Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said “it may be just and moral” to starve 2 million Gaza residents until Israeli hostages are returned, but “no one in the world would let us.”
I appeal to what I call applied Godwinism which is taking specific examples of what a given Nazi said to justify policies or what a given Nazi did in order to move Germany towards the Holocaust. This has been important here in the States as the US is on the precipice of one party autocracy. Rhetoric in US politics now routinely sounds like the hate-driven rhetoric of the rising German Reich and we’re already seeing in our penal systems, our police state and our national security state the same kind of methods that were used in the German security machine that lead to the atrocities of the concentration camps and, later, the death camps.
See, here in the States, people have trouble seeing the similarity between current events and the Holocaust because we’re not at the point of the Wannsee Conference of 1942 yet (when Auschwitz was a proof of concept of an operational death camp), rather we’re still experimenting with the methods used during Operation Barbarossa, in which the starvation of concentration-camp prisoners was going to slowly, and Einsatzgruppen were tasked with massacring villages and burying them in mass graves, or promoting pogroms within newly occupied regions.
What the current Israeli genocide campaign tells us is that it can happen anywhere, but this has been established policy since the birth of the Israeli state, when the international community decided the Jewish people’s need for a homeland was greater than that of the people they displaced, and not only allowed but encouraged displacement by force. The UN told the Jewish settlers they could move there, and gave them military and materiel support, actively aware the region was already occupied, and set about massacring them the way the US massacred the first nations of the new world.
So this is established precedent: Some lives are more valuable to the international community than others, which is the same pretense by which the German Reich selected who were Lebensunwertes Leben and who had a place in their empire.
So now, as a species, we have to choose if we are going to work towards an egalitarian society, where everyone has a right to live, and to accommodations within the community, or if we live in a stratified society where some people are given privilege over others (by whatever merits, whether skin color, physical might, intellect or even because they have money and guns). History has shown us that so long as we choose the latter approach, it always slides to ethnic cleansing and genocide.
This is the choice we have to make in the US and in Israel, and the guys with money and guns seem to be very interested in keeping their position, at the expense of the rest of us.
I appeal to what I call applied Godwinism which is taking specific examples of what a given Nazi said to justify policies or what a given Nazi did in order to move Germany towards the Holocaust. This has been important here in the States as the US is on the precipice of one party autocracy. Rhetoric in US politics now routinely sounds like the hate-driven rhetoric of the rising German Reich and we’re already seeing in our penal systems, our police state and our national security state the same kind of methods that were used in the German security machine that lead to the atrocities of the concentration camps and, later, the death camps.
See, here in the States, people have trouble seeing the similarity between current events and the Holocaust because we’re not at the point of the Wannsee Conference of 1942 yet (when Auschwitz was a proof of concept of an operational death camp), rather we’re still experimenting with the methods used during Operation Barbarossa, in which the starvation of concentration-camp prisoners was going to slowly, and Einsatzgruppen were tasked with massacring villages and burying them in mass graves, or promoting pogroms within newly occupied regions.
What the current Israeli genocide campaign tells us is that it can happen anywhere, but this has been established policy since the birth of the Israeli state, when the international community decided the Jewish people’s need for a homeland was greater than that of the people they displaced, and not only allowed but encouraged displacement by force. The UN told the Jewish settlers they could move there, and gave them military and materiel support, actively aware the region was already occupied, and set about massacring them the way the US massacred the first nations of the new world.
So this is established precedent: Some lives are more valuable to the international community than others, which is the same pretense by which the German Reich selected who were Lebensunwertes Leben and who had a place in their empire.
So now, as a species, we have to choose if we are going to work towards an egalitarian society, where everyone has a right to live, and to accommodations within the community, or if we live in a stratified society where some people are given privilege over others (by whatever merits, whether skin color, physical might, intellect or even because they have money and guns). History has shown us that so long as we choose the latter approach, it always slides to ethnic cleansing and genocide.
This is the choice we have to make in the US and in Israel, and the guys with money and guns seem to be very interested in keeping their position, at the expense of the rest of us.
Robot dogs with guns are coming.