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File: 1775414055328.png (755.4 KB, 1729x1215, IMG_3312.png)

 

I see a lot of talk concerning how Israel should be supported by the USA and European countries for various reasons and, notably, none of them concern with material benefits for either native Europeans or long-time American citizens, instead focusing on abstractions and ideals. As Trump has led the USA into another forever war with Iran (at the behest of Israel, per the words of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio), it is pertinent to talk about a common anti-Zionist talking point that I find counterproductive. Namely: Israel’s colonialism is the same as that of American settle colonialism from the late 18th century to the early 20th century.

This is incorrect as, while America is a settler-colonial state, nonetheless was founded on the basis of enlightenment principles like equality before the law and liberty, considering how the American and French revolutions at the time were leftist at the time of the events, with the notion of equality of men itself being already extremely radical at a time when absolute monarchies were the standard in Europe. That’s not all, as contrary to popular opinion the Founding Fathers themselves weren’t conservative. Whether it’s the lack of any mention specifying the USA as a “white Christian country” founded on the basis of theology in the constitution and the federalist papers, George Washington himself coming to oppose slavery before the abolitionist movement began to gain momentum, many of said fathers being at best deists or nominally Christian, the USA being effectively the first democratic republic in history with limited suffrage being a short-lived experiment that was swept away in favour of universal male suffrage, Thomas Jefferson himself owning a copy of the Quran and a version of the Bible excised of all supernatural elements and among other examples show that the USA was far from the hotbed of reactionary politics both liberals and chuds tend to portray it as. Even the Indian Removal Act that led to the infamous “Trail of Tears” wasn’t unanimously agreed upon, with strong opposition by Christian missionaries and other politicians who opposed it based on the shared humanity and parity between white settlers Native Americans. Indeed, while such ideals coexisted with institutionalised inequality, it is precisely by appealing to those founding ideals unique to America's foundations that movements like MLK's civil rights was even possible. Indeed, had it not been for America, most of the progressive movements in other parts of the west wouldn't even exist (e.g., Germany's gay liberation movement, extirpated by nazism and only resurged in the postwar period because of the rise of America's gay rights movement.)

So it’s no wonder given all this that, despite the reproduction of reactionary politics like Manifest Destiny and Jim Crow laws, the notion of equality (or pretence to it) persisted throughout American history, which laid the seeds for the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements of the contemporary era. And I would argue that it is said notion that distinguishes the American project from other settler-colonies that were more explicit on their racial/ethnic/theological basis, such as Argentina, Australia, Canada, and of course, Israel.

It should also be noted that the USA, for all of its faults, isn’t currently segregating Native Americans from mainstream American society via a state-sponsored countrywide system of racial segregation, nor bombing every Indian reserve and sponsoring white Americans (immigrant or not) to steal land from indigenous people and kicking out of their home by force. So, one could counter-argue that it’s a difference of ‘degrees of coloniality’ rather than absence of it. But I digress. Not to peddle Whig history slop, but it’s undeniable that America was founded on a notion of equality between races and faiths that is completely absent in contrast to the founding of Israel.

Israel just isn’t analogous to America, especially given how Israel both defines itself in particularist ethno-centric ways and has a theological basis that America lacks, as well as how Israeli settler-colonialism follows along the models of standard European colonialism combined with state terrorism both against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza (to the point that Israel is engaging in genocide there). So while the USA isn’t currently engaging in genocide against its natives, the same can’t be said for Israel and its society, where the grand majority of Israelis are effectively kahanists per the latest opinion polls. And that goes for the entire political right and most of the political left in Israel, so let that sink in.

From a leftist standpoint, it can be said that settler-colonialism in the Americas played a historically progressive role in developing productive forces, while simultaneously producing deeply reactionary social relations. The same cannot be said of modern Israeli settler-colonialism, which does not represent a transition to a higher mode of production, but rather a reproduction of imperial domination in a more concentrated form. Ultimately, the claim that “Israel is just like America” obscures more than it reveals. Both are products of colonial history, but they occupy different positions within the global capitalist system. Recognizing this distinction allows for a clearer analysis of imperialism today, especially as Palestinians (unlike the indigenous peoples of the Americas) had their own conception of private property alongside their own bourgeoisie that predates the Balfour Declaration.

