorities. Look at what happened in rwanda. Did we all forget ww2? Of course not.
The idea that we are doomed to repeat history if we forget it is nonsense. The nazis didn't forget about the history of the native genocide in the US. They actually studied it and they learned from it and they improved upon it.
Think about it, neo-nazis want to remember the past just as much as the holocaust survivors. But for different reasons.
As long as people have their creature comforts and are well fed and content, we'll pretend to be civilized and caring and charitable. When that gravy train dries up, we just resort to our natural tribal state.
Nobody forgot the native genocides, but the holocaust happened. Nobody forgot the holocaust, but the rwandan genocide happened.
I took a class in college that only covered genocide, and if there is one single lesson I took away from that, it is that all of the worst atrocities in the history of the world grow out of a seed of convincing people that there are other people out there who are (for whatever reason) less than them and should be defeated. If those people are less than us, then the normal rules of decency surely don't apply and we should do all we can to win.
In the time since I took that class, I've made a giant effort to never attribute what I believe are wrong opinions or bad behavior to some inherent trait. No matter how reprehensible I think someone's opinion, I try to remember that they are a human and deserve decency. That doesn't mean we shouldn't fight for things we believe are right, but the second we start believing that we are fighting monsters, we become willing to do monstrous things.
In the US, there seems to be a growing urge to attribute most political opposition to some sort of ingrained difference and it seems impossible that this attribution could ever lead to any sort of resolution short of armed conflict.
>all of the worst atrocities in the history of the world grow out of a seed of convincing people that there are other people out there who are (for whatever reason) less than them and should be defeated. If those people are less than us, then the normal rules of decency surely don't apply and we should do all we can to win.
To piggyback onto this, I think it's important to clarify that this can happen to anyone's political side, and when it does, it is tempting to turn a blind eye to it. For extremists on the right, it's blatant when they hate or hold prejudices against minorities, religions, etc. But if you're on the left, it's easier to rationalize and ignore prejudices or hatred from left extremists against "all white people" or "all men", etc, because, well, that attitude may just be a means to the end that you support. The only difference between the two, though, is one is easier for you to rationalize.
That commonality of demonizing an individual person based on physical traits or "otherness" knows no ideology and emerges whenever individuals are willing to sacrifice their own personal decency to achieve tribal goals. If we don't squash that specific kind of behavior whenever and wherever we see it, we'll be repeating it forever. It's not enough to crush one manifestation of tribalism if it means creating a new and just-as-potent version of it.
one single lesson I took away from that, it is that all of the worst atrocities in the history of the world grow out of a seed of convincing people that there are other people out there who are (for whatever reason) less than them
Isn't that what most Police espouse? That there is a 'blue line' and they judge who is good and who is less than good?
I don't think there's a conflict between being realistic about the fact that some people will do bad things and the belief that we can still be compassionate toward those people.
Obviously the main problem I'm talking about is more about when you decide a priori that whole groups of people will definitely do bad things and are therefore worthy of bad treatment regardless of whether they have actually done anything, but I think there are lots of police entities out there that carry out their duties professionally and compassionately.
> the worst atrocities in the history of the world grow out of a seed of convincing people that there are other people out there who are (for whatever reason) less than them and should be defeated.
Not really. It's more convincing people that there are other people who are an existential threat to you and your society. While heated rhetoric about immigrants is certainly bad, real atrocities start when you spread the message that "it's us or them", if we'd let them have their way they'd kill us all. And this is something I've heard in the West a lot recently, especially coming from Israel and its supporters when referring to Palestinians.
Animals are subhuman. We don't feel the urge to kill them for this reason. Slaves were certainly considered subhuman, and Europe was not on a mission to kill them all.
Wars might be caused by disputes about borders, or by greed. They don't require the elimination of the enemy, just its defeat.
But at least some of the better known genocides and mass murders are caused by the perception in the mind of the perpetrators that the very existence of the victims is an existential threat to them.
You are obviously correct that we don't just kill things because they are subhuman, but it sure makes the threshold for deciding to kill things lower. We generally kill animals very differently than the way we kill humans, particularly pests. Animals are often killed when they pose the slightest risk to humans.
Killing women and children could only ever seem appropriate if one thought that the women and children deserved as much consideration as a wild animal. I think it's the same with slaves in a lot of time periods. They didn't kill them for fun, but they also didn't get charged with murder when they did kill them.
Between killing enemy combatants and killing pests, genocide tends to look a lot more like killing pests.
I think we agree, more or less.
Now, to add a corollary to this discussion, consider that existential threats are usually perceived, if not necessarily as sub-human, as non-human. Because somebody who doesn't just disagree with you on some issues but wants to destroy you must be necessarily lacking some fundamental human quality.
So once you've set a narrative of the "it's us or them" type, it's easy to place the blame of your necessary defensive action on the enemy: because the enemy has already renounced its humanity when it set itself on enslaving or destroying you.
This sounds like a cartoon version of what would lead to a genocide. It seems like this sort of thing is usually the product of close proximity, prolonged ethnic conflict, a perceived threat (real or imagined), and other pressures like lack of resources.
Well from what we read about the genocide in Bosnia, the ethnic conflict was purely made up over a period of just a few years prior to the genocide. The party in power in Serbia latched onto a massacre that had been perpetrated by the Ottomans hundreds of years before as a way to whip up sentiment against the Muslims. Economics definitely came into it, but there were lots of anecdotes of people who didn't even know what side they were on and had to literally ask their parents about their heritage to find out whether they should fear for their lives.
In Rwanda, the divisions were constructed by the people running the colonies and hadn't actually been divisions recognized by the people prior to that. That happened over a period of decades, sure, but they were also complete fabrications that turned into reasons to kill people who were called "cockroaches" over the state run radio.
I agree that dehumanization isn't the only factor, but it's also not cartoonish. People kill each other all the time for all sorts of terrible reasons, but what causes them to crowd a bunch of women and children into a building and set it on fire is a belief that those people are less than human.
Once again, I'm not talking about war, I'm talking about genocide.
Edit for clarification: a lot of the things you mentioned are very often present, but in that class we read about the genocides in Turkey/Armenia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia and Germany, and it was striking how similar the language was from place to place. Despite the different cultural, economic, and historical circumstances, the one thing they all had in common was really brutal language about the targeted group. We've all seen the propaganda targeted at Jews in Germany, and I mentioned above the Rwandan radio calling people cockroaches. This attitude toward the opponent is necessary but not sufficient.
This is a quote from the wikipedia page about the Red Terror, from the chief of the Ukrainian Cheka:
"Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror."
