Bertrand Russell on Zionism [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egfCTz-ZuZU

by jim_inont • 2 years ago

39 28 2 years ago

cies3• 2 years ago

Israel has exceptionally great PR, especially with people in power.

Palestinians have horrible PR (carrying dead bodies on the crowd's hands in tiny streets, is not something westeners relate to).

In Europe a large part of a generation believes that the holocaust is the reason the state of Israel needs to be. Why is Israel not founded on a repurposed piece of Germany then?

austin-cheney• 2 years ago

Numerous polls indicate younger generations strongly favor the Palestinian side of the conflict in direct opposition to older generations. That being said I would say PR is not working out for Israel.

I suspect that is because older generations remember the PLO as a major terrorist organization supported by numerous other terrorist organizations. Although most of the world still sees Hamas as a terrorist organization younger generations haven’t witnessed any notable Palestinian sponsored terrorist act until the Oct 7 attack. Even then as horrible as that attack was Israel still found a way to completely over shadow it with something much worse.

At the same time the world is also watching wholesale increases of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank will reading about illegal settlements.

That is astoundingly bad PR. It’s so bad now that any action Israel takes against Iran is seen as unilateral, excessively aggressive, and unprovoked which was absolutely not the case just 20 years ago.

Then to somehow still make that much worse the typical response to disagreements from political hardliners is to call people antisemetic. Older generations used to cautiously appreciate the sensitivity of such and tread carefully. Younger generations seem tired of hearing it from Israeli politicians.

jedimind4• 2 years ago

Older generations used to cautiously appreciate the sensitivity of such and tread carefully. Younger generations seem tired of hearing it from Israeli politicians.

I think it's much simpler than that. Younger Generations are just sick and tired of walking on eggshells when it comes to calling out jewish-exceptionalism[0] and that trend was accelerated after having witnessed the self declared "jewish-state" commit livestreamed terrorism and genocide for more than a year with absolute impunity. Israel was[1][2][3] and Israel still is the biggest terrorist organization in the region by far and has been since its inception[3].

[0] The Appeal to Jewishness Fallacy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0MAJ6nSRYA

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_extremist_terrorism

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20231029055310/ojp.gov/ncjrs/vir...

cies3• 2 years ago

That being said I would say PR is not working out for Israel.

In the long run not. That's I believe why we see so much aggression: time's running out for 'm.

I suspect that is because ...

I think it is because the older generations believed corporate media. Younger gens get their news from elsewhere. If you picture the "conflict" in numbers you will see the Palestinians suffered much greater losses, while Israel plays the victim card on every occasion. Kids simply dont buy it.

immibis2• 2 years ago

Because Europe hates Jews. Israel's founding was the actual final solution the European Allied powers decided for the Jewish question - Hitler thought his would be final, but it was penultimate. Leaving the Jews in Europe would not be tolerated by any party to the war.

cies3• 2 years ago

Do you have any source for this? I find the general narrative to be one of jew-friendliness over here.

throwaway2906• 2 years ago

This doesn't need to be a link to some random dude's video because there's a perfectly fine Wikipedia article about Bertrand Russell and his views.

He held a variety of views and I hope this particular dude doesn't intend to paint Russell as source of truth.

In 1929, he wrote that people deemed "mentally defective" and "feebleminded" should be sexually sterilised because they "are apt to have enormous numbers of illegitimate children, all, as a rule, wholly useless to the community.

No comment. Now we just need The Authority or a committee to decide who is feebleminded (maybe based on religious belief, why the hell not) and we're good to go. For the good of humanity! 5 years later: no one from the authority or committee member relatives was judged feebleminded, so coincidental.

On 20 November 1948, in a public speech at Westminster School, addressing a gathering arranged by the New Commonwealth, Russell shocked some observers by suggesting that a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union was justified. Russell argued that war between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed inevitable, so it would be a humanitarian gesture to get it over with quickly and have the United States in the dominant position.

As Russian I'm surprisingly on the fence about this. In hindsight maybe cold war was actually better but considering how it's developing lately...