Now, if we had to give the closest western analogue, that would be Australia. Back when he was just a war-mongering liberal instead of a war-mongering white nationalist radlib, Drew Pavlou debated (and lost) against neo-nazi Joel Davis on immigration, with Joel making the interesting point that Australia was ran as a white nationalist colonial state and that the founding fathers of Australia and its past PMs were under no delusion that Australia was anything more than a white nationalist state, the “White Australia Policy” being the formalisation of such ideals into law. Indeed, since the dominion’s government lacked any significant armed opposition on the part of Aboriginals of Australia, it can be said that the current Australian policies towards mass immigration and multiculturalism were less about equality than they were about chasing after cheap labor per the needs of the capitalist elites and perhaps tailing after America. The same can be said in the cases of the republic of Argentina and the dominion of Canada, both of which were ran explicitly as white nationalist states, albeit with special emphasis on their links with their metropoles (formerly Spain and currently the UK/France, respectively), the liberalisations of immigration laws and moves towards a less racially-exclusionary definition of their identities only occurring in the late 20th century long after the US did the same.

All in all: There’s nothing inconsistent between being an anti-Zionist and being an American patriot on the basis of opposition to genocide and anti-imperialism. It's best not to give zionists more ammo, as it is a common hasbara talking point to equate Israeli settler-colonialism with America's one, and thus equivocate all critiques of zionism as being implicitly anti-American.

Sources:

https://newrepublic.com/post/207325/donald-trump-marco-rubio-israel-iran

https://www.newarab.com/news/poll-huge-majority-israelis-back-gaza-ethnic-cleansing

https://southasiajournal.net/the-problem-isnt-just-netanyahu-its-israeli-society

https://www.meforum.org/middle-east-quarterly/the-conundrum-of-israeli-arab-citizenship

https://www.britannica.com/event/White-Australia-Policy

P.S.: I’m not trying to make apologetics for American atrocities then and now, I’m simply pointing out the need to fight against the attempts of both Hasbara mockingbird media and misguided anti-zionists to equivocate American history with Israeli history to sway American public opinion on Israel’s favor. Unless you think America as a nation is in any way redeemable, then you might as well give up on agitating for revolution in America and just go to another country. What more can I say?

I admire your efforts to debunk rabid self-hating radlibs but I've literally never seen anyone here, not even unironic Third Worldists, equate the USA with Israel

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>>2768993
>>2768987
I do equate them and I go a step further saying that those englightment principles you talk about lead to genocide.
Liberal Whig historians and marxist positivist are not ready to talk about this.

>From a leftist standpoint, it can be said that settler-colonialism in the Americas played a historically progressive role in developing productive forces, while simultaneously producing deeply reactionary social relations. The same cannot be said of modern Israeli settler-colonialism, which does not represent a transition to a higher mode of production, but rather a reproduction of imperial domination in a more concentrated form.
Good trvke

>>2768994
The text you cite is the byproduct of Holocaust trauma, unironically. It is deeply biased by the tunnel visioned pessimism of the authors, not unlike J. Sakai with Settlers (reacting to the political failure of the New Left). It would be helpful for your critical thinking skills to consider the historical context of a text before treating it as gospel. For them, the Holocaust is on a psycho-emotional level the Big Evil. We call that recency bias. Ever heard of the Circassian genocide? I'm guessing not. I invite you to check out the opening summary on Wikipedia.

>>2768987
Israel is not quite the same as the US but everything you said about the founders and US history is bullshit.
Washington never freed his slaves. Neither did Jefferson. The US freed the slaves decades after Britain did. There is nothing special about the US when it comes to ideals of "equality". It's a fake narcissistic history. If you want to believe in that history to manipulate people to positive ends that's fine but it's not real.

>>2769030
"Ideas shape history" isn't Marxism, it's not even Hegel, it's literally garden variety liberalism. The Enlightenment didn't invent genocide. Carthago delenda est. The historical myopia and lack of self-awareness of critical theory is embarrassing.

>>2768987
This attempt to throw Israel under the bus is pretty revealing. Disturbed Americans can wash away their guilty conscience by pinning all the blame on Israel. The Zionist entity's founding fathers were all firm believers in Enlightenment values of liberty, equality, reason, and secularism. The Zionist understanding of Jewish identity is entirely secular.

