by Roger Tucker
Part 1 – Misplaced Concreteness
Martin Luther famously said that “reason is the Devil’s greatest whore.” This fundamental insight into the subservience of the intellect to the emotions must be at the heart of any discussion of the manipulation of language to serve particular interests. In the ancient Hellenistic world this was well understood, giving rise to the numerous schools of Rhetoric that taught aspiring politicians and the like their art. Many centuries later, the Jesuits honed this knowledge and skill into a powerful instrument to combat the Reformation. In Renaissance Italy, Machiavelli schooled the powerful in this art of persuasion, combining it with other means of accomplishing one’s ends that most people recognize as the modus operandi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modus_operandi of the Mafia. As we know, the supreme practitioners of this craft nowadays are the Zionists, whose main purpose has been to pull off and sustain one of the most audacious real estate heists in history. In order to do so they had to colonize the consciousness of the West, something that could only be accomplished through a deliberate perversion and manipulation of language to serve their purpose.
As the purpose of this exercize is to discuss how language is used to distort rather than reveal the truth, with attention to the specific case of Zionism, we need to begin by defining our terms. So, let’s start by asking who are the Zionists, as opposed to other collective terms such as “the Jews,” or “the Israelis.” These terms are often conflated, because they have overlapping boundaries, but they do have different referents. All of these terms are very slippery because they refer to abstractions, general categories rather than things that actually exist. When we say “a chair” we are referring to something non-specific that is presumably bounded by such a category, but if we say “that chair” we are referring to a particular object with all of its unique characteristics.
When we say “Zionists,” who are we referring to? Jews who actively support Israel, passively support Israel, “Christians” eagerly awaiting the Rapture, complicit goyim like Dick Cheney, Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton, or what? It’s an abstraction, a broad sweep of the brush that covers a lot of ground but is inherently vague. In linguistic terms such words have “fuzzy boundaries,” as do all words that refer to classifications of things or people, as opposed to particular examples of such a class. Even Linnaean taxonomy, the effort to properly classify all living things, continues to evolve, with its categories constantly mutating. The misuse of language and the resulting confusion almost always starts with the solidifying of abstract concepts. Technically, this is referred to as “reification,” or “misplaced concreteness,” and it’s as common as dirt.
To proceed with some definitions, let’s start with “Zionism.” Briefly, it is the collection of interlocking concepts, stories, rationalizations and myths that provided the intellectual foundation for establishing the State of Israel and since then has sustained it rhetorically. That is the nature and function of an “ideology,” a conceptual framework that constitutes a particular political view. “Zionists,” then, are people who have adopted that view, who believe (quite often for very different and conflicting reasons) that the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state was legitimate and that it continues to have a moral and legal right to exist.
The broad class of ideologies to which Zionism belongs is fascism, a term that is both widely used and misunderstood. Let us consider the meaning of the word “fascism.” The dictionary definition doesn’t help us much as it associates the word with the particular eruption of fascism in Europe in the 20th Century. But the fascisti of Mussolini’s Italy and the Nazis of Hitler’s Germany were manifesting a phenomenon that dates from the first attempts of human beings to figure out their place in the world, an effort which required the use of language. Language evolved as a means of distinguishing “this” from “that,” the most basic function of communication. Certain sounds became associated with particular things, but these “things” were not really things; they were classes of things. Some of these classes of things referred to material objects, like stones and trees, or tigers and mammoths. Other utterances classified sensations, like hot and cold, soft and hard. Still others, probably the last to develop at this stage, expressed emotions such as like and dislike, want or don’t want. But the most fundamental distinction was the one between “self” and “other,” me and you. This was a necessary and very useful building block of language, but the unnecessary and mistaken solidification of these basic concepts has bedeviled humanity ever since.
Along with the differentiation between self and other came the natural extention of those constructs into “us” and “them.” Again, the terms had enormous utility, but most of the confusion and conflict in human societies arises from the reification of these concepts. Misunderstood, solidified, they set one against the other and tribe against tribe, nation against nation. All of the great spiritual traditions, including the great Western tradition of secular humanism, each in their own way, point this out.
