From: Scott Chase (ecphoric@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat 14 Jun 2003 - 14:39:37 GMT
>From: Jkr438@aol.com
>Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>Subject: Re: Nazion
>Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 13:59:36 EDT
>
>[Jake] Could Godwin's rule be invoked here?
>
That's likely. This brings up the larger issue of why comparisons of
ideologies or groups people dislike to Nazism or Nazis or leaders people
dislike to Hitler are so common. Does the comparison add anything
informative to the topic at hand or detract?
>
>Or even if not, is this really a
>good use of the memetics list? Surely some forums revel in this kind of
>theorizing, so I can't imagine that the memetics list has anything to add
>to this.
>
Some aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict are topical, but as we've seen
cannot be handled without people getting their feathers ruffled.
The ideology of Zionism (which isn't a bad word) would be interesting to
look into with some depth and objectivity. I actually have Herzl's book
around here somewhere. Zionism itself breaks up into subideologies, with
rightward and leftward leanings. The difference between the Labor Zionism of
David Ben-Gurion and the Revisionist Zionism of Vlad Jabotinsky would be one
such polar subgrouping.
Another interesting, but far too emotionally charged, topic would be the
origin and propagation of the blood libel that Jews have some need for
Gentile blood. This has appeared in a recent form with Arabs cast as victims
of the mythical bloodthirsty Jew. The blood libel is a notion that has
worked itself into propaganda spread by Arab media, and one wonders what
influence this might have on the perception Arab childen have of Jews.
Other interesting topics relevant to cultural evolution would be (especially
as ideological antipodes to Zionism) ideologies of pan-Arabism and
Islamicism and how these might be broken into subgroupings.
Instead we have Dace versus Joe or Lawry versus Joe.
>
>-Jake
>
>(only c&p's follow)
>
> > From: joedees@bellsouth.net
> > Subject: Re: Morphogenetic fields
> >
> > Dace Opined:
> >
> > > What you're missing is the human dimension. For example, plenty of
> > > people have recognized that the state policies of Israel toward its
> > > Palestinian minority are criminal. To be anti-Israel, in this limited
> > > sense, results from subjecting beliefs to our innate capacity for
> > > reason. But some people criticize Israel, not out of reason, but out
> > > of a racist hatred of Jews. These are people who equate all Jews with
> > > Israel, though many Jews, even Israeli citizens, are appalled at the
> > > brutality of their government and their fellow citizens. The
> > > principled anti-Isreali stance is a result of human intelligence, not
> > > memetic struggle. The unprincipled anti-Israeli stance results from
> > > the success of the anti-Jew meme. Another unprincipled stance, which
> > > is pro-Isreali, depends on the success of the meme that equates all
> > > criticism of Israel with "anti-Semitism" (the irony being that Arabs
> > > are themselves Semitic).
> >
> > The bias is not on the basis of race so much as religion; all members of
> > non-Islamic religions are to be converted, enslaved (dhimmitude) or
> > killed. This is the stance that medieval Christians also took, but the
> > Enlightenment, which the Islamists have either rejected or never
> > experienced, grew them out of it.
>
>Unlike Christians, Muslims always accepted and revered Jews and lived at
>peace with them.
>
> > As to who is and is not a criminal in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
>I
> > wish to quote James Lileks for you:
> >
> > I havenTt written much about the oRoadmap to PeaceĀ for the same
>
> > reason I wouldnTt write much about attempts to crossbreed a llama
> > with a vacuum cleaner: I donTt think itTs going to work. I never thought
> > it would work. The only question is how many dead Israelis it will take
> > before the point is made, for the 3,234th time.
> > The top-of-the-hour radio news played today's news just as youTd
> > expect - everything shoved through the tit-for-tat template. Israel
> > attempts to take out a terror leader; Hamas orespondsĀ with a
>
> > bombing. As if theyTre equal. As if targeting the car that ferries
>around
> > some murderous SOB is the same as sending a blissed-out teenager to
> > blow nails and screws through the flesh of afternoon commuters so he
> > can bury himself in the heaving bosom of the heavenly whorehouse.
> > Cycle of violence, don't you know.
> >
> > They donTt have helicopters, we're told, so they use suicide bombers.
> > If they had helicopters, they would have strafed the bus and everyone
> > waiting at the corner. Give them a nation where Hamas runs
> > unchecked, and theyTll have helicopters. They won't be Apaches. The
> > bill of sale will be calculated in Euros and the manual written in
> > French. By then the excuse for the terror won't be oppression; it'll be
> > "the legacy of oppression." Sometimes I swear the mainstream media
> > won't take a look at the Palestinian's horrid death-cult subculture
>until
> > we learn that a suicide bomber played "Doom" at an Internet cafe for
> > five minutes. And then they'll blame Intel.
>
>This guy is letting his memes do his thinking for him. Both sides in this
>conflict are committing terrible acts of violence against each other. At
>first glance, it would seem that both sides are equally guilty. But when
>you cancel out the violence of each side, what's left is asymmetrical
>oppression. Israel is oppressing Palestine, while Palestine is not
>oppressing Israel. Israel has all the power, while Palestine has none.
>Israel illegally occupies Palestinian land, while Palestine occupies no
>Israeli land. Israel restricts water to Palestinians, preventing economic
>development, restricts Palestinian movement with numerous check points
>(which has effectively shut down all higher education), prevents
>Palestinians from using highways that criss-cross their territory,
>bulldozes
>their houses, pulls up their crops and fruit trees, and exploits them for
>low-end labor. The relationship is much like that of rapist to raped. To
>claim that Israel is somehow the victim in all this is much like claiming
>the rapist is the victim simply because, in the course of the attack, the
>victim managed to bite his ear. Clearly, we're dealing with a highly
>successful, pathological meme.
>
>We may trace the genealogy of this meme to Adolf Hitler and Naziism. The
>insane persecution of the Jews left them with an enduring sense of
>victimization. Even now, as they victimize Palestinians, they
>narcissistically view themselves as morally pure, while their enemies are
>pure evil. The narcissism generated through oppression has remained in
>place, even as they've become cruel oppressor. The Zion meme is a reverse
>image of the Nazi meme. It's the same except that Jew is victimizer
>instead
>of victim. One might say the Zion meme to the Nazi meme is what the
>vertebrate body-plan is to the insect body-plan-- a simple inversion. They
>may look strikingly different, but below the surface Nazi and Zionist bear
>the same colors, which they elaborate on according to their cultural norms.
>
>Just as Nazis projected their own criminality onto Jews, so Zionists
>project
>their criminality onto their victims. The face of Palestine presented in
>the US media is really just a mirror image of the true face of Israel. The
>Jews made an epochal mistake when they abandoned their Semitic brothers and
>trusted the very ones who had persecuted them. While Jews lived in peace
>with Arabs for centuries from Iraq to Iberia, Europeans bullied them and
>ultimately traumatized them. Yet the Jews left their ancient homes in the
>Arab world to live in a nation established for them by these same European
>powers. What would Saadiah Gaon, tenth century Exilarch (secular head of
>Mesopotamian Jewry), have made of Israel's support for the bombing of
>Baghdad, Gaon's beloved home of many years? He would have figured the Jews
>had lost their minds, and he would have been absolutely right. Zionist
>Jews
>have lost their power of reason to an insidious, malignant meme.
>
>Ted
>
>
>
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