The Enlightenment was always the movement of an elite, the European bourgeoisie and especially the slave-planter class of the Americas. Slavery, colonization, and the exploitation of the working class didn't contradict Enlightenment ideals at all. Go read what Locke or Jefferson had to say about Native Americans or what Kant had to say about blacks. When Napoleon began the French colonization of Africa in Egypt, he did it in the name of spreading Enlightenment values to oppressed Egyptians, something latter French admins would do, albeit without his Islamic garb. Enlightenment values should always be suspect because they reflect the attitude of the Euro-American elite and served their interests.

Israel is a secular and liberal democratic nation-state and behaves just like one, eliminating its rivals, maximizing productivity, genociding natives to steal their lands etc. these are all the outcomes of the Enlightenment.

>>2769009
>>2769009
>he text you cite is the byproduct of Holocaust trauma, unironically. It is deeply biased by the tunnel visioned pessimism of the authors
That's an interesting take, but doesn't make the text any less lucid. Truth is that people can't handle trukes dispensers.
There is a whole strand of criticism enlightenment ideology from the right and the left that are just as valid as the ones DOE or Minima Moralia without being written by victims of persecution, but /leftypol/ is not ready to drop their whiggish shit
>Circassian genocide? I'm guessing not. I invite you to check out the opening summary on Wikipedia
If the point you are trying to make here is that DOE claims that englightment created genocide you are wrong, it's throught its self negation that enlightment reproduces the forms that it seek to abolish. Example: economy in the hands of the experts, no different than the bible in the hands of the church.

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>>2769038
The United States has already given Israel more aid than South Vietnam and Afghanistan and there is no end in sight. American should just walk away from that quagmire.

>>2769013

Correction: In his lifetime, Washington only freed one of his slaves, but all of them were freed after his death since he decided to free them in his will after h the death of Martha, his wife. Regardless, they were all freed a year after his death. Washington’s abolitionist views late in his life are well-attested.

Source: https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/washingtons-1799-will

Although imperfect, Tbf to both the French and American bourgeois revolutionaries the entire idea of equality among men was already radical for the 18th and 19th centuries, so can’t really blame them for their flaws as, cliched as it sounds, they were men of their times.

>>2769036
Ideas do shape history because they reflect relations of power, economic structures, they motivate people to take action, they justify etc. In any case, your Marxism is pretty vulgar because no serious Marxist would deny that the superstructure influences the base. I'm also not sure how criticism of liberal values as genocidal is somehow liberal. Even the Carthage case doesn't really apply, because that refers to the destruction of a city state and its inhabitants as enemies of Roman state, whereas the Native American and Palestinian genocides is built on the theology of progress: "we have a right to steal their land and kill them off because they are less evolved than us, they were doing nothing with the land, they are non-productive, enemies of humanity etc." This ideology doesn't even refer to a specific enemy (any particular tribe or group of natives) but rather all native Americans in general on the grounds all of them simply are this way. Massacres are of course nothing new in human history, but the idea of dispossessing a whole group of people on liberal grounds is.

>>2769043
America is Israel's cornerman. Israel is simply a proxy of the US, one with its own level of independence, but a proxy nonetheless.

>>2769013
>The US freed the slaves decades after Britain did.
Britain never really abolished slavery anymore than the USA did. It would continue in its colonies well into the 20th century. In Australia, Aboriginals were used as slave labor until the 1970s.

>>2768994
both these kaikes supported zionism btw

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>>2769048
>>2769041
And here we arrive at the confusion of critical theory. The reification of ideology. Let's pull up "vulgar" Karl Marx for reference, to set the record straight (bolded emphasis is mine):

