Intifada or Jihad?

Obligatory Seriousness

War sucks, but we know how to psychologically adjust. What people hate more than they can hate each other is the sucker punch, the surprise attack, the unexpected bomb. I am tempted to begin a meme journal of all of the concepts we will hear jawboned until the headlines are reoriented to the next big thing. But attentions are concentrated by the same element of surprise that everybody with an opinion and a megaphone will be laying at our doorsteps over the next several weeks. It’s war and we all know how to be at war.

Not Hate, Disgust
We Americans suffer a pathetic class of journos who enjoy talking about ‘hate’ as if it were a special and unusual emotion that makes us do the unthinkable. The unconscionable happens every day; the journalists show us the unthinkable. Now ladies and gentlemen must decide whether to come up with excuses to make the unthinkable somehow conscionable. Another class of news consumers with no martial education consider that the purpose of militaries is to find idiots absent of human conscience to plan and execute unconscionable acts. So one of the word clouds about Israel and Palestine will be filled with the rhetoric of hate vs love and the impossibility of military intelligence.

So basically don’t look for hate. Hate is not the sustaining emotion. Hate simply enables rage. When you hate someone or something, you rage to get it out of your space. Hate → Rage is a tactical equation. Disgust, in contrast, is the sustained emotion. When you are disgusted with someone or something, you are much more calculating in your approach. You don’t want to simply rage against it, you strategically plan to eliminate it altogether. The disgusted man can be calm and rational, he doesn’t need to rage, but he has a plan to sterilize the object of his disgust from existence.

Jews understand this. I would hope you recognize the difference between hate and disgust because it is key in the determination between tactical conflict and strategic missions. Disgust → Extermination is a strategic equation.

Now in the context of hate vs disgust consider the difference between refusing the right of Israel to exist and refusing to end occupation of Gaza. Netanyahu’s Israel rages at Gaza. Hamas is disgusted by the existence of a Jewish state. Note that this is not a question of capabilities, it is a question of intent.

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Showing Out
Now is the time for all good partisans to show their faces and declare their places. I have shut my mouth for a week on purpose. Since I cannot avoid the issue and the monkey boys have begun pushing content down the throats of my subscriptions, making the meme survey seems more and more reasonable - still I resist. I hate letting this crap into my head, but my tea is so calming I cannot muster the energy to rage it away. Nevertheless, it is becoming more clear where the domestic smokescreens are fulminating.

I’m going to pick a target and this is President Claudine Gay at Harvard. Larry Summers is pissed about her taking 4 days to say something. Where has Larry Summers been? At any rate, Gay pissed me off last year by being a primary provocateur against economics professor Roland Fryer. This for me is the fifth strike against Harvard and more specifically the politicos at the Kennedy School, as I discovered they have proliferated a large clutch of activist clubs and organizations of dubious merit but of significant influence. One can rest assured that very precise weasel words have been crafted, many of which might even require ChatGPT to decode, which would betray their disgust at American complicity in whatever it is they perceive to be the cumulative sins of Israel at this rallying and tallying moment.

As Ronald Reagan once said, I’m not going to lie to the American people; I leave that to others. I have no objection to those who object to Zionism, which I take simply to mean Jewish nationalism, because Israel has clearly demonstrated to me that it is a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-religious, multi-party cosmopolitain society. On the other hand, I have little patience for people who pretend that such reasonable nationalism requires the violent overthrow of ‘oppressors’. Do I think there is irony in that considering 1776? No. I think that between 1776 and 1812 Americans had plenty time to prove they were a nation and were tested in many ways. In fewer than 30 years from its founding, the US made the Louisiana Purchase. Nations can do such things.

What annoys me about the showing out are the demands that call for X doing the right thing now. As if such matters were easy or clear. People don’t quite understand why misunderstandings exist. This is the nature of human catastrophe. It’s not an ‘intelligence failure’.

A Tragic View
I haven’t said it much but I suspect we all too often fail to take the tragic approach to human life as seriously and as often as we should. It sounds like something a Stoic would say, but I wouldn’t call Shakespeare or Dickens stoics. Me, I’m the one with a dark sense of humor - I think it comes from watching too much of the Three Stooges as a child and making their heretofore unthinkable jousts conscionable. Of course as the oldest I got to be Moe. Human tragedy can be funny. The way we consume the news of war is funny, or maybe it’s just laughable.

I just recently finished reading Roughing It by Mark Twain. I’m still mentally in that place where tales of desperate men fighting against nature, the economy and each other is the dominant theme. It was hilarious in the way only Samuel L. Clemons could make it. My other favorite is Samuel L. Jackson who can also make acts of outrageous outbursts quite amusing. What makes it all a joke is the seriousness with which we take our peripheral interests and pet obsessions in the banter around armed conflict between desperate men fighting each other over their economy and against the elements. Weather is something Alexa tells us about if and when we ask from within our climate controlled houses. The fog of war is something altogether different.

