Eve is here. This post by Thomas Neuberger, and the tweetstorm it inspired by Chris Hedges, make the important point that violence begets violence, but the framing of it troubles me. A focus on the “desire for revenge” places emphasis on the harm caused by the victim’s counterattack, as opposed to the perpetrator’s (almost always unnecessary) violence, which sets off a cycle of retaliation.
I was too young to read many important books and fully understand their contents. One was Machiavelli’s The Prince. “But above all, one must refrain from taking away another’s property, for a man forgets the death of his father sooner than he loses his property.”
Perhaps DLG, Emperor of Reality, will correct me. I don’t think quite a few men miss their fathers because they don’t get along well with them, but the fact is that all young men would be extremely upset about having money taken from them that they were supposed to receive. Based on this, I understood this passage. But in Machiavelli’s time, the main form of wealth was land. And land was not just property, but something that conferred status and position in society. Therefore, depriving a person of their “wealth” in this social context could be seen as depriving them of their social status, which is perhaps more humiliating than simply losing wealth alone. It is.
In other words, the motive for revenge is not just, and perhaps not primarily a nefarious murder. It is the indiscrimination and depersonalization of the most basic act of colonialism, which is the taking away of people’s ancestral lands. It is not surprising that the US and European imperialists have been unable to fully internalize what it means.
Of course, there are other ways to inflict deep wounds on an individual’s or community’s sense of self, such as desecrating or destroying sacred objects or places or violating personal/religious taboos. Israel’s plan to demolish Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third most venerated mosque in the Islamic world, will be the source of all provocations.
Written by Thomas Neuberger. It was first published in god’s spy
Renowned journalist and author Chris Hedges long piece In it, he makes many important points, but the one I would like to highlight is that there will be revenge for Western complicity in Israel’s genocide.
From the piece (all emphasis mine):
As I learned from covering the wars in the former Yugoslavia, hatred and revenge are passed down from generation to generation like poison. Our disastrous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which created Hezbollah, should have taught us this.
Those of us who have been covering the Middle East know that the Bush administration was hailed as a liberator in Iraq when the United States spent more than a decade imposing sanctions, creating severe shortages of food and medicine and killing at least one person. I was stunned by what I had imagined would happen. 1 million Iraqis, including 500,000 children. …
Israel’s 1982 occupation of Palestine and saturation bombing of Lebanon led to Osama bin Laden’s attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001, as well as U.S. support for Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir, and the Muslim south. I was disappointed. Philippines, US military aid to Israel, and sanctions on Iraq.
Will the international community continue to passively stand by and allow Israel to carry out mass extermination operations? Will there ever be a limit?
His answer to the above question is also my own. No, there are no restrictions. Israel and the US will stop if they can.
Thinking about it, I’m afraid The Israel Lobby has bought and financed Congress and the two ruling parties.not only has the media and universities been horrified, but the river of blood will continue to grow. There is something to be gained from war. There are many. And the influence of the military industry is Hundreds of millions of dollars spent on Zionist political campaignswould be a formidable barrier to peace, not to mention sanity.
The US is just as guilty as Israel. He hedges in breathtaking clarity on Israel’s similar torture and murder policies in Vietnam and Iraq.
“After the (Vietnam) War,” concludes (Nicolas) Tars. “Most scholars have dismissed the widespread accounts of war crimes repeated through Vietnamese revolutionary publications and American antiwar literature as mere exaggerated propaganda. Few academic historians have thought to cite such sources. Few cited it extensively. My Lai, on the other hand, defended and thereby erased all other American atrocities. Vietnam War bookshelves are now filled with big-picture histories, sober studies of diplomatic and military tactics, and combat memoirs told from a soldier’s perspective. Buried in forgotten U.S. government archives, locked in the memories of atrocity survivors, America’s real war in Vietnam has all but disappeared from the public consciousness”
My lie was not a one-off. It was well-established in policy and widely practiced. Same in Iraq.
The same goes for Abu Ghraib. Bagram. And all Other CIA torture sites We ran and ran — Poland, Lithuania, Thailand, Cuba.
America is that bad. This is America’s true way of war. celebrated blindly.
Mass murder will definitely come back.
Hedges fears the retribution of evil against evil. I think this is guaranteed.
Humans generally have a tolerant nature. Consider the relationship between the United States and Vietnam. If anyone deserves to be hated, it’s us for them. Still today we are friends.
but it’s not all we are tolerant. How many people would kill someone who killed their own child? How many people would kill large numbers of people who kill their own people? The answer cannot be “no one.”
Historical amnesia, at least for the victors, is an important part of the extermination operation once it is over. But for the victims, the memory of the massacre is a sacred mission, along with a yearning for retribution. The vanquished will reemerge in ways that the slaughterers cannot predict.inciting new conflicts and new hostilities.
Thinking about America Notable vulnerabilities — “Water and food supplies. Chemical plants. Energy grids and pipelines. Bridges, tunnels and ports. “And millions of cargo containers carrying most of the goods American consumers depend on.” —U.S. I don’t think we need a complex attack like 9/11 by people who think we need to be punished in order to punish them.
How many very large shopping malls are there in America? What would happen if five of them exploded at once? The so-called Mall of America welcomes you. 42 million people each year. How many people will be attending Black Friday?
What happens when a suicide bomber joins the security lines at busy airports in New York, Chicago, and Dallas just before Christmas, right before a screening?
How many “what ifs” like this can you come up with? They are infinitely everywhere.
We feel fear for us. By arming and protecting such a large-scale massacre so openly, the West has made retaliation inevitable. We will regret these choices when it is too late.