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapter 1
>Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95.
[…]
>When we think about this conjuring up of the dead of world history, a salient difference reveals itself. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time – that of unchaining and establishing modern bourgeois society – in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases.
[…]
>But unheroic though bourgeois society is, it nevertheless needed heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars to bring it into being. And in the austere classical traditions of the Roman Republic the bourgeois gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions, that they needed to conceal from themselves the bourgeois-limited content of their struggles and to keep their passion on the high plane of great historic tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed from the Old Testament the speech, emotions, and illusions for their bourgeois revolution. When the real goal had been achieved and the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk.
>Thus the awakening of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given task in the imagination, not recoiling from its solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not making its ghost walk again.
[…]
>The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content – here the content goes beyond the phrase.
Chapter 3
[…]
>Before we pursue parliamentary history further, some remarks are necessary to avoid common misconceptions regarding the whole character of the epoch that lies before us. Looked at with the eyes of democrats, the period of the Legislative National Assembly is concerned with what the period of the Constituent Assembly was concerned with: the simple struggle between republicans and royalists. The movement itself, however, they sum up in the one shibboleth: “reaction” – night, in which all cats are gray and which permits them to reel off their night watchman’s commonplaces. And to be sure, at first sight the party of Order reveals a maze of different royalist factions which not only intrigue against each other – each seeking to elevate its own pretender to the throne and exclude the pretender of the opposing faction – but also all unite in common hatred of, and common onslaughts on, the “republic.” In opposition to this royalist conspiracy the Montagne, for its part, appears as the representative of the “republic.” The party of Order appears to be perpetually engaged in a “reaction,” directed against press, association, and the like, neither more nor less than in Prussia, and, as in Prussia, carried out in the form of brutal police intervention by the bureaucracy, the gendarmerie, and the law courts. The Montagne, for its part, is just as continually occupied in warding off these attacks and thus defending the “eternal rights of man” as every so-called people’s party has done, more or less, for a century and a half. If one looks at the situation and the parties more closely, however, this superficial appearance, which veils the class struggle and the peculiar physiognomy of this period, disappears.
>Legitimists and Orleanists, as we have said, formed the two great factions of the party of Order. Was what held these factions fast to their pretenders and kept them apart from each other nothing but fleur-de-lis and tricolor, House of Bourbon and House of Orleans, different shades of royalism – was it at all the confession of faith of royalism? Under the Bourbons, big landed property had governed, with its priests and lackeys; under Orleans, high finance, large-scale industry, large-scale trade, that is, capital, with its retinue of lawyers, professors, and smooth-tongued orators. The Legitimate Monarchy was merely the political expression of the hereditary rule of the lords of the soil, as the July Monarchy was only the political expression of the usurped rule of the bourgeois parvenus. What kept the two factions apart, therefore, was not any so-called principles, it was their material conditions of existence, two different kinds of property; it was the old contrast between town and country, the rivalry between capital and landed property. That at the same time old memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and principles bound them to one or the other royal house, who denies this? Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought, and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, who derives them through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and the starting point of his activity. While each faction, Orleanists and Legitimists, sought to make itself and the other believe that it was loyalty to the two royal houses which separated them, facts later proved that it was rather their divided interests which forbade the uniting of the two royal houses.
>And as in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must distinguish still more the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality. Orleanists and Legitimists found themselves side by side in the republic, with equal claims. If each side wished to effect the restoration of its own royal house against the other, that merely signified that each of the two great interests into which the bourgeoisie is split – landed property and capital - sought to restore its own supremacy and the subordination of the other. We speak of two interests of the bourgeoisie, for large landed property, despite its feudal coquetry and pride of race, has been rendered thoroughly bourgeois by the development of modern society. Thus the Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent.

I'm going to stop here because frankly it's not my job to recite a whole god-damned long essay to prove a point. I could also cite parts of The German Ideology, I'm thinking of the camera obscura metaphor, but it's unnecessary in determining what is "vulgar" Marxism as we can tell.

For Marx, ideology is self-deception. A feel-good lie that masks the underlying historical process. Regardless of what shape the mask takes, does not affect the fundamental "necessary" (overdetermined) historical process.

We can see this very clearly in the extraction of agricultural surplus value in virtually every single "actually existing socialism" state for the sake of industry, or defense in the cases of Cuba and Democratic Kampuchea. Soviet economist Evgeny Preobrazhensky, during the 1920s economic debates, proposed extracting surplus value from the peasantry, calling it "primitive socialist accumulation", in reference to the primitive accumulation of capitalism, that is the privatization of the commons, displacement of the countryside and external colonial wealth extraction through which capitalism "funded itself". Bukharin, favoring Lenin's NEP, criticized him, calling this model "internal colonialism". Well, guess what happened? Though Stalin's administration later executed Preobrazhensky during the Great Purge, they literally copied his model. Soviet agricultural laborers were exploited. All the following socialist states imitated the blueprint, with varying degrees of success, including "peasants are revolutionary subjects" Mao and Pol Pot, what a shocker. "We take agriculture as the basic factor and use the fruits of agriculture systematically to build industry […]." said Pol Pot, who had plans to import machinery by exporting rice, though it never came to fruition (no pun intended).