The solidified notion of self is referred to as “ego,” the concept that oneself and others are independent, self-existing, continuous entities. This fundamental example of misplaced concreteness lies at the root of human suffering. Sigmund Freud made an audacious stab at unraveling the underlying cause of mental suffering, which he misidentified as infantile sexuality, but he famously acknowledged that the best that his method could accomplish was to return people to a state of ordinary, manageable neurosis. He just didn’t look deeply enough. He was looking in the right place, the early stage of life during which the notion of ego arises and solidifies, but he didn’t recognize it as a natural by-product of language acquisition. Without language there are no concepts, only feelings, and without concepts there is no way to make the distinction between self and other, and thus no self-consciousness. Once the notion of self solidifies into ego, it becomes possible to take the next step, which is to reify the notion of “us” as opposed to “them.”
Our concern here is not with individual human psychology, but with the political phenomenon of fascism. If we don’t understand fascism then we can’t understand Zionism, of which it is a speciaI case, and to understand fascism we have to dig deep. It has been said that politics is what happens when two or more people get together. The primitive impulse that gives rise to fascism is what happens when two or more people form themselves into a group that first distinguishes itself from others and then asserts its dominance over them. In its everyday, innocuous manifestation, it is the mindset of sports fans rooting for “their” team. When this assertion comes with a full-blown ideology, an elaborate rationalization for exerting organized power over others, it has evolved into fascism. Fascism is group ego writ large, and it requires the creation of a group identity, so that we can distinguish between “us” and “them” in the first place. Street gangs are formed on the basis of geography; the notion of defending “our” turf from the kids from neighboring streets. There is a great variety of possible group identities. They can be generally classified based on factors like ethnicity, “race,” nationality, language, religion, economic status, even gender. It starts, innocently enough, with identification with our immediate family, and spreads from there to kin, clan, neighborhood, tribe, nation and so forth. First and foremost it depends on the reification of the notion of “Us,” the linguistic trap we have been discussing.
Normally we think of fascism as a phenomenon associated with the political right, but it is found equally on the left. The French Revolution depended on the emergence of a group identity among the underclass, “the people.” That constituted the Us, which was then able to set itself against the aristocracy, who had long since lost their martial prowess, the original basis of their privileged position. Accordingly, they soon lost their heads. Karl Marx, updating those ideas to accommodate the conditions of the succeeding century, postulated the existence of a “working class,” consisting of the people who worked in the rapidly proliferating industrial factories. This identification of a new tribe, purely an intellectual construct, required an opposing group, who were discovered to be the “owners of the means of production.” Marx borrowed most of his intellectual furniture from his teacher Hegel, who had pioneered the notion of historical determinism to apotheosize the Prussian Junker state. Marxist musings, based on the “scientific” notion of dialectical materialism, then blossomed in the 20th Century into various mutations resulting in the Soviet Union, Communist China and various other instances of left-wing fascist states.
The etymology of the word “fascism” derives from the Etruscan language, ironically enough, a people who were conquered and more or less erased by the Romans, a settler-colonialist tribe from which Italian Fascismo drew its mythology and symbolism. It was initially depicted as a bound sheaf of wheat (fasces), symbolizing the bounty of the harvest, planted, tended and finally gathered by the tribal collective. As such, it has both a secular and a religious significance. The Romans then utilized it in the design of a staff of authority, embellished now with a naked blade, employed by those empowered to collect taxes and perform other services for the state. The image of the Roman fasces is a common motif in government sponsored design in a number of Western countries, particularly in the U.S. (I prefer my version to the one presented in the Wikipedia link, but the idea is clear enough either way).
Returning to the notions of Zionism, and now armed with an understanding of how tribal/group identification can turn nasty, we can take a closer look at the mixture of historical and mythological language that supports the infrastructure of this particular manifestation of fascism. Zionism developed among European Jews, starting in the late 19th Century, as an answer to “the Jewish Problem.” The problem, boiled down to its essence, was that Jews were a generally distrusted and despised minority in all the European countries to which they had wandered, subjected to numerous restrictions on their freedom of activity, dispossession, random violence, and, something like 39 times, mass expulsion. What happened to Jews under the Third Reich, if that number is correct, was the 40th iteration of this understandably depressing pattern. It was the development of Zionism over a period of some 50 years up until the 1930’s, the construction of a political movement to establish a Jewish homeland (presumably a place where they could only be tormented by one another), combined with the occurrence of the Shoah, which turned a rather outlandish, even laughable, scheme into a virulent reality, one that has become a grave danger to the continued existence of the human race, even more threatening than global warming, AIDS and so forth. Like the latter, it is a pandemic, but this one is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, and has demonstrated a totally ruthless propensity to destroy anyone perceived as “the enemy,” no matter what the cost. When Israel is finally surrounded by nothing but enemies (all, by the way, of their own making) will be the time of greatest danger.