I want very much to discover a number of authors whose play by play on battles, contemporary or historical, force me to get a map of the territory. I want to know which boots are on what ground. Tragically, I expect combatants to die. Tragically, I expect civilians to get caught up in the destruction. Women, children, shut-ins, all of society’s weakest will fall as collateral casualties. This is the nature of human catastrophe. It’s not an ‘intelligence failure’. It is the momentum of one-track minds manifest as a singular policy. It is the hubris of wishful thinking. It is the assumption that we can always know the right thing to do, and just do it. ‘Now more than ever.’

The Universal Qualifier
War, as I say, ends up being the excuse for everything. No doubt your feeds will soon remind you of everything everyone has thought about Israelis and Palestinians and the drama of their conflict. We will hear why it particularly makes each American cry, fuss and demonstrate. The usual suspects will say the usual things. Here are my things.

1. Back in the 90s I tallied up the deaths from the previous conflicts and came up with a number somewhere around 4,000 since 1948. I compared that with about 9,000 gang related deaths in Los Angeles County during the 80s. It gave me perspective.

2. I have always wondered why Jordan was never quite an acceptable destination for ethnic Palestinians sick of Israel. I have never questioned the fact that Muslim Arabs, German Jews and a scramble of other sorts are all Israeli citizens, and so I confess my flirtation with the idea of a One State Solution.

3. There is no question in my mind that Iran is playing the Great Game here, sticking here tongue out at America like a foul mouthed little girl on the sideline whose dirty faced brothers are committing fouls on the field. They invented the Great Satan marketing campaign. Evil genius.

4. America’s democracy cannot manage, and has not managed to put a decent geopolitical praxis against Iranian provocation since Bush 41. I’m not sure he did a good job either, but I can’t imagine him trolling for likes as we do today.

As of today, my understanding is that relatively small moves are being made in 8 border towns east of the Gaza. That’s all I’m going to say about boots on the ground for a while. You know what they say about plans meeting the enemy.

Over a dozen years ago, even before I began my own Martial Education, I started paying attention to military history in order to understand the context of my novel geopolitical neoconservatism. Like many Americans I was shocked into the present by 9/11, and subsequently the past. Having joined what I call the ‘broad American Right’ I rediscovered some of my own values as the son of a US Marine and as one of the big brothers of the neighborhood who kept all of the little brothers in line and the gangs at bay. I still can’t say with any confidence that the American Left appreciates my situational awareness with much more nuance than ‘ghetto black man’, but I seriously digress. My point is that at this point I have a good sense of geopolitical and military wisdom beyond the common sense that most Americans think suffices. That is why I pay attention to military commanders like this guy, somebody I think deserves a good read, especially now, starting with this:

24,669 Americans Murdered by Terrorists in One Day

Intifada or Jihad?
These are labels associated with some particular flavor of Arab or Muslim action. Over the past few years, we Americans haven’t seemed to understand the blurry lines of the Middle Eastern version of The Struggle. So we have tried to appropriate what parts we see as particularly honorable and glorious and tread one way. Keyword “Liberation”. Or we have tried to appropriate those parts we consider heinous and despicable and tread another way. Keyword “Terrorism”. I tried mightily during the Iraq War to attempt in my writing at the time to speak of the conflict in the terms of our military commanders whose profession it is to know what to expect of enemies in all dimensions. That was insufficient for an American political understanding, a humanist perspective and an accurate historical picture.

The American political understanding is what’s percolating right now. We are scouring our search histories trying to name our own domestic boogiemen with the expectation that we will all be showing out in the face of this ‘unspeakable tragedy’. We rhetorically attack each other first, and probably last. The clarity required for American participation in competent geopolitical strategy is not forthcoming from our two parties, one of which cannot even decide who should be its parliamentary leader. You would think our Rulers could come up with something more substantial than waving flags and “standing with our friends”, but you and I know these are dark days.

The ‘humanist perspective’ even sounds a bit cloying and cute. As with the Iraq War, I could never identify any American entity that put humanitarian boots outside of the Green Zone and actually setup and manned aid stations. Our money people tend to employ proxies and so smartly avoid tooting their own ineffective horns. Find me one blogger who says, Bill Gates pays me to deliver these goods on the border of Egypt and Gaza. I mean seriously, the US demonstrating wisdom on the matter of poor displaced homeless people? Yeah right. How’s that going in Florida, or should I say New York, or should I say Texas? Let’s just call them ‘houseless’ to show our concern. I don’t think we’re doing adequately as humanists. Is the EU? Dunno yet. Japan? All I have are question marks.

Today I’m going to find out ways I can hear out Condoleeza Rice whom I hear is on with Bari Weiss. I imagine candidate Nikki Haley could be credible at this moment. I’m patient and moderate in my expectations.

Still, I’m waiting to see what we’re all going to be calling this in a couple weeks, and I wonder if the Eurozone will call it the same thing. What are we calling Ukraine? Oh yeah, them. As always, as a Peasant, I’m figuring out how the peasantry gets through it.