I had an illuminating interaction with a Chinese socialist about this. Mao is idealized as a hero of the peasantry by those who reify his slogans rather than looking at the historical process being masked. Even today, the rural population of China is taken advantage of through the hukou system, which denies them social programs if they move away from their village to a city, which inevitably happens as the cities are where the jobs are. Though I did not verify this, I was told their pensions are also disproportionately lower than the pensions of people from the cities, and Chinese economists justify this by literally using "bootstraps" rhetoric and saying determining the "true contribution" of their labor is impossible.

But of course, it's not limited to China or "actually existing socialism" states, if you've been paying attention, since we mentioned primitive accumulation, which came in great part from looting the countryside for the benefit of the city, even Marx/Engels wrote about the rural/urban divide. The USA today relies on illegal migrant labor to feed itself. The food is only cheap because of stolen wages. And it must be cheap or else there will be riots. No state in history so far has "solved" this problem… regardless of their ideology, that is, "costume", as "vulgar" Karl Marx would say.

>>2769048
>"we have a right to steal their land and kill them off because they are less evolved than us, they were doing nothing with the land, they are non-productive, enemies of humanity etc"
But all of this is irrelevant unless they have the material basis to do so.

>>2769043
A few things to clear up:

  • Aid to Egypt and other Israeli allies should be counted as de facto aid to Israel as that’s what incentives other west Asian countries from not plotting against Israel.

  • Much of the aid to Israel is payed not just via direct means, but also in terms of loans that are different from the money typically sent to countries like Haiti in that it’s sent in such a way that it doesn’t cripple Israel financially

  • It’s questionable if said “military aid” isn’t used by the Israeli government for civilian use like education, universal healthcare, and more. Indeed, the lack of transparency in this regard is generally low

So not only does the US taxpayer’s money being wasted on aid to Israel, but also to subsidise its geopolitical security as well as fund its healthcare and education systems. Really egregious if you ask me.

>>2769048

Wrt the last point, that’s not entirely true. If anything, Israel extracts far more resources from the USA than the other way around, and the Jewish lobby’s power enables it to have indefinite support among at least the DNC and RNC-adjacent wings of the American duopolistic uniparty. Indeed, the US has little next to nothing to gain from wrecking the Middle East at Israel’s behest (as shown by Marco Rubio confirming that Israel prompted the US government to join Israel’s war against Iran).

In fact, I’ll go further and state that not only were the wars in Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, and now Iran were all wars for Israel, but also that Israel functions less as America’s proxy (given how every US president since Bush Sr has been completely subservient to Israel) and more as America’s colonial metropole, with America being a de facto Israeli neocolony. In short, America is to Israel what India was to the British empire, and the British Raj was effectively a joint venture between Indian elites from various societal strata and the British colonial administration.

>>2768987
None of this gets behind the differing material interests at play.

The USA was largely settled by declassed peasants and plantation slavers escaping Great Britain and producing a genocidal combination of a wavefront of ruined settlers who had no interest in expanding the supply of slaves for the slavers and African slave importing planters who encouraged settlement to avoid clashes with the declassed peasants in the colonies proper.

In addition to being a military base in SWANA, Israel was a criminal hub to wreck Socialist states and a straightforward bribe from Jewish finance-capitalists to combat the popularity of Bolshevism among Jewish workers.

The core of Statesian reaction today remains in the exploitation of Black and migrant labor in the South.

The core of Israeli reaction is outside Israel in the exploitation of workers in the pro-Zionist petrostates of SWANA.

>>2769182
what funny about the British Raj was that the exact same debates were had that people have today about israeli influence, national interest, lobbies, and even shadow governments.

>>2769188
Brahmins are definitely the Jews of India.

>>2769177
>>2769043
>>2769182
I like how in the year of 2026 we are still pretending American politicians aren't being bribed to be pro-Zionist, because this "dangerous truth" would lead to antisemitism or something, so we instead pretend that Israel is just a puppet state of AmeriKKKa. Ignoring the fact that antisemitism is on the rise regardless of what useless armchair demagogues are obscuring, because as it turns out, American people don't like not having healthcare and the rest of the world doesn't like not having oil, so latching onto antisemitism in the absence of a serious socialist political program is par for the course.
Lenin states in Imperialism or State and Revolution (can't remember) that one of the reasons why states act in bourgeois interests is because politicians get bribed. Point blank. Why are we pretending to be stupid?
>>2769184
Israel was actually initially supported by the USSR. The shift towards the USA came a bit after.