You're right, it's not literally saying they're subhuman, but it seems pretty close. Actions are irrelevant, only identity matters. That doesn't have anything to do with perceived threats. Only a crazy person would think that someone of a certain class was a threat regardless of their actions unless they believed that there were implicit differences that basically amounted to those of different class not deserving life. And yeah I think it's definitely a genocide.
It's very similar to the genocide in Cambodia where they killed people who wore glasses (in addition to all the others) because they assumed that if they wore glasses it must be because they were literate, and all intellectuals were the enemies of the working class. We read an account of a man who had been a leftist but was sent to a camp because of his glasses. Once again, they didn't literally say people were subhuman, but they sought to attribute fundamental differences to something as superficial as eyesight.
In my first comment, I was mostly talking about people coming to believe that a group of people was fundamentally different in a way that common decency no longer applies, that you no longer give them even the consideration you would give criminals, you just send them off to die because they are irredeemable for something as stupid as what family they were born into or whether or not they wore glasses.
Class, education, profession are mostly about actions, actually. They just happen to be identities that are established by those actions. And (early) Soviets didn't consider any of that irredeemable either, as evidenced by many Imperial "white officers" later in employ of the Red Army.
So, no, it wasn't about any kind of a fundamental difference. That ideology didn't believe that there was any group of people to which common decency no longer applies. They believed that common decency no longer applies to anyone, because revolutionary necessity requires it. People who were deemed dangerous to that necessity were killed not because they were deemed subhuman, but solely because they were deemed to be a danger. They even reflected it in the criminal code - it didn't speak of "punishment", but rather of "means of social protection", and death penalty was euphemistically referred to as "the highest measure of social protection".
I think mass murder of civilians on the basis of socioeconomic class is pretty damn close to a genocide, and definitely different than the Civil War, even though a lot of civilians died in the Civil War.
Words have meanings, and just because masses of people are murdered doesn't mean its genocide just like the Civil War or any war. The reason I've stated elsewhere in this thread is that people want to use genocide with regards to authoritarian left states is a tactic by fascists to soften the horrors of the Nazism.
The Stalinist regime was plenty violent and systematically kills millions of people, but calling it genocide doesn't make sense because that wasn't what it was by definition unless you want to compare it to Nazi germany which killed millions more.
Stalinist regime did plenty of outright genocides even by the most rigid definition of the word, even if you insist that it's not any mass murder, but one carried out on the basis of ethnicity. Technically, most of those were designates as "population transfer" (i.e. deportations) - but they were often carried out in a way that either deliberately caused casualties, or knowingly did nothing about the ones that were the inevitable byproduct of the implementation. For example, the mortality rate for Chechen and Ingush deportees was around 25% - that's literally hundreds of thousands of people; and in some cases, entire villages were massacred outright because deporting them was not deemed logistically viable. All those people suffered for their ethnicity and no other reason. If that's not a genocide, what is?
But anyway, originally we were talking about "the worst atrocities in the history of the world", not genocide specifically. So it's reasonable to assume that genocide in this context is used in a colloquial meaning - i.e. any kind of intentional mass murder by some group metric, not necessarily ethnicity.
Also include the simple motivation of greed. A lot of war and genocide is simply about profiteering. Some perpetrators do so knowingly. Other miscreants feel need to invent some excuse, such as dehumanization, and repaint their predation in righteousness.
> If those people are less than us, then the normal rules of decency surely don't apply and we should do all we can to win.
I too took a class on the Holocaust, even if it was more broad, looking first at the industrialisation of society which enabled the industrialisation of a genocide: by killing at industrial scale, you don't need many executionners, but you'll need a lot of good paper-pusher making sure that the trains run on time and that the camps are well-supplied in fuel, bullets and gas.
> I try to remember that they are a human and deserve decency
I know only one western country that in the last 50 years has shut a million people in a hermetically sealed ghetto; that installs its own civilian population in some other people's land, that shoots those who protest with live bullets, killing hundreds and injuring tens of thousands; and dehumanizes its victims every day with a "it's us or them" narrative. And it's not in Europe. Actually, it's Aronson's country, Israel.
I think that good lessons are valuable in themselves, wherever they might come from. But even to this there is a limit. Lecturing modern Poland on fairness and the lessons of the past while not even mentioning what your own country is doing is just shameless.
> I know only one western country that in the last 50 years has shut a million people in a hermetically sealed ghetto...
You're right: I should have added: ...and that it's happily getting away with it, receiving applause, economic aid and unwavering support by the same powerful countries that like to warn about the lessons of history.
> do not underestimate the destructive power of lies
When people are unwilling to hold fast to truth, that is when terrible things happen. When someone tells a lie, for example, "the reason you don't have a job and things are bad is because of those Jews". Or, "those Jews are not human - we have to protect ourselves". That is when people who would not normally do bad things do bad things. They can believe they are saving their country from destruction by sub-humans. They can believe that they are in fact performing a heroic action.
Some of the labeling heard today seems to be coming close to this, and with terrible consequences. People are losing their jobs, their careers, their ability to express their views, and their ability to practice their religious beliefs - all for the "greater good". Instead of respecting a person's inalienable rights - because they are a human that always deserves this respect - some people are telling themselves that it is OK to disrespect others to achieve some utopian state. This is the biggest lie.
Do you know the difference between a lie and a falsehood?
I think it does a lot of damage in the world, people labelling things as lies when they merely think they're not true. It's very inflammatory. "That's a lie!" says not only "That's not true" but "and you know it". Which often is itself not true. Thus you could be accused of lying yourself.
Very often people are lied to in the media[0], then adopt false beliefs, which they then repeat - but they're not lying when they do so, they believe these things.
It poisons communication when this word 'lies' is thrown around loosely. People disagree about a lot of things. It usually doesn't mean they're lying about it. Usually you have no idea whether people you don't know are lying or saying false things they believe. How could you know that with certainty.
It's not even possible for a sentence to be a lie, in the way you seem to believe. A sentence uttered by a person, yes, but detach it as you did from any speaker, and it can only be true or false. A lie requires specific knowledge in the mind of the particular person uttering the sentence.
[0]Whoops - see, I even did it myself. I don't know if that's right.
>A lie requires specific knowledge in the mind of the particular person uttering the sentence.
Can you clarify? Are you saying it is impossible to ascertain the intent of the speaker?
I appreciate the distinction you are making, it is an important one. To lie is to speak a false statement, coupled with the intent to deceive.
What is missing from your assertion is whether we can gage intent and how we do so. Intent is critical to understanding the degree to which we apply a corrective measure. It's the difference between manslaughter and murder.
Are you saying it is impossible to ascertain the intent of the speaker?
No, not at all. Just that for something to be a lie it needs 1. to be not true, and 2. for the person uttering it to know that it's not true. Hopefully that's entirely uncontroversial.
