Utterly breathtaking amount of historical confusion.
After WW1 the British, who were the major imperial colonial power at the time, though on a steep decline, had already decided that the strip of land we now know as Israel/Palestine was a strategic necessity in order to ensure a divided and weak middle eastern political arrangement, which could be exploited by mineral and oil investors. The old colonial system was clearly on the way out, and needed to be replaced by a system of international finance neocolonialism that came to prominence after WW2 with the Marshall Plan.
So they knew they couldn’t just colonize Palestine, it was against their interests as the seat of international finance capital. This was outlined in broad strokes in the Balfour Declaration written by James Balfour sent to Lord Lionel Rothschild, later adopted with the League of Nations Mandate in 1921. So they backed the Zionist project and started encouraging Zionists to move to Palestine which had an existing Jewish population and whose government was generally tolerant of these Zionists who brought with them lots of foreign capital to invest. This plan continued until WW2 when the industrial economies of Europe, and especially Britain were utterly destroyed by the war. The USA, which had stayed out of the war as much as possible until the battle of Stalingrad that turned the tides against the Nazis, had wanted this since it could then establish itself as the world’s industrial powerhouse and seat of neocolonial finance capital. After a period of mass industrialization, this is exactly what happened.
But of course the international finance capitalists, wherever they were stationed, had a plan in place for the region of Palestine; and a few years later, with backing of the international community, we have the tragedy of the Nakba.
100 years of conflict, engineered by the international ruling class of our current world. Obviously regional tensions existed, Muslim and Jewish tradition goes back a very long time and has occupied the same parts of the world for much of it, but the period of peace that existed in the region of Palestine was 500 years long before the British carved up the Ottoman empire for their own benefit.
The ‘period of peace’ still meant systemic discrimination against jews in Palestine, the Ottoman empire, Russia, Europe and Northern Africa. Creating their own country to escape this discrimination was the major driver for migration starting in the 1880’s.
Sure there have been other geopolitical drivers capitalizing on this but you seem to want to make it seem like it was just a capitalist conspiracy, ignoring these social demographic causes. These religious nutjobs would be going at eachother even if there was no money to be made
Capitalism isn’t just an economic system, it isn’t a way that people make money it is a system of class domination. It is the productive system of the globe, and the history of humanity is the history of production.
You would have it reduced to just a religious dispute. Religion enforces the ideological superstructure of our system. Within feudal society God was the disembodied social object that drove productive relations: the king was king because god wanted him yo be, and the church made sure the serfs and peasants served (produced for) the nobility and aristocracy as it was god’s will.
Now our god is money. We don’t do things because god wills it, we do it because we need money. It is a system of forced competition that takes our time and work, converts it into commodities, sells those commodities for a profit in a marketplace, and delivers those profits to the “owners” of the capital. All social relations are condensed down to impersonal market exchanges, and people become alienated from each other, from themselves.
Marx said that Religion was the opiate of the masses, which taken in context is actually a very humanist conclusion. But he also said that atheists were like children trying to reassure everyone that they don’t believe in the bogeyman. When you view religion as the enlightenment does, as it views all things, you see individuals acting irrationally at the behest of their own imagination. When you view it dialectically you realize that it is rational, that it is a real social force that has a function as a part of society, for better or for worse. A vast system of social interconnectedness. Rather than a mere delusion, it has great power and influence, which leaves us the question about for whom it operates and what are the historical conditions that temper it’s operation.
Hopefully someday your lived conditions will set you on the path to emancipate yourself. As the great social philosophers George Clinton once proclaimed: “Free your mind and your ass will follow.”
All social relations are condensed down to impersonal market exchanges
Well I’d say this is the main pillar of your essay that exposes that you’re just trying to cram reality into your narrative. ‘Making bank’ is not what’s driving these groups to try and kill eachother
I’ll repeat myself - capitalism is not about making money. Making money is an intermediate step. That is what the accumulation of capital allows one to do. Capitalism is a system of class dominance which means it is about power.
Power is effort expended over time. so how does an institution, for the benefit of its leaders, gain power, politically or economically? They get other people to expend effort for the institution or for those leaders. Basically you get people to work for you.
Capitalism, the threat of starvation, the ideologically religious myth of hard work being the main determinant of wealth is one way. Doing work for a church or religion is another much older way. How this connects together, if you are able to connect two ideas together at all, is that capitalism in the form of imperialism, that nasty combination of militaristic dominance, financialization and exploitation of workers described by Lenin in his book on imperialism; has backed fundamentalists particularly for their domestic feistiness. The USA has a long history of backing with money and weapons, Islamic fundamentalist terrorists such as the Mujahideen, Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi Royal family, and yes, Zionists etc., because as I’ve already described, the aim of this imperialist project was to destabilize the region so it could be taken advantage of by oil and mineral speculators.