Who, then, were “the Jews,” also known as “the Jewish People?” Because such classifications are abstractions, there can be no clearcut answer. On October 19th, the English translation of Israeli historian Shlomo Sand’s book, ‘The Invention of the Jewish People,’ will (has – VS) become available. This book effectively demolishes the notion that there was any such thing until it was cobbled together about 150 years ago as the essential building block in the construction of the Zionist ideology. The notion of “the Jews” is derived from the linguistic misperception that we have been talking about, the solidification of an abstract generalization. The Nazis created a definition based on parentage, going back in some cases several generations. They themselves were under the impression that they were “Aryans,” a wholly mythical people which, like the notion of the Jewish people was pretty much invented out of whole cloth. Much of the confusion about such things derived from attempts by students of the new discipline of anthropology in the 19th Century to establish the notion of “race,” a term meant to separate all of humanity into specific ethnic groups for the purpose of analysis by academics under the impression that they were doing “science.”. The idea of “race” was promptly solidified into something that actually exists and has bedeviled humanity ever since. So much for “social science,” a vague and ever mutating set of academic disciplines replete with numerous examples of misplaced concreteness and usually gussied up with highly dubious statistics, mind-numbing jargon and elaborate grant proposals.
The Zionist ideology depends on the presumed existence of “the Jewish People,” so the ideas are interlocked. However, many so-called Jews (like the author of this piece) are quite adamantly anti-Zionist, so it is obvious that the two ideas are not congruent. As the old syllogism goes, all dogs are animals, but not all animals are dogs. To complicate matters further, the majority of Zionists are not even Jews; the number of “Christian” Zionists is purported to be somewhere upwards of 50 million in the U.S. alone, far outnumbering the world population of “Jews” (however one chooses to define them). The whole thing gets quite surrealistic when “the Jews” try to define themselves. The State of Israel, deferring to the Israeli representatives of the equally non-existent “Jewish Religion,” determined that a Jew is someone whose mother was a Jew. Simple enough, eh? But the ever lurking “demographic problem” forced this definition to mutate, so that now the Israelis, as in so much else, have simply imitated the Nazis, requiring that at least someone in the family, way back when, was Jewish. Logically, that would mean that all the Palestinians would instantly become legally Jewish, but that of course isn’t going to happen. Instead, the definition includes only Europeans willing to claim Jewish ancestry (in practice, this meant many thousands of people from the former Soviet Union who made at least some vague claim to have “Jewish” antecedents. They could be relied upon to support the Zionist State and fight “the enemy,” which was the whole point of the exercize.
When looked at linguistically, much of the fabric that constitutes the underlying rationale for their being a Jewish State in the first place simply falls apart, like the white suit” in that wonderful old film starring Alec Guiness. Much the same thing happened in South Africa, when the Afrikaaners, who interestingly enough, in their own tribal mythology thought of themselves as the Lost (or Thirteenth) Tribe of Israel, were forced to create legal distinctions between “White,” “Colored,” and “Black.” Given those good old fuzzy boundaries, the Japanese (a First World people given to trading with anyone – kind of like the Chinese nowadays – and therefore seen as “friendly”) were obligingly classified as “White.” South Africa during Apartheid, like Nazi Germany, offers wonderful analogies and precedents regarding the problem of Israel, because it was so recent, and the situations are so similar, almost congruent. The whole Rube Goldberg contraption of Israel would instantly crumble if it had the same enemies as So. Africa then had, whose only consistent ally (other than Rhodesia, the neighboring white European supremacist state) was – guess who – the State of Israel – two peas in a pod. But at the time, the whole of the Western World, in its typically self-righteous and hypocritical way, was solidly unified against the Nationalists (they had no oil, no nuclear weapons, and no powerful allies), so the whole structure just collapsed (after a little prodding, but it didn’t take that much – the handwriting was clearly on the wall). That an Israeli version of F.W. de Klerk will arise at just the right time seems unlikely, but one never knows.
One would think that the same thing would long ago have happened vis a vis the Western democracies and Israel, since Israel so closely resembles both Nazi Germany and Nationalist South Africa, but a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. The Zionists maneuvered their way into the halls of power in the West, and Israel effectively colonized the Empire. You’ve got to hand it to them; that was quite a trick. I strongly recommend Greg Felton’s book, “The Host and the Parasite,” for an excellent recap of how that came about (eBook available from the author for $18.95).