Yes, how to find out what people know, desire, plan, intend etc is another question entirely.
Another thing - I don't think you can always neatly divide people's utterances into something they know/believe vs something they don't. e.g. believing in god or not - some have varying levels of belief, depends on mood, some aren't sure what they believe etc, it's often not a simple, unchanging binary 'on or off' situation.
Malicious lies can very, very, very quickly turn into innocent falsehoods spread by the ignorant and credulous. Which is perhaps closely related to the fact that more large-scale evil is done through obedience to authority than through malice itself. For every psychotic true-believer Nazi or Communist, there were thousands of ordinary people, just like you and me, who didn't want to rock the boat, let other people serve as their conscience, and quietly did as they were told.
Well, that's a strange question. It's mostly how people talk to each other - we don't ordinarily hear e.g.
Teacher: What's 8+9? Tommy: Uh..11. Teacher: No, that's a lie!
It seems that particularly in heated political contexts, people enjoy calling false statements lies, and don't notice or care that what they're themselves saying isn't true. The end justifies the means, anything that scores points in the fight is good, even the same or worse than what you're accusing the other guy of doing.
But in the context of this article, I don't think it matters if people truly believe in the madness, or if they purposely put themselves behind it. You still end up with atrocities.
Say Nazis weren't lied too, say all the way up, people really just had these false impressions.
You make decisions that affect others, you're responsible for them. If you made a mistake, used falsehoods as your basis for the decisions, and did atrocious things, or, you did them willingly, I don't know. They're both bad.
If thinking it's a lie pushes you to validate the truthfulness of your knowledge, then so be it. Even if you weren't lied to. It's all about that constant active search for the truth, and a certain amount of challenging what you hear, criticizing the so called facts, and looking a little harder.
Tommy should know better. If he goes on living with that false belief of numbers, he's a threat to society. He'll make wrong choices, miscalculation, and his judgment can't be trusted. The same as if he was a liar.
We should teach people this responsibility. You have to put in the effort to rid yourself of falsehoods and be a truth seeker.
Also, most people should be able to judge their confidence in their knowledge. A lot of people end up doing things even though if they spent a few minutes thinking about it, they would know that they're not sure about this. Yet they do it anyway. That's getting pretty close to a lie.
(Sorry, I didn't read the article.) Well, I find that point of view....extremely strange. Yes, people make mistakes, get things wrong. You can't learn without making mistakes. One definition of an expert is "Someone who's made all the mistakes there is to make, in a very narrow field." Lying is a whole other thing. If you don't know that, I'm not sure what to say to you. It's as if I'd said "You shouldn't correct children when they make mistakes". I think there must be some misunderstanding, because I literally can't believe you can't see the difference, or think it means nothing.
I think you should read the article, I'm talking in relation to it, and children is absolutly a terrible analogy for what I'm talking about.
I know its not the same thing. But I don't see how it matters to the article.
The article is about how falsehoods and lies can cause fear and lead to chaos (amongst other things). Such as what happened in world war 2, where countries turned against each others and targeted Jews.
In that sense, I don't think it matters, you believe Jews are responsible for all your problems and up to get you, so you go commit genocide against them. Does it matter if that idea was a lie or a falsehood? What if Hitler truly believed it? Okay, its a falsehood. So what? He just made a mistake? Everyone makes mistakes?
That's my point. How could all this happen? Suddenly, a falsehood or a lie turned rogue, doesn't matter, but somehow everyone has these ideas, and the whole world starts to act irrationally.
You're a politician, you need to validate your claims before claiming them. You should fact check, have a confidence ratio, justify yourself. You can't just go: "oh sorry, I guess it was false, I just didn't know" after you've already rallied, propagated and enacted laws and decree based on it. But it seems you're trying to claim that spreading falsehoods as a politician isn't as bad as spreading lies. Like if spreading falsehoods was okay. I don't think it is. It's just as bad, and can, and has, lead to great historical atrocities in the past.
A liar does so deliberately and will mix truth with fiction for the goal of manipulation.
Everyone will believe and repeat at least one falsehood, we just don’t know what our own false beliefs are. There is no attempt manipulate with falsehoods.
The converse is also true: it’s extremely dangerous to avoid the word “lie” when it actually fits. A certain nameless American president constantly gets a free pass on this from news organizations.
Spreading hatred for groups of people via labels and encouraging their treatment as sub-human is popular rhetoric among nationalist extremists and political conspiracy theorists, but to satisfy the final condition (to be subjected in practice to a significant amount of suppression based on deceitful rhetoric), I think an easy argument could be made to put immigrants in that category, and maybe also homosexuals/trans people. You have to be mindful of that last condition though, since if you dropped it, nearly any group of people, sadly, would qualify as being subjected to such behavior.
The problem with this is a lot of these statements came out during the red scare as a way for the liberal west to distinguish itself from the communist east. Saying "Mao killed tens of millions" is like saying "Capitalism kills tens of millions" because people around the world don't get food for free even though we make enough food to feed everyone. They are similar because the argument is essentially "the central planning lead to famine" which points to a failure of the ideology, not an intended result of the ideology.
Stalin and Mao were brutal and both directly killed and imprisoned between them killed millions who didn't agree with them, but the number is a couple of orders of magnitude less than the oft cited tens of millions to hundreds of millions. It doesn't excuse them of the violence they subjected to millions to, but statements like this make them seem worse than say the result of fascism which has been something that fascists (along with holocaust denial) use to disparage actual communists to benign and reformist social democrats whilst lifting the historical record of their ideology's crimes. For example, look at the nonsensical "universal healthcare is communism" rhetoric in the US.
For what it's worth in the article he brings up Soviet atrocities as well. No place on the political spectrum has the monopoly on being righteous, nor committing terrible crimes.
What many forget are the dead bodies of capitalism. That isn't mentioned normally, not is it in this first hand account.
Capitalism has its roots in the idea that only those who produce get resources. If you are unable/unwilling, you do not deserve anything. And that anything includes: a home, food, water, bathroom, medicine, surgery, dentistry, or all the other essentials needed to live.
Along with that, our unique US capitalism also allows for slavery when charged with a crime. We call the Russian and Chinese detention centers "gulags" - we have enshrined their usage in our Constitution.
Mao and Stalin killed X millions. I'll accept that without research. How many people has the US killed with lack of health care? How many union strikers were murdered by the National Guard? How many African Americans were killed under lynching and 'police discretion'? How many people were killed because they didn't make enough money to matter? How many communities were poisoned with lead and other environmental pollutants because their community was impoverished?
In the end, Capitalists can crow one solid phrase to absolve their 'sins'. And that is,
"They brought their suffering and death upon themselves by not choosing better".