>>2769194
Sir Moses Haim Montefiore was British and Edmond James de Rothschild was French. The USSR only supported Zionism for a small period of time anyhow.

>>2769194
>The american Bourg has no interest in controlling oil supply! It's just that Israel is cobtrolling them
Drop dead /pol/tard

>>2769280
How does war with Iran accomplish this? Are you retarded?

>>2769315
Because Iran has vast oil reserves?

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>>2769013
Founder Benjamin Franklin was not only the first president of the Abolitionist Society, he also founded the first school for 'Negros' in the US.
After getting to KNOW and making FRIENDS with Black people his racism diminished and he did what he could to aid the struggle for freedom.

Many former homophobes do the same thing when they make a gay friend and then begin attending pride parades etc.

>>2769194
>Ignoring the fact that antisemitism is on the rise regardless of what useless armchair demagogues are obscuring, because as it turns out, American people don't like not having healthcare and the rest of the world doesn't like not having oil, so latching onto antisemitism in the absence of a serious socialist political program is par for the course.
That's true and antisemitism does fill in for that, but I do need to emphasize that antisemitism is retarded and it's probably not going to lead to healthcare or cheaper oil prices. It doesn't have a great record. I think it of it like a form of braindead populism that acts as a mental block, because if you think the Jews are responsible for the world economy, then you've already figured it out and don't need to do any further investigation on how the world economy works, so you're going to mentally retard yourself. I just think it's important to raise this.

>>2769194
people who downplay the power of the lobby are just worried it'll bring out all the schizos from the woodwork, all of a sudden everyone will blame israel for all the crimes of US imperialism, and focuses on frankist sabbatean cabals and holocaust shit like profession xiamen jiang does instead of real material analysis.

>>2768987
you can't compare israeli and american colonialism because they are two ends of the same dildo. comparative ethics are a dirty fucking joke. the us and israel cooperate israel is the us is nato is british empire is european colonialism.

>>2769384
Who else has vast oil reserves? Venezuela? The Gulf States? Is the US invading those right now? Why is Israel occupying Lebanese territory with ground troops and forcing civilians out? Have you considered that maybe trying to invade Iran is a retarded idea to begin with? You'd have a more coherent thesis if you had said "they knew Iran would close the strait and drive up the price of oil, they're doing insider trading to profit, they know there was never a chance of the invasion being successful because that wasn't the intent". But instead you're talking about controlling oil supply. Right after the kidnapping operation in Venezuela, which has accomplished forcing Venezuela onto the negotiation table regarding oil.

>>2769674
Antisemitism is the "socialism of fools".
>>2769703
I'm afraid the schizos haven't even reached their final form. QAnon and the Trump administration feel like a prelude in retrospect of the ugly things to come. More and more people are starting to believe the Epstein files have "vindicated" conspiracy schizos (they didn't). It's our zeitgeist's "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" except, unlike the Protocols which were known to be a forgery, it's "real" (meaning not actually real as they imagine it to be, insert Baudrillard or whatever post-structural esotericist that explains it in more academically prestigious fashion).

>>2768993
>I admire your efforts to debunk rabid self-hating radlibs but I've literally never seen anyone here, not even unironic Third Worldists, equate the USA with Israel
I have seen several posts sayin that the USA is worse, that Manifest destiny was the inspiration for Zionism and Lebensraum, which isn't untrue tbh. Not justification for self-hatred if you happen to be born in these countries, but nevertheless.

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>>2769608
but muh common ruin of contending groups
but muh people are only selfish and never ever do anything contrary to their zero sum interests
but muh psychopathic struggle where all others exist without my consent and must be destroyed

>>2769608
>>2769044
Both of you should be hanged for trying to white wash these rapists and slavers. Also, if you believe making friends with black people is enough to make people no longer racist, then it’s odd how racism still exists in mixed race friend groups and mixed race social environments. Lastly, you are not actually a friend to people you are participating in the subjugation in. A few nice deeds equate to nothing from a systemic perspective. But the problem with whites is that they always want to let their kind off the hook as easy as possible.

>>2769048
>”claim that X leads to Y is true because I claim that X leads to Y”
Damn..

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>>2770426
Ben Franklin was not a slavery. His parents had sold him into indentured servitude. He's the only Founder not in the owner class.