As for “my narrative” history tells a narrative; the events I’ve described are provable, have been proven and are proven again and again for anyone who reads the news or academic studies. You on the other hand don’t even have a narrative, you are arguing from a position of ignorance. Its sad that you are so weighed down by your own lack of history and political analysis. But I can’t blame you personally, we are all the products of our environment for better or for much much worse.
No I don’t think that, I think they are somewhat outside the systems I’ve described. The Iranian revolution was the result of exactly the sort of finance imperialist exploitation and mass immiseration I’ve described taking place under the pro-western puppet government of the Shah, installed in a coup carried out by the Americans and British intelligence services in 1953.
“Opening of the markets for development” led to severe and widespread disparity and by 1979_ the people had enough. It was a legitimate popular uprising, but islamists were overtly powerful and able to consolidate power into the fundamentalist islamist government of Ayatolla Khomeini. Since the Ayatollah is opposed to western meddling, Iran had come under severe sanctions by western imperialist countries, affecting mostly regular people. I’m not an expert on Iran but I don’t advocate for Islamic fundamentalism as an alternative to capitalism. Like I alluded to elsewhere, its just another institution controlling peoples minds in order to exploit them, which benefits a few powerful religious leaders instead of powerful corporate executives. But I also don’t think opening the country back up to be raided by neoliberal imperialists is what is best for the Iranian people either.
I think their regime is attempting to survive under severe sanctions, but the country is actually moderately wealthy in resources and productive capacity. No I don’t think it benefits Iran if Lebanon or the Gaza strip is controlled by secular liberals, they would prefer to have Islamic fundamentalists who share their form of governance, with which to support with weapons and resources. Israel is the proxy of western imperialism in the region and they support groups that will fight with Israel when its politically advantageous.
But Iran is also a separate entity from Hezbollah or Hamas. Hezbollah has asked Iran for aid and military intervention in the last year as the conflict between Israel and Lebanon has worsened, and Iran had left them hanging out to dry for most of that time, so Hezbollah is more than just a puppet of Iran. Like Israel is more than just a puppet of the USA, clearly Bibi’s regime is using their own playbook to preserve power, which seems to involve escalating regional conflicts and committing even more mass deaths.
So even if Iran isn’t actively trying to stabilize the region, the Israeli government under Bibi is actively trying to destabilize and destroy as much as possible. Not that a more moderate flavor of Zionism would make much difference, the Nakba was carried out by a relatively more left wing government, so called “labor Zionists.”
Utterly breathtaking amount of historical confusion.
After WW1 the British, who were the major imperial colonial power at the time, though on a steep decline, had already decided that the strip of land we now know as Israel/Palestine was a strategic necessity in order to ensure a divided and weak middle eastern political arrangement, which could be exploited by mineral and oil investors. The old colonial system was clearly on the way out, and needed to be replaced by a system of international finance neocolonialism that came to prominence after WW2 with the Marshall Plan.
So they knew they couldn’t just colonize Palestine, it was against their interests as the seat of international finance capital. This was outlined in broad strokes in the Balfour Declaration written by James Balfour sent to Lord Lionel Rothschild, later adopted with the League of Nations Mandate in 1921. So they backed the Zionist project and started encouraging Zionists to move to Palestine which had an existing Jewish population and whose government was generally tolerant of these Zionists who brought with them lots of foreign capital to invest. This plan continued until WW2 when the industrial economies of Europe, and especially Britain were utterly destroyed by the war. The USA, which had stayed out of the war as much as possible until the battle of Stalingrad that turned the tides against the Nazis, had wanted this since it could then establish itself as the world’s industrial powerhouse and seat of neocolonial finance capital. After a period of mass industrialization, this is exactly what happened.
But of course the international finance capitalists, wherever they were stationed, had a plan in place for the region of Palestine; and a few years later, with backing of the international community, we have the tragedy of the Nakba.
100 years of conflict, engineered by the international ruling class of our current world. Obviously regional tensions existed, Muslim and Jewish tradition goes back a very long time and has occupied the same parts of the world for much of it, but the period of peace that existed in the region of Palestine was 500 years long before the British carved up the Ottoman empire for their own benefit.
The ‘period of peace’ still meant systemic discrimination against jews in Palestine, the Ottoman empire, Russia, Europe and Northern Africa. Creating their own country to escape this discrimination was the major driver for migration starting in the 1880’s.
Sure there have been other geopolitical drivers capitalizing on this but you seem to want to make it seem like it was just a capitalist conspiracy, ignoring these social demographic causes. These religious nutjobs would be going at eachother even if there was no money to be made
Capitalism isn’t just an economic system, it isn’t a way that people make money it is a system of class domination. It is the productive system of the globe, and the history of humanity is the history of production.
You would have it reduced to just a religious dispute. Religion enforces the ideological superstructure of our system. Within feudal society God was the disembodied social object that drove productive relations: the king was king because god wanted him yo be, and the church made sure the serfs and peasants served (produced for) the nobility and aristocracy as it was god’s will.