In the Middle East, Russell suggested that the West avoid opposing Arab nationalism, and proposed the creation of a United Nations peacekeeping force to guard Israel's frontiers to ensure that Israel was prevented from committing aggression and protected from it.

It's interesting how he wants to oppose one people's nationalism and but not another people's nationalism.

He also suggested Western recognition of the People's Republic of China, and that it be admitted to the UN with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

Also tongue in cheek:

Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression

That guy should read about Muslim conquests circa 600.

ofcourseyoudo• 2 years ago

He was wrong about some things and right about Zionism. This didn't need to be a random dude's walk through Russell's wikipedia page because there's a perfectly fine link here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell

"No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate?" -- Russell

AnimalMuppet• 2 years ago

Honest question: Were they expelled, or did they flee? Or some of both?

I think the difference matters. "I'm not living with those people in charge" and then fighting for the better part of a century to throw them out, gets less sympathy from me than "they threw me out".

On the other hand, I have some sympathy for Cuban exiles, so maybe I'm inconsistent...

throwaway2906• 2 years ago

I believe people here are capable of finding an article on Wikipedia on their own. I just highlighted that this person had some opinions that are pretty out there and implying "this is true because this guy said so" is not a good logic.

It's telling that a bunch of my comments were flagged. (The guy who pointedly suggested that I must be a Jew to have this view however wasn't.)

znpy• 2 years ago

I'm not surprised.

People will cut and paste and just take/use the pieces of facts/opinions/history that support their political opinions, and ignore the rest and the whole context.

It happens with dead people as well as with people currently alive. Some get cancelled, some don't.

It's largely arbitrary.

EDIT: i'm not taking sides in this specific topic, just a comment on the pattern of behavior that i see across various discussions.

throwaway2906• 2 years ago

People will cut and paste and just take/use the pieces of facts/opinions/history that support their political opinions, and ignore the rest and the whole context.

That was my reaction to the video and why I think posting the Wikipedia page would have been much better.

baobun• 2 years ago

Why random Wikipedia rehash and not just link the actual damn letter that OP is reading out?

https://www.connexions.org/CxLibrary/Docs/CX5576-RussellMidE...

http://www.russfound.org/RToP/RToP%20BRPF%20Message.htm

BTW, this trend of sharing videos of some rando fluencer reading someone elses article aloud? Almost always they put their own (or worse...) bias into it, hurting the understanding of the naive viewer. You know how to read, just read it yourself first.

throwaway2906• 2 years ago

Why random Wikipedia rehash and not just link the actual damn letter that OP is reading out?

because my point is this guy had different views and the fact that this guy said it does not mean this is automatically "truth".

i_am_a_peasant2• 2 years ago

Oof, most people in tech's take on Israel that I ever met usually are along the lines of "I'm not touching that".

I'm not gonna pretend I'm on some moral high ground or whatever. As a Jew I'm just happy I wasn't actually born in Israel and didn't inherit all the problems that come with it.

Before Oct 7 I was seeing more and more of the arab world normalize relations with Israel. Now it's all gone down the drain again.

I also don't think Israel is demographically sustainable, all the ultra religious people have like 8-12 kids, the seculars maybe 3. Sooner or later that's just gonna explode in people's face.

My position on the whole conflict is along the lines of "everybody sucks". The descendants of the arabs that chose to cooperate with Israel became Israeli citizens, the descendants of the arabs that chose to not, are in a world of sh*t.

It's kind of hard to be reasonable when you have every reason to be resentful. Even when there are reasonable people, if they try to change something they'd mostly be pissing in the wind because the established leadership is funded by Iran and has no interest in improving the situation for anyone but themselves.

Israel also is very good at making their neighbors hate them by pulling all sort of dick moves and giving far right wingers a green light to do whatever the hell they want.

It's all bs and I want none of it. I will on purpose not marry a Jewish woman just to make sure my kids aren't Jewish and they're less likely to be tempted to swallow the nationalistic bs that makes gullible young people who want to be special and different sign into getting themselves blown up or shot for a cause that's just not worth it.

