Thursday, November 29, 2012

UN general assembly makes resounding vote in favour of Palestinian statehood.
Overwhelming majority votes to recognize Palestine as non-member state as US and Israel are left to condemn decision.

Green: In favor; Red: Against; Yellow: Abstain; Blue: Absent; Grey: Non-Members
Corey Robin: "White Men of Democracy"
So, yes, Lincoln plays a role in Lincoln, but it’s just that: a role. Seward, Spader and his goons, Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), even crazy Mary Todd Lincoln (Sally Fields)—everyone has a hand in freeing the slaves.

Everyone, it seems, save the slaves themselves.
Where are the Palestinians in white liberal discussion of Palestine?
It's enough to turn me into an orthodox Freudian.

Robin say's he's running out of patience with me.
I had a longer comment, but I deleted it. I shouldn't have.
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Joseph Massad on the UN vote.
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This is getting absurd
Jefferson, I would submit, should be remembered not only as the writer of the Declaration of Independence and owner of slaves, but also as a contributor, along with his successors, to a doctrine of race war and what Hannah Arendt would later call, in another context, “race imperialism”—which would find its ultimate fulfillment a century later, and a continent away.

...With their orientation to the future and acute sense of victimhood, the southern writers adopted an ethos geared less to liberalism or conservatism—ideologies arising from previous centuries of European conflict—than to fascism, the one ism of the twentieth century that could and would make a legitimate claim to novelty. They beat the drums of race war. Like the Nazis ca. 1940, they offered deportation and extermination as final solutions to the Negro Question. If blacks were set free, Jefferson warned, it would “produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one race or the other.” The only alternative was an “effort…unknown to history. When freed, he [the slave] is to be removed beyond the mixture.” Anticipating the writings of Robert Brassilach, the French fascist who argued that compassion meant that Jewish children should be deported from France with their parents, Dew claimed, “If our slaves are ever to be sent away in any systematic manner, humanity demands that they should be carried in families.” If the slaves were freed, Harper concluded, “one race must be driven out by the other, or exterminated, or again enslaved.”

Like the Nazis, the defenders of slavery spoke of lebensraum.
Another 3000 word paean to the Freudian unconscious.
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Robin in 2007 in the LRB, on Hannah Arendt.
From its inception, Arendt argued, Zionism had exhibited some of the nastier features of European nationalism. Drawing ‘from German sources’, she wrote in 1946, Herzl presumed that the Jews constituted neither a religion nor a people but an ‘organic national body’ or race that could one day be housed ‘inside the closed walls of a biological entity’ or state. With its insistence on the eternal struggle between the Jews and their enemies, she wrote in the 1930s, the Zionist worldview seemed ‘to conform perfectly’ to that of ‘the National Socialists’.
As always he simplifies and confuses things. Unwilling to see things as entwined, he can't untangle. If the anti-imperialist Burke was adapted to serve imperialist ends, so was, and is, political liberalism. Capitalism is defended as promoting both stability and permanent revolution. Modern conservatives are economic liberals adapting the language of the old order, based on land, with the new order based on commerce. The Nazi camps and the gulag were modern and functioning bureaucracies.

Robin can make one argument or another, but he can't see through irony.
He's anti-psychological in the manner of Chomsky. He needs to see both himself and his opponents as rational and other than the product of a history and culture. He's written on Zionism on his blog, if only after prodding. And both the links shown were to comments by me.  And again that image proves my point.

On Arendt:
Zionism left the Palestinians with no options other than emigration or ‘transfer’, which could be accomplished only using Fascist methods, or second-class status in the land of their birth.
Israel is devolving into fascism. Religious fundamentalists are puritan. Fascists and puritans can work together but they are not synonymous. Bureaucrats can work for either without qualm.  Arendt's focus on psychology was not a "mistake".  A terror of determinism only strengthens its hold.

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