Now our god is money. We don’t do things because god wills it, we do it because we need money. It is a system of forced competition that takes our time and work, converts it into commodities, sells those commodities for a profit in a marketplace, and delivers those profits to the “owners” of the capital. All social relations are condensed down to impersonal market exchanges, and people become alienated from each other, from themselves.
Marx said that Religion was the opiate of the masses, which taken in context is actually a very humanist conclusion. But he also said that atheists were like children trying to reassure everyone that they don’t believe in the bogeyman. When you view religion as the enlightenment does, as it views all things, you see individuals acting irrationally at the behest of their own imagination. When you view it dialectically you realize that it is rational, that it is a real social force that has a function as a part of society, for better or for worse. A vast system of social interconnectedness. Rather than a mere delusion, it has great power and influence, which leaves us the question about for whom it operates and what are the historical conditions that temper it’s operation.
Hopefully someday your lived conditions will set you on the path to emancipate yourself. As the great social philosophers George Clinton once proclaimed: “Free your mind and your ass will follow.”
Well I’d say this is the main pillar of your essay that exposes that you’re just trying to cram reality into your narrative. ‘Making bank’ is not what’s driving these groups to try and kill eachother
I’ll repeat myself - capitalism is not about making money. Making money is an intermediate step. That is what the accumulation of capital allows one to do. Capitalism is a system of class dominance which means it is about power.
Power is effort expended over time. so how does an institution, for the benefit of its leaders, gain power, politically or economically? They get other people to expend effort for the institution or for those leaders. Basically you get people to work for you.
Capitalism, the threat of starvation, the ideologically religious myth of hard work being the main determinant of wealth is one way. Doing work for a church or religion is another much older way. How this connects together, if you are able to connect two ideas together at all, is that capitalism in the form of imperialism, that nasty combination of militaristic dominance, financialization and exploitation of workers described by Lenin in his book on imperialism; has backed fundamentalists particularly for their domestic feistiness. The USA has a long history of backing with money and weapons, Islamic fundamentalist terrorists such as the Mujahideen, Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi Royal family, and yes, Zionists etc., because as I’ve already described, the aim of this imperialist project was to destabilize the region so it could be taken advantage of by oil and mineral speculators.
As for “my narrative” history tells a narrative; the events I’ve described are provable, have been proven and are proven again and again for anyone who reads the news or academic studies. You on the other hand don’t even have a narrative, you are arguing from a position of ignorance. Its sad that you are so weighed down by your own lack of history and political analysis. But I can’t blame you personally, we are all the products of our environment for better or for much much worse.
Do you think Iran is funding and arming islamic fundamentalists to stabilize the region?
No I don’t think that, I think they are somewhat outside the systems I’ve described. The Iranian revolution was the result of exactly the sort of finance imperialist exploitation and mass immiseration I’ve described taking place under the pro-western puppet government of the Shah, installed in a coup carried out by the Americans and British intelligence services in 1953.
“Opening of the markets for development” led to severe and widespread disparity and by 1979_ the people had enough. It was a legitimate popular uprising, but islamists were overtly powerful and able to consolidate power into the fundamentalist islamist government of Ayatolla Khomeini. Since the Ayatollah is opposed to western meddling, Iran had come under severe sanctions by western imperialist countries, affecting mostly regular people. I’m not an expert on Iran but I don’t advocate for Islamic fundamentalism as an alternative to capitalism. Like I alluded to elsewhere, its just another institution controlling peoples minds in order to exploit them, which benefits a few powerful religious leaders instead of powerful corporate executives. But I also don’t think opening the country back up to be raided by neoliberal imperialists is what is best for the Iranian people either.
I think their regime is attempting to survive under severe sanctions, but the country is actually moderately wealthy in resources and productive capacity. No I don’t think it benefits Iran if Lebanon or the Gaza strip is controlled by secular liberals, they would prefer to have Islamic fundamentalists who share their form of governance, with which to support with weapons and resources. Israel is the proxy of western imperialism in the region and they support groups that will fight with Israel when its politically advantageous.
But Iran is also a separate entity from Hezbollah or Hamas. Hezbollah has asked Iran for aid and military intervention in the last year as the conflict between Israel and Lebanon has worsened, and Iran had left them hanging out to dry for most of that time, so Hezbollah is more than just a puppet of Iran. Like Israel is more than just a puppet of the USA, clearly Bibi’s regime is using their own playbook to preserve power, which seems to involve escalating regional conflicts and committing even more mass deaths.
So even if Iran isn’t actively trying to stabilize the region, the Israeli government under Bibi is actively trying to destabilize and destroy as much as possible. Not that a more moderate flavor of Zionism would make much difference, the Nakba was carried out by a relatively more left wing government, so called “labor Zionists.”