Am I advocating communism or socialism? No. They have been shown to not work in the previous incarnations around the world. Capitalism works, until people slip through the cracks... And those cracks day by day get ever so larger. I don't know the name of the thing I think of. Maybe its a mashup between socialism and capitalism, so that we all grow together, and that nobody is left behind.
There’s a huge difference between actually killing
someome like the Soviets did (by a bullet to the head or by enslaving and working someone to death) and “killing” (like you call it) by not sharing resources (health care) with someone. The latter is actually at worst a lack of compassion, not murder.
Capitalism has its roots in one idea: private ownership of the means of production. It doesn't say anything about who does or does not deserve something; it's just completely orthogonal to the ideology, such as it is. People still suffer as a result of those economic policies, when they're not unchecked - but it is not the intent, and you can absolutely have capitalism without any of that stuff.
Statist hard left ideologies (such as Stalinism, or Maoism, or even late Soviet socialism), on the other hand, have an ideological dogma that suppressing dissent by violence, even extreme violence, is perfectly okay, and even a revolutionary duty - the ends justify the means.
There are other political ideologies that incorporate capitalism (or parts of it) as an economic program, but pile other stuff on top of that to justify violent oppression of the opposition - like most right-wing dictatorships - and those would be legitimate targets for comparison with Stalinism etc. But people dying from lack of healthcare in US are not "victims of capitalism". They're victims of a specific oligopoly, that other capitalist countries don't even have.
One of the things about living in any society is the violence that is enacted on people is often invisible to you unless you are the target of such violence. You can say capitalism does not include in its tenants that certain people are victims or targets of violence but people are. For example, people who steal are threatened by violence for violating property rights, people who do not pay taxes are threatened by violence to pay such taxes. People who murder are threatened with violence so that they not murder. Violence is wielded by the state in liberal capitalism and one of the most important objects of that violence is to uphold the rights of property holders as well as general personal rights like right to life in the case of murder.
You can claim that "it's not violence" but it is. I won't put words in your mouth, but I imagine the first thought you might have is "well, I wouldn't call that violence because imprisoning a person against their wishes for murdering another is justified." Well, in authoritarian left ideologies, beheading the ruling class was justified because they oppressed the working class, so for them, it is justified within their systems logic.
Finally, in addition to those who are expressly the target of violence under capitalism there are people who by the final result of the ideology, become victims of violence, such as those in prison working extremely low wages as the other poster pointed at. You can claim "it isn't the intent" but that argument is very similar to the argument that the intent of pre-Stalin revolutionary Russia wasn't the statist regime that it became. "It's not actual capitalism" is akin to "it's not actual socialism" which is an argument leftists make today.
I didn't claim that it's not violence. But yes, you're absolutely right, it's justifiable violence. And the kind of stuff that e.g. the Bolsheviks did is not justifiable violence by our metrics - and why would we care about theirs? I don't believe in objective morality, but I'm not a moral relativist either, and I'm not going to give someone a pass on the basis that they believe that they're doing the right thing. I'm going to judge the rightness of that thing on my own.
And of the things that you have listed, the only one that is fundamental to capitalism is protection of property rights. And it has a direct equivalent in statist socialism - enforcement of the lack of property rights and prohibition of "economic exploitation" (e.g. when USSR banned most private trade, even between consenting parties, as "speculation", and banned hiring other people as workers). I would dare say that the latter is at least as violent as the former - but then on top of that you have to add all the stuff about violently suppressing political opposition, which is not an ideological requirement of capitalism.
> that argument is very similar to the argument that the intent of pre-Stalin revolutionary Russia wasn't the statist regime that it became
That argument is trivially refuted by looking at the arrangements in pre-Stalin revolutionary Russia, though. For example, the first Soviet constitution that explicitly drew the voting districts such that cities (where workers live) got 5x votes of rural areas (where peasants live) per capita, and anyone deemed bourgeois had no right to vote at all. That's "dictatorship of the proletariat" in action, right there.
But the other thing about that argument is that to be convincing, it requires counter-examples. And that's something that's severely lacking - we can talk about how statist socialism can be democratic and non-authoritarian in principle, but somehow none of the socialist nations that lasted for any noticeable amount of time were. This strongly implies that there's something about the ideology itself that, if not embracing authoritarianism explicitly, encourages it in practice.
With capitalism, OTOH, you get plenty of really nasty examples, but you also get examples of working democracy, rule of law, social welfare etc. Which implies that capitalism is not inherently opposed to any of those things as a matter of ideology.
But ultimately, the reason is simple: capitalism is strictly an economic system, while socialism is a economic and political system. Different strains of socialism have different political prescriptions - from totalitarianism to anarchism - but they all have some. Capitalism has none - you have to fill the missing pieces in from elsewhere (again, with a very broad spectrum, from humanism to fascism) to make a complete picture. And when you assign blame in the resulting picture, it's important to understand which of those bits contributed to it - and in many cases, it's not the economics.
What we have now though is a perverse form capitalism as espoused by those free-market fundamentalists Friedman and Hayek, which absolutely is an ideology; and one that has the economies of the western developed nations in a vice grip.
> Some of the labeling heard today
What do you have in mind, in particular?
They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
From the man who is now the president of the country with the world’s largest economy and military. I’m sorry if this bothers people because it’s political, but it’s a fair answer to the weak question asked.
Don’t know what’s political about answering that question directly except that it’s from a Trump quote. I suppose most people would prefer everyone just not answer here - in which case I wonder what this article is doing on hacker news at all if we don’t want to have this discussion here.
The actual lines are: "They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." Explain how prior comment differs significantly from the actual quote.
HN is at least 90% anti-Trump. If you're getting downvoted for a Trump criticism, you've screwed up somewhere other than pissing off the three people on HN who have voting privileges and like Trump.
HN is at least 90% anti-Trump. If you're getting downvoted for a Trump criticism, you've screwed up somewhere other than pissing off the three people on HN who have voting privileges and like Trump.
Or maybe you're underestimating the significant number of people working in tech whose empathy skills are definitely below par and sympathize with the right because "the best and smartest always win"?
I didn't do it, so I don't know exactly. Possible that "illegals" aren't really a group in the sense that matters? You can choose whether or not to be an illegal; discrimination against innate traits is what really has historically been a problem. It is also valid to infer certain limited things from having the "illegal" status, such as that basically by definition these are people who don't have much regard for the law. (It isn't irrational or invalid to point out that there is a selection process, which I mean in the more-or-less Darwinian sense, that makes it so that illegal immigrants are very likely to have disproportionate numbers of people who are going to break your other laws.) It is, again, not the same as making statements based on immutable characteristics.
