Back to work. The confidence level I’m feeling is essential to the work I do, which is the ‘justification’ of the ‘obsession’ in any thread, including evil threads as in the memoir of Auschwitz’s commander who believed murdering families was necessary because he was obsessed with a goal he perceived as justifying not only slaughter of human beings to win a specific combat but so they were forever removed from existence, so even the most noncombatant became a victim of being labeled enemy, and not just of some horrible foe but of the most horrible foe imaginable, which is your own internal weakness. Their belief was that Jews see their weaknesses and prey on them. It’s actually not that far off, just twisted into evil, because Jews see need, which is not necessarily a weakness, and try to satisfy the need, which makes them successful at satisfying needs when you realize those needs aren’t weaknesses, that the Jews have no interest in you beyond identifying what you need and trying to assist with those needs. The truly sad part is that Jews think of societies as cooperative ventures between and among groups. But people keep trying to portray them as having secret motives beyond what Jews actually do and think. All Jews care about is living. They want to live, to be successful at life as an individual, as a family, as a community. At the level of community, Jews are just members of the community who want to make things better for the community. Like any group, they sometimes do what’s best for their community within the larger community and sometimes they do what’s best for other communities. Both come from the same life goal: that to be good at living, to have a successful life, means helping yourself and others. That’s Hillel: ‘if I am not for myself, who will be / if I am only for myself, who am I?’ Smart aphoristic Jew!
Don’t know where this is heading. Take the Arab Israeli population. On one hand, Arabs are correct that Jews pose an existential threat to the traditional Arab way of life. The traditional Arab way of life fails in crucial aspects in the modern world, not because Arabs are stupid but because their traditions hold them back. Exposure of Arabs to Jewish methods is showing Arabs that you don’t have to become Jewish to learn from and to emulate what Jews do to figure out needs and how to satisfy them, and thus how to form cooperative ventures. Arabs are terrible at cooperation. That is not a racial characteristic: being unable to cooperate is so deeply learned that Arab societies have replaced actual cooperation with unachievable ideals of Arab brotherhood – sometimes with a capital B – and a Caliphate that marks the return to glory. It’s not just Palestinians fixated on 1948. It is like how Hungarian identity roots in the Ottoman victory at Mohacs, in which the Christian states would not help Hungary remain free. Think of that when you hear about Hungarian fear of immigrants; it comes from very deep in the national memory of betrayal and loss.
The concept of a Caliphate, the chants about Kyhber made about Jews, are ghost-summoning. They are like the Ghost Dancers, the Mahdi of Sudan, or even the Nongkawuse, the Xhosa girl whose prophecies led to the great cattle killing. In each case, there was an incantation, a dance, a belief that if repeated and repeated with sufficient fervor, the invaders would be defeated and order would magically be restored. It is a belief in magic. Mao believed in magic: the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, for if you repeat and act with so much devotion to the repetition of the act then all will be fed though there is no food and all will be equal though they are not meaningfully equal. It’s magic to believe equality exists when all is inherently unequal. It’s magic to believe chanting Khyber, Khyber will summon the ancient armies. For that brief moment, Arabs cooperated! They worked together for victory. Their cultural foundation for lack of cooperation is the focus on that happening when they banded together to spread jihad. They treat all that came after as their being in control was their golden age, so they try to reassert control by summoning the ghosts of the one thing that worked before. It’s almost the opposite of Mohacs, where betrayal is the lesson. The root of Hungarian Jew-hatred is more this fear of betrayal than the Germanic fear of loss of purity.
This is a depressing topic. I’m going to stop for a bit until the ‘channel’ changes.
jomi: playing with perception 