Kamala Makes Her Bones On Palestine

There is some logic to everyone in the West skating on some genocide or the other, innit? We’re kicking and screaming, mostly just screaming, and we’re still getting dragged. The change the world claims to want will only come from exhausting the status quo, but you won’t do that from within Western governments, and you won’t do that by playing nicer than them, and you can’t do it without destroying yourself one way or the other. If you finally identify the farce that always was liberalism, just a mass coping mechanism, you must identify the farce (or convenience) in its progeny: inalienable rights… and it’s a slippery slope from there. All that’s left is materialism and entropy. You can either be part of it like AOC, and embrace some facsimile of life, roasted by conscience and certainly going to hell, or you can live your days harangued and horrified, tortured by your impotence on one hand, and society on the other.

Should Harris become the president, the guy with whom she will have to work if she hopes to get anything she wants through congress is Zionist Chuck Schumer. Last election cycle he was able to maneuver to get the two persons who might have been able to mount an effective primary challenge out of his way. Then Representative Anthony Delgado was appointed lieutenant governor; he may well be NY State’s next governor and could conceivably become president himself. Meanwhile, the ginned up Force the Vote over the then unpassable medicare for all was a warning to AOC. She tried to tell clueless activists that the votes for it weren’t there, but the bought and paid for lefty shock jock from Pasadena–a whole CONTINENT away from AOC’s district in NYC–wasn’t about to listen. Shock jock, his name escapes me, was at that time represented by, guess who, next CA senator Adam Schiff, that’s who. Also a Zionist, one might add. One would think he might have “called out” Schiff, his own representative at the time.

Representative Ocassio-Cortez was not elected to be standard bearer for The Left. She was elected to represent her district, which by all accounts, I have relatives who live in her district, she does.

I don’t like Zionist influence in our public life either, but it has been allowed to happen, and our governing class is not suddenly going to turn against Israel. What I think is now possible is that Israel and its’ American supporters will have to be paying for what they get from us. I rather think that something like that is what Netanyahu was told by Harris in the private meeting in July.

I don’t like the very-ambitious because they’re so much harder to read than regular folks. They’ll say anything. Doesn’t mean they’re all callous and bad, but one still must compare previous promises with actual actions with all contexts considered. While Trump and Biden have well-proven themselves with their actions while in power, Kamala is less proven than them both.

The least amount of D convention crowd interest happened during the foreign policy parts. This tells me that the “genocide” line needs better optics. Otherwise too many rationalize that it’s all ‘fog of war’ stuff. The best I’ve been able to do for the poorly informed is offer videos from holocaust scholars and mercenaries bragging about taking pot shots at children. I’m hoping that just because many seem to need Life Magazine-style photos of obvious exterminations like at Auschwitz, doesn’t mean that other graphic proofs won’t be effective.

As for liberals, I’d prefer to assume the above. They need to be better informed, not better moralized. Texts made the rounds in the reactionary echochamber which described far lefties (Bolsheviks) as using liberals to gain political power, then genociding them afterwards to eliminate any challenges to their new power. Don’t want to appear that way here. Liberals may simply be poorly informed and shaming wont work.

@Anon:

Once you understand that we are ruled by high-functioning (in the sense that most can fake empathy when called upon) sociopaths, everything they do makes sense.

To use my favorite analogy, the armed robber already knows that “Thou Shalt Not Steal!” and he does not care. Hold a loaded Colt Python to his head with the sure knowledge that you will without hesitation pull that trigger on that big motherfucker magnum, and he will be the one on his knees, tearfully quoting Holy Scripture to you.

And he will not care a whit whether or not you are legally entitled to spatter his brains on the wall.

I call what’s going on in Gaza genocide.

I also think of history. I put myself in Europe of the first part of the Twentieth Century. Maybe, even worse, a German in the Thirties. Or worse than that, a German Jew in the 1930’s.

So say my family has been German for hundreds of years. I speak German. My children speak German. My father is a decorated veteran of the First World War. The terms of each person’s contract with the state has been fulfilled, in many cases with our own blood. I am a citizen in the deepest most originalist terms. I have subsumed my personal sovereignty in the greater sovereignty of my country. Now my Fatherland. A sacred contract. In return, that larger sovereign state has pledged, with it’s very existence, my security, my family’s security. One for all and all for one.