I'd go so far as to suggest that those who deliberately try to conflate the matter of judging people based on their immutable vs. chosen characteristics are themselves contributing to the problem. If you force people who have problems with the legality of certain immigration procedures to also get themselves declared "racist" or whathaveyou, you shouldn't be surprised when people decide to accept the label instead. "Racism" and other similar labels has lost its sting in large part because it got horribly, horribly overused in places where it was not applicable, and now, surprise surprise, we find ourselves living in a culture where people care less about that label. It was not a good choice to try to spend the political capital the labels had that way.
Discrimination against religion and sexual activities are prominent examples of highly problematic discrimination against things you can choose.
Also, people aren’t being called racists because they’re against illegal immigration. They’re being called racist because their stance against illegal immigration is obviously racist (for example, ignoring white illegal immigrants).
There’s a dark underbelly of incel/redpill/GamerGate people in the tech world who are easily triggered by other perspectives, and my impression is that nearly everyone who would identify with those groups are Trump supporters. I could be wrong, but anecdotally, it sure seems that way.
Given that they appear to be motivated by emotions, and portray themselves as victims, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if a small handful of such people spent inordinate amounts of time managing a bunch of sock puppet accounts just to amplify their downvoting power. If so, it is a strange and ironic phenomenon.
and "In 2016, Sam Altman, one of Silicon Valley’s most influential entrepreneurs, revealed to the New Yorker that he had an arrangement with Thiel whereby in the eventuality of some kind of systemic collapse scenario – synthetic virus breakout, rampaging AI, resource war between nuclear-armed states, so forth – they both get on a private jet and fly to a property Thiel owns in New Zealand."
I think this is pretty straight-forward that these hidden/flagged posts isn't some sort of bot army, but instead having a button on the mod-switch at the root console for this website. To me, it's clear that Thiel was the one who put his head out espousing Trump support, to see how the tech community would take it. But I think at least in the elites in SV, they're all Trump supporters.
Who knows, but I’ve learned to be perpetually disappointed by Thiel in any situation involving morals, ethics, or intellectual integrity. I can’t imagine that he would waste time on this stuff, but at the same time, he’s shown that it’s certainly not beneath him.
Going to keep it real. I get irked by downvotes and I have no love for Thiel, but this sounds a little far fetched. I don't really have an opinion of Altman and it's possible SV boys like Trump at the very least because they like taxcuts and they're rich, but that the reason for the dearth of rather quick downvotes is a mod switch is seems less likely to me as much as it's over zealous Trump supporters.
Regardless it's just a website. If anyone wanted to manipulate opinion, manipulating hn of all places is unlikely to do much. And hey, even if they are, they've succeeded in manipulating a bunch of people who might have money but seriously have little power.
I do no longer think that people actually learn from history. They do so if they percieve to gain a advantage from that, but the advantage of something "normal" like peace and prosperity in europe, is only visible in hindsight.
I think, people must be vaccinated against radicalism, again and again, by experiencing the outcomes for themselves.
If you are discriminated and robbed in your favorite online game, for no other reason then who you are or your name- without any success when appealing to the "state", you begin to understand what it is like to have been a jew in europe.
Another difficult fact remains- only the prosperity of the past and the nuclear weapons kept these dark tides at bay.
The politics, the memorials and the activism did & do nothing.
> If you are discriminated and robbed in your favorite online game, for no other reason then who you are or your name- without any success when appealing to the "state", you begin to understand what it is like to have been a jew in europe.
What you are describing is frustration about one’s presumed entitlement with regards to a hobby.
The world is not just and no government is perfect, learning that in a video game seems like a nice, soft way to learn an important lesson.
It is not similar to trying to live in a country that has a policy of trying to exterminate you. One could not log out of Nazi germany or simply get a new hobby, Jewish people struggled to get food & resources for their families without getting disappeared to a death camp.
I hope you're wrong. Truly, redicliously incorrect. I fear you're right, or at least that you need to have a family member who was hurt by war to appreciate peace. I think the world's current swerve towards extremeism might be caused by the WW2 generation passing away and their children moving into retirement. Maybe in just one more generation we'll have all forgotten the horror and be ready for round 3.
Well if that’s true the learning curve will be so steep as to resemble a cliff. I’m not usually a nuclear war alarmist, given that all players stand to lose, but which country capable of world war will lose gracefully without nuking someone? China? Russia? The USA? UK? It’s a bit long in the tooth, but I think Einstein was right.
I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Something I find interesting about WW1 was that it was preceded by a long period of general peace. During that period, we had been in the steep part of the industrial revolution's S-curve. Modern nation states had been solidifying their centralized power. The world was globalized and war was unthinkable.
Once war broke out, the participating governments seemed shocked at their new found power to wage total war, through their industrial economies, their rapidly expanding populations, and their amplified political power.
If such an unthinkable war were to break out today, our knowledge of our destructive capability is 70 years out of date. Who knows what atrocities we might accomplish.
This sort of out-of-date knowledge of war fighting capabilities is what led to millions of men dying in trenches in WW1.
Consider, for instance, that over fifty million artillery rounds were fired during the Battle of the Somme alone. That’s a level of warfare unprecedented at the time - it required an industrial economy just to produce that much ordnance, not to mention a railways to move them to the front.
No one prior to ww1 would have conceived of warfare on that scale. Now, just imagine what kind of warfare we’re capable of today, that we haven’t even thought of yet?
They already feature such typical WW1 elements like machine guns, barbed wire, and frontal assaults on entrenched enemy positions (with the associated carnage).
Something on the scale of WW1 was considered unthinkable by many even so. And they had good reasons to believe it, because if you looked at the numbers, it simply didn't make sense - even in the best case, the material gains for the victors would be dwarfed by economic losses, mostly because of how involved international trade was between all the potential opponents.
There was a book, published 5 yeas before WW1, that argued that exact point. It wasn't obscure, either.
These days, I hear very similar points - "China doesn't need a war with US, because US is its biggest export market", or, say, "Europe doesn't need a war with Russia, because it depends on Russian gas"...
If you are discriminated and robbed in your favorite online game, for no other reason then who you are or your name- without any success when appealing to the "state", you begin to understand what it is like to have been a jew in europe.
I think I understand what you’re trying to say, but that is a terrible way to say it. On the face of it, no experience you have in an online game comes close to being rounded up and shot in the neck, or sent to a KZ/VZ. Not. Even. Close. It belittles the nightmare of Nazi Germany to compare the lives of people slated for extermination with the experience of having a bad time playing a game. I would strongly urge you to find a better way to express what I think you were trying to say about marginalization and discrimination in a way that doesn’t make a mockery of your own point.