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>>2770443
>2026
>i am forgotten

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>>2770443

>Indeed, had it not been for America, most of the progressive movements in other parts of the west wouldn't even exist (e.g., Germany's gay liberation movement, extirpated by nazism and only resurged in the postwar period because of the rise of America's gay rights movement.
Chatgpt post. Gay people dont need americans to liberate themselves

>>2770453
Exactly. being anti-Franklin is cringe and retarded

>Indeed, while such ideals coexisted with institutionalised inequality, it is precisely by appealing to those founding ideals unique to America's foundations that movements like MLK's civil rights was even possible.
See vidrel.

>>2770426
<A major turning point occurred in 1763 after Franklin visited a school for Black children run by the Bray Associates. He observed that the children's "apprehension was as quick" and their "memory as strong" as white children, leading him to conclude that any perceived inferiority was due to a lack of education and the environment of slavery rather than nature.
The man was literally ahead of his own time. It wasn't uncommon at all for abolitionists to be racist, and the sociological approach to systemic disadvantage by then was literally unheard of. John Brown for reference was born in 1800. W. E. B. Du Bois was born in 1868.

>>2769751
>Who else has vast oil reserves? Venezuela? The Gulf States? Is the US invading those right now? Why is Israel occupying Lebanese territory with ground troops and forcing civilians out? Have you considered that maybe trying to invade Iran is a retarded idea to begin with?
Eh. I think a lot of Marxists (not very good ones) get into this positioning where there's, like, a direct rational relationship between what the U.S. does and, say, oil prices or military-industrial profits. This can sort of end up being a kind of alibi for what is happening, because what is happening was always going to happen according to some mechanical materialist logic, while neglecting the political decisions of the leaders of these states, who do have reasons for doing what they're doing.

I'm not saying good reasons, but the reason Israel is occupying Lebanese territory and forcing civilians out is because of what it really looks like. Southern Lebanon is full of Shia Muslims who support Hezbollah, and Israel and Hezbollah are enemies, and Israel wants to terrorize that population to drive them north, while at the same time putting pressure on Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah. They are essentially punishing all of Lebanon because the refugees end up in Beirut and other places. By driving to the Litani, the Israelis also secure a more defensible position because it's a valley compared to the terrain on the northern Israeli border.

Trump is bombing Iran, which doesn't make any rational business sense if what you cared about is the stock market. But Trump doesn't care that much about the stock market. He tries to manipulate the market. But it's also the case in capitalism that you can strategize a short-term loss if you secure long-term gains. Really what I think Trump is trying to do is use military force to resolve multiple crises in the world capitalist system that have built up. Trump doesn't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon, because if Iran has a nuke, Saudi Arabia will also get a nuke with Pakistani technology. Previous administrations tried to stabilize the situation but never resolved it, and then as crises accumulated (the Gaza war, the fall of Assad, and then internally in Iran in January), Trump seized an opportunity in his mind and attacked. But what he's really attempting to do more generally is force a reset across multiple fronts simultaneously in a bid to perserve American hegemony over the long haul.

That also locks in long-term profits from oil. It's not oil prices now that matter so much but the future profits from oil and where/how they're recapitalized. Like, whether the future profits of Venezuelan oil are recapitalized in Silicon Valley or are they recapitalized in Chinese tech companies. That is very important. If Trump could do it, he'd like the future profits of Iranian oil, and Gulf Arab oil, to also end up in the U.S. rather than in China. The money from oil sales has to go somewhere.

He might fail at that, BTW. But where the Marxist critique seems to land the strongest for me when Marxists point out that capitalism is not only prone to crises – it's an inherently unstable system – it also can't get out of its crises without wars. People think what Trump is doing is really exceptional and there's a war and people freak out, like oh my God we're just bombing these people, but the U.S. invaded Panama in 1989 and bombed civilian neighborhoods where Noriega's supporters lived. That really wasn't a long time ago in historical terms.

>>2770470
You're missing the point. The German empire and the Weimar Republic both had thriving gay rights movement, with Magnus Hirschfeld and Adolf Brand (founder of Der Eigene, the first ever gay magazine) making their mark in that period. See the Wandervogel movement for further reference. But then the nazis crushed the whole thing, and guess what? Right after WW2, the German gay rights movement never got back to where it was in the 1919 as most of its leadership was either sent to the camps, died in the war indirectly (as was the case with Brand) or perished due to imprisonment by the allied forces and the west German movement.

