Sunday, May 23, 2021

Rethinking Godwin's Law in Gaza

 It's an inevitability if you're an online muckraker. It happens all the time. You get dragged down the rabbit hole by some malignant grandstanding troll and, regardless of what the devolving conversation was actually about, somebody gets called a fucking Nazi. It's so common that it has it's own name, Godwin's Law, created by attorney, author, and Electronic Frontier Foundation veteran Mike Godwin. Godwin's Law was originally an internet adage that declared that any online squabble, if allowed to go on long enough, would inevitably lead to someone or something being inappropriately compared to Hitler or the Nazi regime.

However, like many the internet adage, Godwin's Law has taken on another unofficial meaning. A more punitive meaning that essentially goes that anyone who makes such a comparison has already lost the argument and in some cases may indeed be an anti-Semite for having taken it there. But what happens when just such a comparison, however ugly, is completely appropriate? What happens when the similarities to the Third Reich become so appallingly obvious that ignoring such a fact becomes an exercise in absurdity? And what happens when those similarities are in fact an indirect result of histories greatest horror? The rotten fruit of the Reich. Are we to ignore such inconvenient truths? And if so, at whose expense and to whose reward?

After two weeks of Israel's latest hideous bombing campaign against the Gazan prison camp, I find such uncomfortable comparisons hard to resist. The bloodbath began with the ongoing ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem, in this case the embattled Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and the IDF's storm trooper assault on the peaceful Ramadan worshippers of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. In response to such brutish behavior, Hamas decided to launch a volley of rockets into Israel after issuing an ultimatum calling on Israeli soldiers to leave the mosque and the Sheik Jarrah protesters be.

Israel chose war and used Hamas' puny attempt at self-defense as an excuse to launch a blitzkrieg carpet bombing over one of the most densely populated places on earth, a gigantic ghetto under permanent lockdown by a totally criminal blockade, giving it's inmates no place safe to hide. It was like shooting fish in a barrel with a goddamn Uzi. Schools, hospitals, whole apartment blocks, nothing was off limits. Whole towers were demolished 9/11 style, including one housing the offices of international journalists. Homes in refugee camps were obliterated without warning before the routes to the nearest hospitals were mined. Hundreds of civilians, many of them helpless women and children, annihilated without mercy.

Hamas attempted to negotiate a ceasefire on day two of the eleven day massacre. Their ceasefire was rejected and the attacks were intensified to spite their efforts. Israel's zeal for sadism knew no bounds. According to them, every bombing target, every school, tower, and hovel contained a hidden Hamas asset and in a way they were right. In spite of how you or I may feel about them, Hamas is the rightful democratically elected leadership of Gaza. They enjoy the popular support of a broken populace desperate to strike back against their tormentors like Warsaw partisans even if it means dying in the process. Any death is better than life in internment. For this sometimes misguided sin of pride, Israel sees fit to punish an entire population. Gaza's greatest sin has been resisting their Judaization, refusing to be liquidated for the greater good of the chosen people.

Under such devastating circumstances, how is any historical observer not supposed to make the connection between the actions and ambitions of Israel's master race and Nazi Germany, especially when you consider the intimate connections between the two. I have long argued that the greatest tragedy of the Holocaust was that many of the children of it's survivors were doomed by international forces to become the new Nazis. Like an abused child, Israel developed into the shape of its tormentors and the American empire exploited this sickness to wage war on the Arab world. Just like the Nazi's Third Reich, this war is doomed by its own ambition to fail and this failure is doomed by its reaper's cruelty to devolve into increasingly genocidal policies before the new Nazis can collapse beneath the weight of their horror.

I say none of this with glee or even anger. I draw my conclusions with great sadness and pray to various gods that I'm wrong. But to declare me an anti-Semite among other foul slurs just for invoking such unpleasant historical observations is the truly lazy and callous position to take. The second interpretation of Godwin's Law is simply another excuse to silence debate on a sensitive subject and even the first interpretation refuses to acknowledge that the greatest example of humanities capacity for cruelty in the last century can serve as a perfect scale to measure our sins by so long as it's done analytically. Otherwise we raise the horrors of the Holocaust to a height in which no crime could ever possibly compare, thus assuming that just such a crime cannot possibly repeat itself. Surely the risk offered by just such an ultimatum far outweighs that posed by the insensitivity of douche bags on the internet.

You be the judge, dearest motherfuckers. I for one welcome the debate. I only hope it's not in vain.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  They Walked the Line by Joy Division

*  The Metal East by Lightening Bolt

*  The War Dance by Killing Joke

*  Nightclubbing by Iggy Pop

*  My War by Black Flag

*  Atmosphere by Joy Division

*  All Tomorrow's Parties by the Velvet Underground

* Let's Have a War by Fear 

11 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. “Zionism is the only political ideology I know of that claims that disagreement with it is a hate crime.”
    — John Clark, Ontario Coalition Against Poverty“Z

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    1. claim Palestinian lands as their exclusive biblical birthright.

      The woman responded in terms she obviously thought conciliatory: “I don’t say that it [a Palestinian village] should burn down, but that you should leave the village and we’ll go live in it.”

      https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2021-05-04/jerusalem-protests-mob-establishment/

      https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2021-05-22/israel-war-crimes-zionists/

      Jewish groups that aid Israel’s war crimes can’t deny all responsibility for those crimes
      22 May 2021
      Here is something that can be said with great confidence. It is racist – antisemitic, if you prefer – to hold Jews, individually or collectively, accountable for Israel’s crimes. Jews are not responsible for Israel’s war crimes, even if the Israeli state presumes to implicate Jews in its crimes by falsely declaring it represents all Jews in the world.