Then things start to take a turn in the late Twenties. Over there on the fringes things are being said outloud but in obscure corners; obscure enough to be dismissed for now. There is a tone of grievance and a promises of retribution, but just murmurs. And they keep getting a little bit louder and a little more distinct. Slowly there are men marching in streets. The members of a small sedition in a beer hall somewhere are now being hailed as “heroes” by their leader and the men become more numerous and they start to have uniforms and the leader gets enough of a vote from the minority to use the rules and norms, carefully constructed over the years, to gain even more power.

Then, in a matter of months, the State is becoming an instrument for repression. That sacred contract has become just another instrument to be used against itself and those who thought, up until that time, that it would protect them, find that it has become their enemy. Their existential enemy- in the most concrete sense of the word.

When the trains finally stop running and the smokestacks stop emitting their human smoke the few survivors wake up and realize that they have put their faith and their lives in a treacherous machine that has gassed and burned and destroyed everything and everyone of any personal value. Never again they say. Never again will I, we, put our faith and lives in the hands of those who hate us and want us dead. We will make our own state and we will kill anyone who ever makes even the slightest move to come for us or our families. And the State of Israel was born.

When I look at it from that perspective I get a glimmer of the kind of sickness that has been implanted in the souls of those who survived.

In the world of states it turns out to be kill or be killed. Survival first. Trust no one. And why should they? When you’ve been betrayed by what is supposed to be the ultimate repository of centuries of cultural values there’s not much trust left anymore. It’s all, fuck around, find out. The abused have become the abuser.

“So those who are not us and don’t know what it has felt like to be betrayed in that way say who cares what others say?” This time we live and fuck the rest of you and, at the moment, that’s become Bibi Netanyahu incarnate. And so far no one has had the political imagination or moral stature to resist him.

I pray for that person but I know I’m not him. All I can hope is if and when my moment to act in some deeper or more consequential way comes, in whatever way it’s deemed, I am able. Perhaps that’s where everybody is at right now. Why so often it feels that the world is holding its collective breath.

So I don’t blame as much as mourn. At the moment.

That’s where we are as far as I can tell. I have neither the political imagination or moral standing to create a new world out of this millenia’s old conflict. We seem to be on a river that is flowing to only God knows where and with a resistless force. It’s kill or be killed now and the abused has become the abuser. It’s as old as the Bible whence it pretends to have originated but I suspect it goes back a good bit further. So, while I am repelled, I find it difficult to sit in easy judgement. I am deeply uncomfortable.
I should be. We all should be. At least I can acknowledge that.

Were Trump to be elected…

Were Harris to be elected…

Do you have a viable alternative, or is it all just whining?

To the ten or so comments posted as of this writing, I mostly concur, although there’s a whiff of nihilism to anon’s observations—it’s a western world malady.

The political and personal trajectory of both Kamala bala get down on your knees and pray to Willie and of AOC’s perfidious pandering have been well remarked upon here and elsewhere.

I’ll mention once again my dismay at otherwise intelligent friends in my circle who are Kamala cheerleaders. You go girl! They all suffer fromTDS.
I’m mute around the lib’s delusions. Attempting to influence, persuade and educate is futile. Why bother?

Yes brothers and sisters, it’s the same old same old. Roll out the tumbrils and make a new order. Not happening in the political realm. Maybe in the personal there’s a prayer of hope and transformation, but that’s up to you (and me, too).

Have a restful weekend, if you enjoy that luxury. Every day’s a death day in some parts.

@Willy: “Liberals may simply be poorly informed…”

Now picture yourself explaining this to a pregnant woman in Gaza, or perhaps, a retiree in Flint, Michigan. At some point (around 2016) that sentiment rings hollow. Is it healthcare, or ‘access’? At present, the information is visceral.

Kamala’s husband and step-children are Jewish. I have a feeling that, on Israel and Gaza, she will go wherever her husband and stepchildren go. If her Jewish husband and stepchildren fully support Israel, then she will also fully support Israel. If they have problems on what Israel has been doing to Gaza and Palestinians, (like many Jews in America do,) then there may be hope that she as the President will take a more balanced stance on the Israel-Palestinian issue.

My “plan” has always been to try to tell the truth, moral or factual. I try not to be a fool. I am not trying to be in control or in charge or powerful. I sometimes try to persuade other people, mostly I hope in the general direction of being kind and honest.

Whoops left out the word “sometimes” when quoting bruce wilder.
A word can make a difference.

I am an idealist of sorts, but “noble” seems a bit too . . .

I was a liberal back before it meant performative gaslighter and friend to the CIA.