> I think, people must be vaccinated against radicalism, again and again, by experiencing the outcomes for themselves.
but then they'll have autism.
seriously though - our grandfathers' tragedies are just political fodder at this point and that's extremely sad. the proud nationalists think that their nations somehow won the war, when in truth they just lost a bit less than nazi germany. in case of Poland, turns out that being on the victorious side didn't really matter much, except perhaps that the goverment can now say that we won the war and thus now we, the grandchildren, deserve more than them, their grandchildren.
Explicitly certainly not. It only mentions Israel in a very passing reference: "No nation has a monopoly on virtue – something that many people, including many of my fellow Israeli citizens, still struggle to understand." Way too little.
He did allude to that (EDIT: that conflict). This is a discussion of the Holocaust and the rise of the right in Europe, not a discussion of world conflicts, wrongs and rights, of which there are too many to list.
Perhaps more relevant is that, sadly enough, there are quite a few Israelis who are semi-supportive of these right wing attitudes in Europe and elsewhere simply due to their feelings that their enemy's enemy is somehow their friend. Similarly some jewish people in Europe who have been facing rising anti-jewish sentiments and rhetoric might even believe the right wing parties will help with that. This is by no means universal but I think it's a bad idea.
In my opinion, this is partly a result of the left-wing biased (or lazy, or idealistic) approach which is helping fuel the fire. Admittedly this is also related to the bubble nature of today's view of reality. It's much easier to people to stay and believe in their bubble than rise to see the whole picture. You can always find anecdotal evidence to support any world view, simply viewing the world through a black and white lens is already a problem. Maybe people who are stressed out tend to do that more often.
Let's also not forget that the European (and American) actions or lack of action recently and over many decades are some of the root causes of the refugee crisis which is fuelling these sentiments. Finally the background of the global economy, crisis, and wealth re-distribution are also a factor. When times are bad everyone is looking for someone to blame.
In fact, he expresses pride in fighting for Israeli "independence". But anyway, it's pointless to debate the merits here. Whoever's "right", it's arguable that the Palestinians will become a stateless people, just as the Jews were for a couple thousand years. Maybe they'll make a comeback, or maybe they'll go the way of the Gypsies. But it's nothing to be proud of, in my opinion.
Referencing modern Poland is uncalled for. At this moment this voice is becoming just another one in a dirty political quarrel. History is still being studied in Poland, no worries Mr. Aronson and Guardian.
Modern Poland is going the nationalist populism way. The article is very much called for, and it is needed.
We have a government that builds its ideology on the notion that Poland was always innocent and heroic, Poles were always the victims, we should be proud of our country, anybody who says otherwise is a traitor, leftist, marxist, or other kind of undesirable.
They build their support on historic resentment towards Germans (because WW2 but also because now they are leftists and want to put terrorists in our country), EU in general (because they are leftist and lie to us, they only give us money to abuse us, we would be better off outside), Jews (because they are lying that Poles were killing them and helping Germans in WW2, because they want our money from reperations, because they are behind every leftist conspiracy ever). Among the enemies of the people are also private media, NGOs, ecologists, liberal and socialist governments anywhere, liberal media. Whoever criticizes any particular thing government did becomes a part of conspiracy, and then it suffices to show that this guy is in any way connected to any previously ostracized group - and you can safely ignore whatever (s)he says.
There's this paranoia that people abroad say "polish death camps" and think that death camps were created by Poles. So they post every single mention in foreign media of the term, and there's public outrage.
There was a stupid law recently introduced that was punishing "blaming Polish nation or state for Holocaust or other crimes against humanity". It was unconstutitional obviously, but constutitional tribunal isn't working anymore. It was also stupid, because there were crimes against humanity done by Poles (although on small scale).
It was introduced, predictably Israel, USA, and others protested - government used it as a way to portrait everybody opposing this law as a traitor paid by Jews. That was the rhethoric. And USA obviously is only protesting because Israel forces them to (because government at once tries to show USA as an alternative to EU which is the big devil according to them, and to show that USA when it criticizes Poland is the enemy too). It's funny how they contradict themselves sometimes.
For like half a year the law was suspended, and government blamed everything evil on Jews for opposing it. There was a huge antisemitic campaign in the media, both traditional (public TV, radio, etc), and social media. People were posting every single story from WW2 where a Jew did something bad (because that makes Poles collaborating with Germans ok somehow :) ).
There was a 50 anniversary of 1968 expulsion of Jews from Poland by communist regime. Somehow, despite current government dislike of communists - they managed to make it look like 1968 was bad, but Jews had it coming.
USA blocked all high-level meetings between our governments, and that was the end of that. Government backpedaled, law was canceled. But the propaganda remains.
It sometimes feels like I'm in 1930s. Have you ever listened to Michałkiewicz or Grzegorz Braun? People like that always were there, but they were marginalized. Nowaydays their rethoric is repeated by prime minister and public TV.
It's terrifying to see my own parents buying into this crap. People who were always teaching me to be tolerant, not to believe government when it shows "these people are your enemy". Now they are repeating the same shit that is in TVP. Every few months there's new public enemy - from ecologists, through "homolobby", european courts, NGOs, private media, Jews, France, Israel, USA, Germany, Ireland. Everybody out there is just waiting to destroy our pure, innocent Poland.
That is bullshit, and the fact that people are buying into this is scary as hell. I will manage, I'm working in IT. I can go abroad and live well. But I'm also a patriot, and I don't want to move. And I'm very pessimistic about the general direction Poland took recently. It ends with isolated, marginalized Poland outside of EU. And that in turn ends with Poland going the Belarus way - as a "proudly independent" vassal state of Russia. I would very much want to be mistaken, but we're so far hitting every point on the checklist.
I've read your post twice, just to be sure I didn't overlook an "/s" marker, a wink emoji or something. It strikes me as a narrow view taken to extreme - entire vision of our country built up from referencing criticisms and verbal sparring. Political horse-trading, and back-and-forth doesn't a nation-state make.
That is neither substantive matter, nor the actual state of the country. Please, have a look around with me; consider multiple factors:
The economy's doing well, the country is not pushing towards Russia - neither economically nor geopolitically; instead we've diversified trade and geopolitics; see the recent adventures with China.
The political process is chugging along as it ought to, there's plurality of voices in the media and it seems to be growing. The political and economic protests & demonstrations are well attended and mostly well behaved.
We've even managed to hold our own against EU's meddling in our internal politics, during recent changes to the judiciary. Oh, and we're one of the very few states in Europe that managed to weather the migrant crisis. Meanwhile we host - no, scratch that, we gainfully employ and well integrate with - a vibrant community of war refugees from our neighbor, the Ukraine.
If there's one thing I still seriously worry about, it's the retirement pension system. Frankly, I plan on avoiding relying on that.
Hey, we've on a better trajectory than our western neighbors, and we've made a few friends along the way. Cheers!