Wow I got more emotional than I thought I would.

jedimind4• 2 years ago

My position on the whole conflict is along the lines of "everybody sucks".

That's like calling the holocaust a "conflict" and that in that "conflict" everybody sucked. That's the kind of bothsidesism you would have gotten away with before Israel's genocide[1] of Palestinians which led people to studying the history[2] of Palestine and the history of Zionism and realizing that this "conflict" is not some random accident but the outcome of a carefully crafted colonial project by secular european-jews with nationalist ambitions - long before the holocaust. For these secular jews, who also considered colonizing Uganda, Madagascar, Cyprus, Argentina (Baron Hirsch's colonization project), Birobidzhan - USSR (Jewish Autonomous Oblast), Alaska (Slattery Report proposal), British Guiana, judaism was simply a useful tool to legitimize their colonial project: "Most Zionists don't believe that God exists, but they do believe that he promised them Palestine".

[1] https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/prof-amos-go...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20231029055310/ojp.gov/ncjrs/vir...

demarq• 2 years ago

I also had a response but it would probably get me permanently banned.

You more reasonable and patient than I am. Well said.

i_am_a_peasant2• 2 years ago

Amos Goldberg is monetizing being an anti-israel israeli. If you gave him valid counter arguments he'd never accept them because it would be career suicide. So I'm not even going to begin to tackle any of this stuff. I support your right to free speech but I don't get how any of this helps anyone with anything. You have to work with today's reality that Israel is a state that exists that has certain security interests. I'm guessing the end game here is to cut US support for Israel and hope that it will wither and die afterwards?

With the current administration that's not gonna happen anytime soon and I doubt you'll see it change in the next 20-40 years. Do you think you'll decide to be more constructive in that time?

rramadass• 2 years ago

Bertrand Russell would have been better served if he had studied his own country's role in creating the Israel/Palestine problem. The British Empire laid the seeds of almost all the inter-country/inter-ethnicity/inter-religious/etc. conflicts plaguing the world today but they have conveniently washed their hands off of all of it.

On the Palestine problem; Britain in Palestine 1917-1948 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOJqLTc6RkU

The British Empire Was Much Worse Than You Realize - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/04/the-british-em... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42558142

There is a reason that the term Perfidious Albion exists - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidious_Albion

Finally; Bill Clinton did negotiate a two state solution to the Palestine/Israel problem but Yasser Arafat/PLO rejected it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTC5bq-lfoI

throwaway2906• 2 years ago

All good points. After Ottoman empire literally every country there except Egypt is an artificial creation. Europe divided the region.

And I am not talking about people or religions. Jews, Arabs, Christians, etc all lived there for a long time. Under Ottoman empire with all its faults they had fair autonomy and religious pluralism. After the empire fell someone thought let's just put them in different places and everything will be fine. That guaranteed chaos and displacement.

pinewurst• 2 years ago

Also, there’s strong evidence that Britain* strongly pushed for the Arab invasion of Israel in 1948 over local objections in order to retain power and to benefit from the chaos. That didn’t work out for them well.

*Specifically the imperial agents in the Middle East strongly distinct from the new Labour government back home.

r00fus• 2 years ago

This video is incredible in describing why the British Empire did what it did in the Middle East and the resulting decades-long disaster [1]. Note this is a small portion of a longer 2h video you can find.

Absolutely fascinating historical lesson. tl;dw - the Brits and US along with other colonial powers needed oil, and this region was blessed/cursed with gobs of it, and destabilizing or corrupting governments allowed the colonizers to get more direct access to the goods.

[1] https://youtu.be/mo_ZhGIE8xQ?si=AU5sqYkYoTRbUlBw

tim333• 2 years ago

I'm not sure Russells take on Israel bombing Egypt proved that good -

The bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender, but will stiffen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment...

In practice Israel's attacks on Egypt led on to their one Arab peace treaty nine years later. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93Israel_peace_tre...)

Bertrand Russell on Zionism [video]

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