And who are “the Israelis?” The term is generally understood to refer to the residents of the State of Israel. They are a hodgepodge of people from all over the world who share the fuzzy characteristic of being “Jewish,” except of course for the 20 percent of the hapless indigenous population who remain from the initial ethnic cleansing (the Nakba of 1948). The Jewish Israelis have little in common with one another but the mythical notion of belonging to a putative tribe, and now a sense of nationhood, as well as speaking a common language which was resurrected specifically for this purpose. The vast majority of them, or their recent forebears, were induced to immigrate through the machinations of the Zionists, initially a diverse group of European utopian idealists who self-identified as “Jews,” the vast majority of whom felt no need to actually go there themselves. Prior to the 1940’s, the Zionist enterprise had no attraction for most Jews in the West. In the meantime, the movement in Palestine was being effectively taken over by a small group of Eastern European terrorists who acquired the sobriquet of “political Zionists.” Like the “Bolsheviks” in Russia (it is interesting, in terms of the perversion of language, that the Russian word means “the majority”), they were a small, single-minded group of opportunistic fanatics able to wrest control of a much larger but inchoate political movement that was unable to match them in zealotry, organization and ruthlessness. Interestingly, these people were the very Eastern European Jews who were utterly repellant to the cultivated Western European Jews, particularly the Viennese, who had invented Zionism in the first place.
The political Zionists and their descendents, whether Labor or Likud, have constituted the Israeli power elite and ruled the country since its inception in 1948. National office is reserved for those who have an unimpeachable terrorist resume or bloodline. These were the folks who lured European Jewish immigrants by playing on their understandable paranoia, as well as many thousands of Jews from the Islamic countries, where they had lived quite peaceably for centuries, through the use of agents provocateurs who were sent to stir up trouble between them and their neighbors. The marketing approach, using tactics to fit particular circumstances, was simple, “we’re here to rescue you, come help to settle the Promised Land,” reminiscent of the real estate speculators in the 19th Century who marketed the arid and unproductive plains of America, coincidentally already populated by innocent, indigenous people. Had it not been for the rise of Nazi Germany the whole misbegotten enterprise would have quickly dissolved into nothing more than a comical anecdote in the annals of history. The Nazis not only provided the enterprise with new life, but closely collaborated with the Zionists right up to the end of WWII . They were, after all, of a like mind.
It should be clear from the above that neither “the Jews” nor “the Israelis” are “the enemy.” They are, by and large, ordinary folks who inadvertently got caught up in the appalling schemes of a small group of unscrupulous fanatics – they can mostly only be accused of guilt by association, although it is true that many Israelis, people indocrinated from birth by their power elite, have since then committed serious war crimes and crimes against humanity and continue to do so on a daily basis. Nor are we speaking of the fuzzy category of people generally labeled “Zionists.” Most of them are afflicted with an infectious mental disease, of which support for Israel is the primary symptom, but otherwise are for the most part perfectly decent people, albeit in a profound state of denial. We must be careful not to label people, even Zionists, as “the enemy,” or as “evil,” or we ensure a continuation of the same cycle of mindless violence. It is Zionism, a deadly fascist ideology, that is evil in the same sense that cancer is evil; it causes unnecessary harm to living beings and therefore must be eradicated. In Part II of this essay we will discuss the nature and etiology of the disease. Part III will consists of the specifics for a cure.
That fasci pic is neat. Corporations control the government now so that is fascism. Vote all you want the agenda rolls on. Don’t like it? Buy more politicians than the corporations is one way to fix it.
Be careful V.O.T.S. criticism of the zionists ist verboten! The DoJ blog patrol at the fusion center is watching! Criticize anything but that certain country in the middle east full of the chosen.
On a certain level, Tucker’s grammatically correct essay could’ve been written by a B’Tselem or Hamas Chomskybot.
Tucker’s comments about Zionism show an abysmal lack of knowledge regarding history. He merely repeats all the well-worn anti-Zionist canards and defamations, contributing nothing to the general understanding of the situation here in Israel.
Worse, rather than raising the level of awareness he adds yet another layer of generalization, deletion, and distortion to the miasma that passes for analysis of Zionism.
In actual fact, Tucker’s essay is incitement pretending to be scholarship, following the Chomsky-Said-LeVine school of propaganda.
An objective analyst would compare the cultural and economic results of Zionism to those systems the author thinks are superior.
Tucker doesn’t name those systems, but it’s easy to make a critical inference: just look at any anti-Zionist society, and you’ll find Tucker’s ideal model.