Economy has nothing to do with national propaganda spreading xenophobia and calling all opposition - traitors. 3rd Reich had much better economy than Weimar Republic (if not very sustainable). Besides - Poland is one of the few countries in EU that haven't had budget surplus in last few years despite the economic boom in EU.
> the country is not pushing towards Russia
Look at any independent rating regarding media freedom, rule of law, tolerance. We are changing towards Russia.
> we've diversified trade and geopolitics
yeah, from being "friends" with EU and USA we changed to what exactly? China isn't our ally, we're doing business, like we did before. Meanwhile we're completely marginalized in EU, and have no bargaining power in relations with USA (which was pretty well showcased during that crisis with stupid Holocaust law). Even if PIS doesn't want us to exit EU - it constantly portraits EU as the worst threat to Poland. Such propaganda may easily end with Poland leaving EU - see Cameron debacle. PIS is feeding extreme right to marginalize liberal opposition, same as Fides did in Hungary with Jobbik. Then PIS remains the "lesser evil". This is a very risky strategy, and is already hurting Poland.
> there's plurality of voices in the media and it seems to be growing
> Poland’s status declined from Free to Partly Free due to government intolerance toward independent or critical reporting, excessive political interference in the affairs of public media, and restrictions on speech regarding Polish history and identity, which have collectively contributed to increased self-censorship and polarization.
Government openly talks about nationalization of foreign owned media. That's the plurality you speak of?
> We've even managed to hold our own against EU's meddling in our internal politics, during recent changes to the judiciary
Or, if you aren't brainwashed - we managed to destroy independent judiciary and still remain in EU (for now). Great job.
> Oh, and we're one of the very few states in Europe that managed to weather the migrant crisis
The rest of the European countries seem to exist as well. Maybe try to travel more :)
> war refugees from our neighbor, the Ukraine
These are war refuges like the +- 2 000 000 of Poles in UK, Ireland, Germany are war refuges. So - not at all. They are economic migrants, and benefit Poland much more than we benefit them. Still a good thing, but changes nothing.
>Besides - Poland is one of the few countries in EU that haven't had budget surplus in last few years despite the economic boom in EU.
Money remained in the private economy rather than in the central budget? Is that your point here?
>>>marginalized Poland outside of EU. And that in turn ends with Poland (...) - as a "proudly independent" vassal state of Russia.
>Look at any independent rating regarding media freedom, rule of law, tolerance. We are changing towards Russia.
Shifted goalposts. Of course we need to exit EU before the EU crashes. Good thing we haven't switched to euro yet, and we're building a competing block in the form of V4 and external trade ties. Nobody here trusts Russia enough to go join their block; certainly we remember history and current events in there.
As for "low freedom, rule of law, tolerance" - that's why I noted the government pays attention and reacts to peaceful citizen protests, while not heeding to EU's (and other external actors') pressure too much. That's how it's supposed to be ran in regard to internal politics. Facts over words, and if you still prefer the ratings ratings over observable reality, I have a bundle of 2006-vintage, AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities to sell to you.
>government intolerance toward independent or critical reporting
>excessive political interference in the affairs of public media
Public media are the minority of media. Every government packs KRRiT. The previous team wasn't any more neutral, it just was speaking in other tone. Which is the whole point of the OP - "is language representative of actual socio-political changes?" Wake me up when the nationalization gets any traction in the society.
>and restrictions on speech regarding Polish history and identity
Holocaust lies were prohibited in Germany and other countries well before in Poland. We're catching up in that regard, if anything.
>increased self-censorship and polarization
There's no discussion of police monitoring, nor of straight up delegalization of whole political party in Poland, again unlike certain western countries. We still seem to hold higher plurality standards, and for that we suffer from the Popper's paradox of tolerance towards intolerance to certain political options, as witnessed in this discussion.
>> We've even managed to hold our own against EU's meddling in our internal politics, during recent changes to the judiciary
>Or, if you aren't brainwashed - we managed to destroy independent judiciary and still remain in EU (for now). Great job.
Not a great job; I was disappointed in how it was rushed and kind of botched. Nonetheless, the point of protecting internal politics from foreign meddling still stands. Contrast that with, for example, Italy and Greece.
>The rest of the European countries seem to exist as well. Maybe try to travel more :)
With much weakened political scenes and societies split along partisan lines; with low trust and dialogues in the nation, and towards immigrants; with Chemnitz and all that. Meanwhile here in Poland we trade with the immigrants just fine, and when that one immigrant was attacked, it was huge shock to everybody, decried widely, and stayed in the news for several cycles.
>> war refugees from our neighbor, the Ukraine
>economic refugees (...) Still a good thing, but changes nothing.
It's an observable fact that we and them integrate just fine. While opinions peddled online would have you believe we are some sort of xenophobes by default.
Have a nice day, ajuc; I'm off to buy a coffee from Nadia at the Żabka.
> Money remained in the private economy rather than in the central budget? Is that your point here?
My point was that Polish government is using nationalistic propaganda, and I'm pretty sure I was clear. Regarding economy (which is an offtopic you started) my point is, that the government increased spending to buy votes to the point that even at the peak of global economic boom we can't balance the budget. How will it work when the boom will inevitably end? It is not sustainable, especially not in the face of demographic crisis (and contrary to the propaganda 500+ isn't going to help - Poland still has negative net change of population, and it's getting worse).
But economy worries me less than the government playing with fire and supporting antiliberal, nationalist, xenophobic propaganda. Because economy you can fix in a few years. Fucked up society you're stuck with for decades.
> we're building a competing block in the form of V4 and external trade ties
V4 votes differently than Poland on vast majority of sessions in EU parliament. Any sort of V4 or "intermarrum" alliance as an alternative to EU or NATO is a pipedream. We have few common interests, potential candidates have no reason to ally us except on immigrants crisis, and even then we have little to offer them. And if we forced them to choose Poland or EU they will choose EU every time.
> The previous team [of public media] wasn't any more neutral
There was never such a biased public media in Poland since communism fell. Data says so, it's not subjective.
> Wake me up when the nationalization gets any traction in the society.
PIS supporters generally agree with the proposition to buy foreign owned media (and even some Polish independent media) by national companies. Government can do it very cheaply - making laws that make private media in Poland unprofitable, buying the media cheaply, then reversing the law. That's how Hungary did it.
> Holocaust lies were prohibited in Germany and other countries well before in Poland
The problem is - Poland tried to prohibit some Holocaust truths as well. Also it's funny how even government admitted it was bad, and you're still defending it. More Catholic than the pope :)
> We still seem to hold higher plurality standards
No we don't. If you think we do please show data confirming it.
