I haven’t changed my mind that you’re applying a standard to Israel that you aren’t applying consistently in others, I’m not putting words in your mouth.
But do you not see my bigger point here? Communist writer Frederic Lordon makes the same point in Imperium: Structures and Affects of Political Bodies, that the anarchist/ultra-left dispute about states necessarily bypasses the very real struggles for national self-determination of peoples. For the person left without a passport, stateless, a refugee, it isn’t an abstract question whether or not states in general should exist. It’s a luxury permitted only to those who’ve never experienced the alternative.
So what you’re actually doing, in my view, is coming to two terribly traumatised groups of peoples (Jews and Palestinians), each struggling for a nation-state they can call their own, that they can call home, where they live and work and prosper without fear, and saying, ‘Yes but don’t you realise states are oppressive?’ Even Lenin talks about this many times in his works on the question of nationalism for Communists.
the anarchist/ultra-left dispute about states necessarily bypasses the very real struggles for national self-determination of peoples.
… yes. and i don’t have an easy answer about what to do for all those people but i do have a pretty easy principle that “states are tools of oppression” and “we should oppose them killing anyone.”
I don’t have any problem with the existence of the state. I think it’s an inevitability following from Spinoza’s humanist anthropology, as set out in Frederic Lordon’s book I explained earlier.
The problem is one you have to confront: as a documented, passported citizen of a state, it is in fact for you to reconcile how reconcile these views. That on the one hand, Israel has no right to eixst; that no state has a right to exist; that Palestinians are justified in ‘armed resistance’ for a Palestinian state; but that this also has no right to exist and should be abolished like all the rest. But not before the Jewish state, of course, and if that were to happen, then I guess we’d just see what happened to the Jewish minority there and it’s for someone else to mourn the consequences.
All the while, you’re telling millions of people who either grew up and still are stateless (because of UNRWA, the Arab states, and the UN’s bespoke definition of Palestinian refugees), or those Jews struggling for a state of their own for the first time in 2,000 years, that actually you know better than them and the struggle for a nation state is the wrong thing to want.
I think this is a crucial and fatal weakness in the anarchist/ultra-left ideology.
It’s a contradictory mess of views for a leftist to hold, covered by Lordon in the first chapter of his book.
you’re telling millions of people who either grew up and still are stateless (because of UNRWA, the Arab states, and the UN’s bespoke definition of Palestinian refugees), or those Jews struggling for a state of their own for the first time in 2,000 years, that actually you know better than them
I have a principal that says they are wrong, but I never said I know better than them.
what you’re actually doing, in my view, is coming to two terribly traumatised groups of peoples (Jews and Palestinians), each struggling for a nation-state they can call their own, that they can call home, where they live and work and prosper without fear, and saying, ‘Yes but don’t you realise states are oppressive?’
so you do see that i have no double standard. i don’t see why you insist on arguing with me as though i’m someone else.
I haven’t changed my mind that you’re applying a standard to Israel that you aren’t applying consistently in others, I’m not putting words in your mouth.
But do you not see my bigger point here? Communist writer Frederic Lordon makes the same point in Imperium: Structures and Affects of Political Bodies, that the anarchist/ultra-left dispute about states necessarily bypasses the very real struggles for national self-determination of peoples. For the person left without a passport, stateless, a refugee, it isn’t an abstract question whether or not states in general should exist. It’s a luxury permitted only to those who’ve never experienced the alternative.
So what you’re actually doing, in my view, is coming to two terribly traumatised groups of peoples (Jews and Palestinians), each struggling for a nation-state they can call their own, that they can call home, where they live and work and prosper without fear, and saying, ‘Yes but don’t you realise states are oppressive?’ Even Lenin talks about this many times in his works on the question of nationalism for Communists.
… yes. and i don’t have an easy answer about what to do for all those people but i do have a pretty easy principle that “states are tools of oppression” and “we should oppose them killing anyone.”
Then you need to think harder.
this is just posturing. you don’t have a reasonable solution to the conundrum either.
I don’t have any problem with the existence of the state. I think it’s an inevitability following from Spinoza’s humanist anthropology, as set out in Frederic Lordon’s book I explained earlier.
The problem is one you have to confront: as a documented, passported citizen of a state, it is in fact for you to reconcile how reconcile these views. That on the one hand, Israel has no right to eixst; that no state has a right to exist; that Palestinians are justified in ‘armed resistance’ for a Palestinian state; but that this also has no right to exist and should be abolished like all the rest. But not before the Jewish state, of course, and if that were to happen, then I guess we’d just see what happened to the Jewish minority there and it’s for someone else to mourn the consequences.
All the while, you’re telling millions of people who either grew up and still are stateless (because of UNRWA, the Arab states, and the UN’s bespoke definition of Palestinian refugees), or those Jews struggling for a state of their own for the first time in 2,000 years, that actually you know better than them and the struggle for a nation state is the wrong thing to want.
I think this is a crucial and fatal weakness in the anarchist/ultra-left ideology.
It’s a contradictory mess of views for a leftist to hold, covered by Lordon in the first chapter of his book.
I have a principal that says they are wrong, but I never said I know better than them.
yes
no
you can’t think quoting lenin to justify the existence of states would mollify me.
so you do see that i have no double standard. i don’t see why you insist on arguing with me as though i’m someone else.
you’ve been wrong this whole time.
you are.