|
The MoA Week In Review – (Not Ukraine) OT 2023-14
Last week's post on Moon of Alabama:
—
Other issues:
Covid:
Zionists:
Europe?
South America:
Use as open (not Ukraine) thread …
the whale in Moby Dick is comparable to the female worker in the 2nd story of Melville’s diptych, “Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids.” the narrator is watching girls working at printing and a pulping press, talking to their supervisor:
“It never is known to tear a hair’s point.”
“Does it never stop — get clogged?”
“No. It must go. The machinery makes it go just so; just that very way, and at that very pace you there plainly see it go. The pulp can’t help going.”
Something of awe now stole over me, as I gazed upon this inflexible iron animal. Always, more or less, machinery of this ponderous, elaborate sort strikes, in some moods, strange dread into the human heart, as some living, panting Behemoth might. But what made the thing I saw so specially terrible to me was the metallic necessity, the unbudging fatality which governed it. Though, here and there, I could not follow the thin, gauzy vail of pulp in the course of its more mysterious or entirely invisible advance, yet it was indubitable that, at those points where it eluded me, it still marched on in unvarying docility to the autocratic cunning of the machine. A fascination fastened on me. I stood spell-bound and wandering in my soul. Before my eyes — there, passing in slow procession along the wheeling cylinders, I seemed to see, glued to the pallid incipience of the pulp, the yet more pallid faces of all the pallid girls I had eyed that heavy day. Slowly, mournfully, beseechingly, yet unresistingly, they gleamed along, their agony dimly outlined on the imperfect paper, like the print of the tormented face on the handkerchief of Saint Veronica…..
…Most of our girls come from far-off villages.”
“The girls,” echoed I, glancing round at their silent forms. “Why is it, Sir, that in most factories, female operatives, of whatever age, are indiscriminately called girls, never women?”
“Oh! as to that — why, I suppose, the fact of their being generally unmarried — that’s the reason, I should think. But it never struck me before. For our factory here, we will not have married women; they are apt to be off and-on too much. We want none but steady workers: twelve hours to the day, day after day, through the three hundred and sixty-five days, excepting Sundays, Thanksgiving, and Fastdays. That’s our rule. And so, having no married women, what females we have are rightly enough called girls.”
“Then these are all maids,” said I, while some pained homage to their pale virginity made me involuntarily bow.
“All maids.”
——-
humans didn’t evolve to live in this industrial hellhole.
Posted by: rjb1.5 | Jan 16 2023 1:07 utc | 123
On the Peter Beinart article posted by b:
Good, but it doesn’t go far enough. Zionism is anti-Jewish. It also might be called antisemitic, but the usual stance of Jews has been that a Jew, except for an actual apostate, cannot be called antisemitic, so that Zionists, claiming to be Jews, couldn’t then be labeled antisemites. Thus, the Zionists would label Jewish anti-Zionists as “Jewish self-haters.” But now some Zionists have come to claim that some anti-Zionist Jews are antisemites, which opens the door for the charge to rebound against themselves much more accurately.
Zionism is just exactly Jewish nationalism. As such, it differs not one whit from other nationalisms. It is not unique and, as simply an ideology, indeed does not deserve to be singled out as worse than other nationalisms. Had the Zionists found an empty (well, almost empty) island to colonize like the Icelanders, their nationalism could have had an appearance as innocent-seeming as Icelandic nationalism, yet all nationalisms are alike. They are one religion. They are one ideology. They only differ in their adornment, which they appropriate from the cultures of the people they claim to represent.
Every nationalism in essence is completely puritanical and exclusionary, demanding an ethnically-pure territory for itself to the exclusion of all who do not belong to the in-group, a territory usually expanded at the expense of others. Every nationalism embodies the idea of state building, which must be done by conscripting the entire population, by force if necessary, into that agenda. What they build is an idol, a Golden Calf that replaces all worship of everything else: God, gods, self, family, career, pleasure, or personal or other materialistic ideals, with subordination to the idol. This is well described in the book by Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag, which I highly recommend.
So, far from being Jewish, Zionism is anti-Jewish. Zionist recruitment is full of utter hatred of Judaism, disrespect for the Diaspora, avoidance of traditional Jewish languages like Yiddish, and disparagement of traditional Jewish religiosity in all its forms. Instead, the foundational ideal of Zionism was to imitate white European colonialism exactly, hence their freindship with apartheid South Africa. Similarly, the Zionists’ analysis of the Jews exactly matched the European antisemites, that the Jews were an unassimilable foreign body which must be expelled. Thus, they took up nationalism from those who had earlier developed it and who were hostile to the presence of Jews in their midst. The Zionists’ idea was, if you can’t beat’em, join’em.
When Nazi Germany appeared, the Labor Party of the yishuv, the Zionist settlement movement in Palestine, made a formal agreement or treaty with the Nazis called Ha-Ma’avarah=The Transfer Agreement, which was upheld by both parties for over 5 years, 1933-1938, and helped to facilitate the emigration of German Jews to Palestine, something the German Nazis then favored. Of course, because their analysis of the Jews was identical to the Zionists’ analysis, so much did they share interests.
Today, many Zionists profess to practice the Jewish religion, but their core motivation is the Golden Calf of the Jewish state, which is the be-all and end-all to them. Because their state does not differ from other states in its nationalism and nationalist behavior, it really lacks any specifically Jewish characteristics at all. All the Jewish accouterments are merely decoration, or boundary markers to show who is included or excluded from the body of the nation.
Posted by: Cabe | Jan 16 2023 23:50 utc | 183
|