> [western EU survived immigration crisis] with much weakened political scenes and societies split along partisan lines
Just like Poland, then? And we had no crisis to blame this on, just Jarek playing with fire.
>Poland still has negative net change of population, and it's getting worse
I'll buy a vacation house on the cheap/s. Also, try convincing the greens that it's a bad thing. Also, try convincing anybody that with growing population we'd somehow save our pension system.
Or maybe we'll invite some immigrants from compatible cultures to work with us and integrate into the society. Oh well.
>the government playing with fire and supporting antiliberal, nationalist, xenophobic propaganda
Says the online panic. Liberalism is upheld, with pluralism; it's the "single political option or bust" mentality that gets rightfully criticized. Nationalism is what people want; you don't have to agree, but that's the price of living in democracy. Transferring that warm fuzzy feeling to the whole federal state of EU doesn't make it better or worse; it's just that - transferring it. "Xenophobic", nope; it's not "us vs them", it's "some ideas and cultures are specific threat by refusing to integrate, all others are welcome". Come on, don't you see the foreigners around you at work, at the mall, in the schools? Don't you have any immigrants in your social circles?
>V4 votes differently than Poland on vast majority of sessions in EU parliament.
Whole EU is made of countries with different economic and geopolitical interests, votes split and join all the time, and we manage a working consensus. You've just put forth example of the process working as expected, not of some sort of roadblock. What's the alternative - complete unity of opinions under one leadership? We've been there just a few decades ago, we don't want a repeat of that. Let's keep discussing and trying for the best option. That's how progress is made.
>Any sort of V4 or "intermarrum" alliance as an alternative to (...) NATO is a pipedream.
Wouldn't make geopolitical sense either. NATO is our best bet and we will stick with it, especially given the recently re-floated ideas of EU-ran army[1], which would effectively be an anty-brexit "police" stationed all over the EU. With no moderating influence from USofA, unlike NATO. As for V4 being an alternative to EU - I don't know. Maybe, hopefully. Better to make friends than to keep betting on one option that looks increasingly shaky. Especially as EU has this ugly habit of buying our allegiance with structural funds pumped into our economy, making us feel dependent on them.
>[stats about public media]
You show proportional representation in the public media of the governing fraction - back then, PO-PiS coalition, right now, PiS government. You made a point the public media reflecting the political reality. I naturally agree with you and chalk that down as system working as expected. Watch it change once the leading political fraction - as it always did.
Worth repeating that Public media are the minority of media in here; the majority of viewership and readership are the private ones.
>The problem is - Poland tried to prohibit some Holocaust truths as well.
Was that fixed? Great, process works as expected. Ask for a lot, bargain some, settle on what you really wanted. Politics 101.
>and you're still defending it
I didn't, and never will. I value freedom of speech above state-enforced truth. I am unhappy with legislating what is the official truth. The whole point of my post was that we're on a better trajectory than other countries. Not perfect, better. Reliable process grounded in our centuries-long democratic traditions[3] over centrally-managed perfection.
>> We still seem to hold higher plurality standards
>No we don't. If you think we do please show data confirming it.
We're having productive discussions across political aisles. We scream a lot, protest in Warsaw a lot, and continue to run the country. {edit}What we don't do is "don't talk to those people; deplatform those people; don't hire those people". For neither political, nor national/cultural factors of "those people". Which is a real problem in the internet-outrage-mob fueled countries{/edit}
The political scene covers almost full left-to-right spectrum, and it is expected to swing the other way in an election cycle or two. We don't import antisemites en mass, and the immigrants here don't close up into enclaves; instead they live, work and play among us, speaking our language and marrying locally.
The most popular subjects among my politically-active friends are healthcare, pension system, and internet freedoms. Those aren't left-right, or nationalist-internationalist subjects; those are economic bargains we want to tweak and improve. Or, hopefully, overhaul. EU and immigration are somewhat distant subjects exactly because we managed to minimize the impact.[2] {edit}We appreciate GDPR and open market and other goodies from EU in the same sitting we criticize immigration quotas and umpteenth copyright extension and other hare-brained ideas.{/edit}
> Poland consistently scores worse than western Europe (especially than Scandinavian countries)
Is your data showing Germany (re:Chemnitz) as unified and highly trusting their four-time PM? Is your data showing the french happy about soldiers patrolling the streets of Paris? Are the greeks and spanish trusting the government to run it efficiently and stand up to EU when proper to protect their interest? Are your sources glossing over the growing antisemitism in the west?
Also, funny you should mention Scandinavia. How's that Swedish experiment with humanitarian superpower going?
Please page me when our government issues civilians with leaflets on civil defense preparations. For now, concern dismissed with prejudice, due to biased sourcing.
You continue to change the subject and skip inconvenient questions. When I ask for data behind your assumptions you just don't answer. When I provide data to support my assumptions you laugh it off basing on anecdotal evidence and start another offtopic. Yet, in the end you confirmed my point:
> Nationalism is what people want
Precisely. And it's because (among other things) government is actively working to make them want it. And it's a very bad idea, which was the whole point of the original article we discuss here. So mentioning Poland was totally justified.
With that settled I'm done with this discussion. I dislike talking with people jumping on 1000 tangentially related points when they can't answer it. It's a cheap and timewasting tactic.
I understand you don't like nationalism. Tough. Substituting its staunchly opposing ideology of internationalism doesn't help at all, from historical perspective.
As for >[changing subject, skipping questions, jumping on 1000 tangents], I opened up with the very reason: "It strikes me as a narrow view taken to extreme". I then went on to show that the broad socio-political processes work well in our country. Sure, there are some kooky outcomes here and there. We will fix them in democratic way.
Economics is of utmost importance; as long as voters perceive it as going well, they don't go for extremism promising a "quick & easy fix" that of course is neither.
How exactly does Poland end up “outside of EU”? Polish government has no such plans, Polish society is strongly pro-EU, and there’s no legal way in EU treaties to force us out so the only way I can think of is if the EU itself ceases to exists
Constant anti-EU propaganda in public and PIS-related private media. Marginalization of liberal politicians and supporting far right movements to position PIS as the only mainstream party. Presenting western Europe as decadent, failing world Poland has to defend against.
If you asked 10 years ago if brexit can happen people would laugh at you.
This.
People like to imagine that there is some kind of corrective force to history, some invisible hand that will, inevitably, push things into balance and restore normality.
There is not. Many times in history -- for many peoples, nations, and civilisations -- the world has ended. That is a completely normal thing to happen, albeit extremely unpleasant and very often lethal for those involved.
Things are not different this time. If civilisation survives, it will be because people have laboured with great difficulty and courage to make it survive. It has always been thus, and always will be.
Do not take it for granted.
(Edit: unclear language.)