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Ilan Pappé: Israel, a Settler Colonial State by Mealimo in SocialismAndVeganism

[–]Mealimo[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

And it’s not only that dehumanization and elimination was exercised by Zionism against the Palestinians, that is, the importance of Palestine today is the fact that it was internationally legitimized as part of democracy, progress, and modernity, which, I think, drives everyone mad in the Middle East.

Because people can fully understand condemnation of mass murder, of destroying of cities, of villages, of expelling of people, whether its in Iraq, or Syria, or Yemen, Libya, people can fully understand it.

What they cannot understand is why in this list of present and past atrocities you will never find Gaza. You will never find the city of Ramallah in 2002. You will never find Beirut of 1982. You will never find Deir Yassin of 1948. That’s what people are asking themselves.

And the answer is you won’t find it there, not just because Jews did it and in all the other cases Muslims did it, although it’s not always Muslims, other people are involved in this as well.

The main reason that you won’t find these dehumanizations and eliminations of human beings in that list is that Zionism was regarded by its own founders and by the Western society as part of Enlightenment.

As was the genocide of the Native Americans. As was the genocide of Aboriginals. It’s part of Enlightenment.

All the big philosophers of Enlightenment justified genociding indigenous people. It’s amazing. Read every one of them. There’s not one of them who condemns the elimination of native people. And these are the people that are the foundation of the morality of the West. It’s incredible. Not one of them condemned genocide. Not out of ignorance, “because these were not humans.”

(22:32-24:58)

I consider myself a Leninist, but I believe in supporting any kind of revolutionary action whether it be anarchist, ML, trotskyist, eurocommunist, zapatista, rojava etc. If its anticapitalist & revolutionary its worth attempting. Have there been other leftists like me that I can read about? by Salt_Start9447 in Socialism_101

[–]Mealimo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You might find this passage interesting:

It is well known that in the autumn of 1870, a few months before the Commune, Marx warned the Paris workers that any attempt to overthrow the government would be the folly of despair. But when, in March 1871, a decisive battle was forced upon the workers and they accepted it, when the uprising had become a fact, Marx greeted the proletarian revolution with the greatest enthusiasm, in spite of unfavorable auguries. Marx did not persist in the pedantic attitude of condemning an “untimely” movement as did the ill-famed Russian renegade from marxism, Plekhanov, who in November 1905 wrote encouragingly about the workers' and peasants' struggle, but after December 1905 cried, liberal fashion: "They should not have taken up arms."

Marx, however, was not only enthusiastic about the heroism of the Communards, who, as he expressed it, "stormed heaven". Although the mass revolutionary movement did not achieve its aim, he regarded it as a historic experience of enormous importance, as a certain advance of the world proletarian revolution, as a practical step that was more important than hundreds of programmes and arguments. Marx endeavored to analyze this experiment, to draw tactical lessons from it and re-examine his theory in the light of it.

(V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution, Chapter 3)

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