So, the leader in Israel's labor party basically just called out the modern political left, stating that "something is very wrong" with it, for them to support Hamas over Israel.
And for me, the answer is obvious: it's wokeism, stupid! (intended to be a play on "it's the economy, stupid"). It's this ideology that views the world predominantly a struggle between different power relationships, with focus on intersectionality. It is overly obsessed with viewing the world as the oppressors vs the oppressed, leading to an overly simplistic and black and white worldview that just doesn't work.
I'm going to be honest, as someone who has a background in secular humanism, I've never been a particular fan of the state of Israel. Quite frankly, through that lens, I tended to view the conflict as a struggle between two factions of religious extremists who believe that they are entitled to the same piece of land. Muslims, such as Bin Laden, who I discussed last night with his letter to America and who had some choice words on the conflict, saw the land of Israel/Palestine as islamic holy land, and he very clearly had some anti semitism in his worldview. And of course, israel LITERALLY believes that God gave them the land, and I can say that as a former christian who has read the old testament/torah and understands the culture behind that. And honestly, as a secular humanist, I think both sides would be better off shedding their religious extremism and realizing that they have to share.
Now, of course, I'm also to the point to understand that not all of these territorial disputes and calls for various ethnic and religious groups to have their own nation state are realistic, or even desirable in some cases, and that to some extent, some groups are just...going to hate each other. Even if we took religious fundamentalism out of the equation, the tribalism that effectively comes with being born into group A vs B and having the culture of group A vs B is going to cause conflict between groups A and B. And sometimes there is no easy answer to such things. So I have softened on that and understand the issue is more complex than "if these people weren't religious this war would stop". No, it wouldn't. Religion definitely exacerbates the conflict, but it doesn't SOLVE it.
As a matter of fact, I think political ideologies are always going to be an issue that leads to conflict. people simply have different value systems sometimes. They believe that humans should be governed in different ways and have different beliefs on the issue, and if people aren't open minded enough to see reason and get on the same page, then conflict occurs. All societies have this conflict. We have this issue in the US, and I still largely see politics as mostly the rational secular people on the left and the weirdo regressive religious extremists on the right. Societies are able to hopefully address concerns without violence, and hopefully one side becomes dominant peacefully through demographic changes over time, but yeah that doesnt mean that fights aren't had. They're normally had at the ballot box rather than in the streets ideally.
Which brings us back to wokeism. Wokeism or postmodernism is an ideology that originated in academia in the 1960s and 1970s. And as I always say, yes, in that environment, it has value. Theres nothing wrong with viewing society as a set of power relations to some degree. Being able to entertain such ideas is the mark of an open minded and educated person. But the modern postmodernist left is neither open minded nor educated. They adopt these ideas with a fanaticism that rivals the fundamentalist religions I so despise. For a postmodernist or "woke" person, that system of power relations IS their world, that IS their political ideology, and it leads to the left going through a fairly regressive phase in my opinion that severely threatens it.
How can leftists who normally love to go on and on about womens' rights and gay rights, get the israel/palestine issue so wrong? It's because they see the palestinians as oppressed, rather than oppressors. To a humanist like me, I think that radical islam actually does pose an issue with the modern postmodernist left. On the one hand, such a religion is extremely authoritarian and regressive, but on the others they see muslims as oppressed people. They look at how white christians treat them in the US and how racist many of them are, and they feel a need to defend them. In moderation, that's okay. I mean, I certainly support the rights of people to peacefully practice islam without being harassed or discriminated against too. But I do it out of a support for liberal values that keep our free society intact. I don't do it because of the woke crap. And honestly, once muslims themselves behave illiberally, whatever defense i have of them is gone and I'm willing to criticize them.
Honestly, liberal values, like the rule of law, separation of church and state, while also having freedom of religion, speech, and thought, are cornerstones of our society and I will defend them against all threats, both from the right and the left. But this modern postmodernist left isn't liberal. They're ILLIBERAL. Their worldview is just as fanatical and authoritarian as any religious fundie, and they'll push the same black and white thinking and the same aggressive methods of evangelism and policing people that religions do in order to spread their ideology. If religion is a "mind virus" as some secularists would argue, postmodernism is a left wing mind virus. And it's taken over the left in recent years and drove them completely insane.
So now, they're defending hamas against israel, because they see israel as oppressor and palestine as oppressed. it doesnt matter if israel is a much more liberal democracy while radical islam is still in its "dark ages" as far as its extremism goes, no, all that matters is israel bad, palestine good. And it's that kind of oversimplification that causes them to lose the plot.
Look, I'm not a huge fan of israel. I honestly see them more as a lesser evil, rather than a party i actually fully sympathize and agree with. Because Israel has its religious fundamentalists too, and that drives a lot of the policies that causes a lot of these issues in the first place. I, for example, completely CONDEMN israel's settlement programs. Let the palestinians have some land, stop trying to displace them because you guys think you have a religious right to it. BUT....let's face is, with palestine pushing the "from the river to the sea" crap, and with hamas being an openly genocidal organization as far as I'm concerned, yeah, no, screw Hamas. They're barbarians to me. And I respect them like I would a barbarian in a game of civ.
But...the postmodern left doesnt believe in a such thing as civilized vs uncivilized. I kinda see their point, after all, the dichotomy was made up by those who wished to push their morals as superior. But to be blunt...yeah, I'm not so much of a moral relativist that I believe that there are no morals superior to others. On what grounds do I, a secular humanist, declare one set of morals superior to another? Why, based on its consequences, of course. When one side seems to largely improve human well being, and the other seems to be stuck in their regressive religious fundamentalist phase, I'm going to praise the more progressive faction here. Because if there's NO such thing as objective morality and killing a human horribly is equivalent to helping them live a long life, then there's no such thing as progress. And because I call myself a progressive, in a relatively "modernist" sense (as opposed to the postmodernist drivel), yeah, I do believe that there is a such thing as an objective goal to morality. I dont think it inherently comes from a divine being, but some ways of doing things just lead to better (read: more favorable) outcomes for the people involved.
And that's the difference between the modernist progressive left and the postmodernist regressive left. While postmodernists and woke people will call themselves progressives, their ideas of social progress seem much different than mine. Which is why I have so many apparent conflicts with them over the term. For example, I see UBI as progressive because it brings us to a stage of our humanity that solves poverty and liberates people from coercion work. But they see it as "regressive" because we give rich people $1000 a month or something and that's bad. I look at problems like poverty and wage slavery as things that humanity is to conquer, and that doing so is to achieve a milestone that brings the world forward. But they use progressive to mean "helps poor people more than rich people". And while yes, UBI is "progressive" in their definition too, they dont recognize it as such as they get hung on means testing and only taxing rich people and blah blah blah. Hell, many of them would consider an NIT with a more regressive tax structure as more progressive than a flat tax UBI because they are just so hung up on how they frame and define things. It's baffling to me.
But yeah, the ideological perspectives of this new modern left is troubling. It's just leading to that entire faction going from our best, greatest hope for the future to completely and utterly crapping the bed. To be fair, I've been warned before. I used to have a friend who was alt right who said that anything these politics touches gets ruined. And he's not wrong on that. Although I don't think I'll be joining him as he has since joined the alt right.
I'll stick to the liberal, modernist left, thank you very much. I believe that the alt right is quite frankly just as bad as the postmodernist left. If anything, both are just mirror images of each other. Like communists and fascists fighting each other while both being horridly authoritarian and homocidal in practice.
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