And as OP pointed out, it was only decades after WW2 that the gay rights movement would re-emerge in west Germany, and only because of the ascendance of the gay rights movement and the broader sexual revolution in America, itself an offshoot of the American revolutionary counterculture of the 1960s-1970s.

>>2770471
didnt franklin say only anglos were white, though?

>>2770622
i don't think he meant it as an insult given he was an abolitionist and believed that black people deserved equal rights, though he did own 7 slaves at one point

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>>2770640
He also believed the only difference between men and women's minds was education, which was pretty radical at that period.
In addition to creating the first school for "Negros."

Benjamin Franklin was a chad proto-marxist.

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>>2770622
>>2770640
he wrote that in Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751). The context was that he wanted to increase the number of "purely" white people to impress "the inhabitants of venus and mars"

Not even joking. Bro believed in aliens and wanted to impress them by "removing woods" and increase the number of white people so that Earth would reflect more light at the aliens.

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-04-02-0080

here is the source. ctrl+f "swarthy"

>>2771410
believing in aliens is also ahead of his time

>>2771410
I feel like there's some semantic shift (words changed meaning) going on because calling Swedes swarthy compared to English people is ludicrous in today's understanding of the word "swarthy". Russians as well, ignoring Slavophobic racism which came much later as far as I'm aware, are often ghostly pale.

Now that I look it up it's also apparently peculiar that he didn't wear a wig or powder his hair, highly unusual for men of his social class at the time.

>>2771618
hitler also called slavs subhuman
racism is incoherent

>>2771650
Hitler's racism is not the same thing as Enlightenment racism which is not the same thing as the aristocratic racism of that French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau who invented Aryanism which inspired the Nazis but simultaneously they had to revise to remove the "believing commoners are all racially degenerate" and "the decline of humanity is inevitable" aspects, as well as the fact that he was ironically a philosemite.

>>2771670 (me)
The racism of the Enlightenment reflected colonial ambitions
The racism of de Gobineau reflected the anxieties of an increasingly irrelevant aristocracy on its way to the dustbin of history
The racism of the Nazis reflected the anger of Germany losing the WW1 gamble despite going all-in and the fear that Germany was falling behind

In all cases, the particular racism "masked" an underlying historical process

>>2771618
nope, swarthy meant darksinned back then too. consult an etymology dictionary if you don't believe me. I think franklin called so many europeans swarthy because most of the european immigrants to pennsylvania at this time were indentured workers who came over on boats and had just spent months getting hit by direct sunlight every day.

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The mayor of the capital of the Israeli-occupied territories in the West Bank is a North African Jew, the Minister of National Security is an Iraqi Kurdish Jew, you never really saw anything like this in America.

>>2768987
In you second paragraph you try to make the point that the settler-colonial state USA is different from Israel in the respect that the former was founded on enlightenment principles while the latter was not. This is false. They were both hypocritically founded on enlightenment principles which were progressive for their time.

The USAs declaration of independence declares that the people of the colonies had the right to fight off their British masters because they violated the principles which they valued: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,". That is
-all men are equal,
-they have inherent rights (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness),
-to secure these rights men form governments which derive their powers the consent of the governed (democracy).

The drafting of the constitution of course excluded any blacks, native Americans and women. Following decades would show the government of the USA betraying all of these high minded (for the time) founding principles (blacks, native Americans and other ethnic minority groups were not equal before the law and were excluded from those inherent rights thus no true democracy existed; native Americans were systematically exterminated). And to the present day, as you are doing now, desperate believers in USA exceptionalism refused to look at reality and instead pointed at various texts to defend the reputation of the USA, and themselves from the cognitive dissonance.

Israels declaration of independence similarly paid lip service to ideas of equal rights for all. Paragraph 13 states: "THE STATE OF ISRAEL … will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.".

And similarly, Israel would not be true to those principles for a single day of it's existence (de facto apartheid, genocide). And similar to defenders of the USA, defenders of Israel will point to it's declaration of independence and other texts to claim that Israel is in fact a modern secular nation with equal rights for all ignoring the reality of the ground.

Ah, but you say, they Israeli declaration of independence mentions "the prophets of Israel". Yes, and the USA declaration of independence mentions "God", which is of course the Christian god. What the fuck else would it be. Come on.

>>2794038
bullet point lists don't work wtf. ah whatever.


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