DAS Blog

I used to think this sort of thing was just a matter of the Puritanism I have discussed here before or even the "I'm not anti-Semitic ... I'm a tolerant, open-minded liberal ... I just dislike Zionism" thinking that my more conservative friends claim it is.

But it seems that certain kind of liberal really feels a need to deny that such admittedly distasteful things as mass deportations really do play a role in stabilizing borders and preventing border wars (it isn't just about hating on Israel for creating conditions that drove Palestinians out) -- see the reactions to my admittedly trolling comment here.

Note the misrepresentation of my claim regarding borders: just because a country brutally oppresses and eventually deports "troublesome minorities" doesn't mean it can't later become ethnically heterogeneous. And I never claim otherwise. Indeed, one could argue that successful heterogeneous countries are successful because they devise a common culture for all their peoples by picking on an outgroup and unifying on the basis of "we are all different -- but none of us are [OUTGROUP]".

The world really isn't any different than Middle School. The difference between a conservative and a progressive is that a conservative says trying to make the world grow up and at least enter High School if not College is futile whilst a progressive says that we should try to make the world grow up. But pretending like the sins of the first world have not benefited us is pernicious denialism.

The other interesting aspect of the discussion is the reasoning of "we shouldn't make morally repelent hypotheses regarding historical events". Are we to deny the gross immorality of history, or at least deny the benefits we still have from said immorality, in order to improve the future? AFAIC, the opposite is the case -- if we really want to make positive changes, the first thing we need to do is honestly not only confront the sins of the past but also how we still benefit from them. Perhaps this is what Torah/Joshua/Samuel is getting at by including the not so morally happy parts about how the Hebrews came to control Israel: that we need to confront and engage with what happened in our past rather than deny it? This sort of active reflection and self-critique is something liberals should be encouraging others, especially Zionists, to do rather than engaging in pie-in-the-sky denialism themselves.

Of course the odd thing is that, domestically, these same liberals offer such cogent critiques of "white privilage" and how we melanically challenged types continue to benefit from even past racism. Yet they fail to see how this operates on the world stage (except when it comes to talking about the after effects of colonialism hurt everyone in the third world but magically Israel is a colonial oppressor and not also a victim in all of this? I guess that gets back to the "Puritans deciding who is oppressed and hence elected" critique of mine).

Between this attitude and the sheer incompetence and hassles of the New York DMV (once any legal issues are resolved, remind me to tell you what the DMV is doing to my wife -- these people don't even know what their own paperwork says!) and MTA making me hate on gummint, I just might be driven to the political right!