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  3. The Israeli standard is to determine whether someone is Jewish rests with whether one's mother is Jewish as if Jewishness could be traced to one's DNA which is, to my understanding, quite odd. Back in the early twentieth century the heritage of Jews to be persecuted unfairly for centuries led many decent and intelligent Jews to participate in social activities supporting other cultures who were likewise persecuted and many of the people supporting black Americans who suffered from Jim Crow horrors were Jewish because they fully understood the persecution. And, as with many Jews living in Israel today, they were not religious. Both of my parents left Europe in the late 19th century for the USA as persecuted Jews. My own Jewish parents were totally unaffiliated with religion. But the long inherency of Jews with intellectual and liberal qualities and even with atheism were, to me, most attractive in defining Jewish traditions. As a New York kid in the early 1940s I got involved with a Jewish Zionist organization called Hobonim and learned about their desire to create a Jewish nation as a kind of official ghetto to contain all of the world's Jews and, as a New Yorker quite satisfied to remain where I was born, I argued against the concept as it struck me as creating a target area very dangerous for Jews who integrated well in many different places throughout the world. There was something, to my mind, of world citizenry to being essentially Jewish which seemed to me exceedingly valuable. And to lose that universality struck me as fundamentally both anti-human and anti-Semitic since Jews as well as anybody else should feel free to live anywhere on the planet.

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  4. the talmud is compulsory in south korea schools

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    1. sounds false but look it up tremendous propaganda in south korean newspapers lauding the jews, many jewish publications admit it , cartoon type talmuds for children hit images and see how talmud has taken over south korea

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  5. https://electronicintifada.net/content/today-we-are-nazis-says-member-israeli-jewish-extremist-group/33081

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  6. @FakeReporter
    In the last few days, our researchers at Fake Reporter alongside @HablocOrg have been monitoring far-right groups on Whatsapp and Telegram.

    We saw how civilians are organizing and arming themselves, in order to violently attacks Arab businesses and civilians.

    Israel closes both border crossings with Gaza al jazeera
    52,406 views•May 23, 2021
    This closings was 5 hours ago - please spread on internet to protect Palestinians from further atrocities.
    Both of the border crossings between Israel and Gaza have been closed.
    The checkpoint was briefly opened on Friday allowing foreign journalists to enter the Gaza Strip.
    Israel has also closed access to Gaza from the sea

    Israeli settlers, flanked by security forces, stormed the courtyards of al-Aqsa on Sunday. Earlier, Israeli police reportedly arrested at least six Palestinian worshippers.

    The Palestinian foreign ministry condemned the move, saying it was aimed at “provoking worshippers”.

    you.This closings was 5 hours ago - please spread on internet to protect Palestinians from further atrocities.

    “Today we are Nazis,” says member of Israeli Jewish extremist group
    https://electronicintifada.net/content/today-we-are-nazis-says-member-israe

    has israel removed blockade of Gaza so humanitarian aid can reach the Palestinians? Please keep watching, the genocide of Palestinians will be continuing, electricity is off so they can't let the world know, press building bombed with equipment, idf targeting journalists.li-jewish-extremist-group/33081

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  7. I don't regard it as antisemitic to draw comparisons to the Nazis but it is neither accurate nor helpful to the Palestinian cause. Taking some of your points:

    - "blitzkrieg carpet bombing over one of the most densely populated places on earth". That perhaps shows your ignorance of the historical realities. The Blitzkrieg of May/June 1940 involved mostly land warfare supported by bombing of cities using Stuka divebombers which carried a single relatively small bomb. Carpet bombing was invented by the USA and the UK later in WWII and truly obliterated vast areas. Unlike the IDF, there was never any warning given by the Allies. Does that make the Allies also Nazis? At the time there was much debate as to the morality of what was labelled area bombing.

    - "a broken populace desperate to strike back against their tormentors like Warsaw partisans". The Warsaw ghetto was vastly worse than any part of the Occupied Territories today, horrendous as the Zionists have made it. There were frequent roundups of Jewish people to be taken to death camps. Apartheid Israel has no death camps, no gas chambers, no SS or Gestapo. It has no Einsatzgruppen (and I suspect you'd never even heard of them) roaming the OT looking for 'Untermenschen' to rape, torture and murder by the thousand. Israel is not conducting forcible medical experiments on children without anaesthetic.

    The comparison leads me to conclude that anyone making it (including boastful Zionists) knows little or nothing of what Nazi Germany and its satellite states were. For anyone supporting the Palestinian cause, using the comparison plays into the Zionists' hands who can justly claim that such people are extremists who don't care about Jewish historical suffering under a real Nazi regime.

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    1. As nasty as the Nazis wee, and no defense is possible, I doubt any nation in war is guilty free. The revolting behavior of any nation committing horrors on innocent bystanders is indefensible and the Zionists fit into that pattern as well as any human organization designed to control a population by exerting brutality to generate fear and obedience from a prejudiced legal system to a misbehaving police force to any vigorously active military organization. When the entire world spends massively to gain deadly weapons which are highly profitable to produce, they will inevitably be used, even though they are designed to eliminate much of planetary life. This does not speak well for the intellect of our species.

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    2. I apologize for the typo in the initial sentence which should read "As nasty as the Nazis were..."

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