Giving him is due, Tucker is obviously bright. He could’ve made a more careful and reasoned comparison of the degrees of freedom that Zionism has provided, across the spectrum of Israeli society, to those of the 22 Islamic societies that, for more than 61 years, have sought(and continue seeking) to annihilate Israel.
Like Tucker, those Islamic societies are rabid anti-Zionists, and his screed could make the front page in any of their newspapers.
Such an objective cultural-economic analysis is unlikely because the results wouldn’t conform with the conclusion from which Tucker begins.
We have done more than any Islamic country (and most non-Islamic ones) to bring those who hate us into our society. This turns out to have been a mistake, as many of us have realized. Tucker only proves the Gemara’s wisdom: “Who is merciful to the wicked will one day be wicked to the merciful”.
Tucker is guilty of doing the very thing he wrongly claims is done by Zionists: “[using] language is used to distort rather than reveal the truth.”
I believe Tucker has the ability to understand this fact, but doubt he has the moral courage to admit it.
Bob, it’s nice to know that the hasbaratchiks are on the case. I must be doing something right. Thanks.
So ziobob’s defence of Israel is that its neighbours are Muslim therefore they must be worse. Well that’s the kind of thing we’ve come to expect. At least they’re dropping their only democracy in the Middle East line.
Apartheid South Africa used to try and defend itself by claiming that all its black neighbours were communist. In reality it was all about demonising the victim so you can continue to steal their land and resources.
a very important new book in english:
http://www.versobooks.com/books/nopqrs/s-titles/sand_shlomo_invention_of_the_jewish_people.shtml
@everybody: I have to say that I feel some sympathy for Bob. He writes a 354 long reply knowing full well that it is exceedingly unlikely to convince anybody. So if he is not seriously trying to persuade us that Zionism is good, and if he is not seriously trying to elecit some sympathy for the last racist state on the planet – what is he trying to do? I think that the answer is rather obvious: collect a paycheck.
The output of the Hasbara posters is always written along the same lines: a rather verbose post, replete with “cookie cutter” cliches, and without any real attempt at making an articulate case, much less so staring a serious discussion. My bet is that Bob probably makes 5-10 of these posts everyday and that probably gets him a check at the end of the week.
The economic crisis in Israel is severe (gazillions of US dollars can only help so much), at a lot of Israelis are living right at, or even below, the official poverty line.
A recent emigrant from the USA is simply unlikely to find a real job right upon his arrival. So what to the authorities make him with? They send him to a colonly in the West Bank, give him a small appartment and basically tell him put his laptop to use for the greater good of the state until he finds a real job. And as everything temporary, this kind of situation can last a long time.
And since the guy moved to Israehell to begin with, he probably already has the ideological inclinations to match – so for him that kind of “cyber-crusade” for his beloved and newly aquired Eretz Yisroel comes naturally.
So think of Bob as some Israeli version of the guy standing on an intersection waving a sign with “Mario’s Pizza” or something similar. He has a crappy job which he hates, and he is only trying to pay the bills. And give the guy a break – he is not nearly as evil as he is pathetic ;-)
small addendum: HA! I just look at Bob’s website and he claims to live in Sderot. LOL! If that is true, that would just about explain his situation. You can imagine the “booming economy” in a place right next to the Gaza strip which has been getting Qassams from across inside the open air mega-Gulag the Israelis created! Bob clearly got a raw deal: the authorites have stuck the poor guy there (free housing, no doubt) and told to tap away on his keyboard for a living…
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Saker’s deductions are correct. The minions of Israel are numerous and ubiquitous, engaged in a propaganda offensive of unprecedented size and intensity. Some are no doubt paid for it, but the vast majority are brainwashed volunteers. They come in two flavors, your typical ZioNazi troll who froths at the mouth, and the more insidious ones, the “progressive” Zionists, aka the Gatekeepers. The former can be ignored as just an environmental nuisance, like mosquitoes – Bob is a relatively articulate example.
Some good examples of the latter popped up in the comments section of the previous essay I wrote entitled How Does the World Protect Itself from Israel and the Scourge of Zionism? that appeared on Palestine Think Tank. These closet Zionists join Palestinian support and anti-Occupation groups, and so forth, loudly proclaiming their “leftist” credentials. But they are there to protect the two Holy of Holies, the legitimacy of a Jewish State in Palestine (the ideology) and the dogma of the Holycause (the religion). These people can’t be ignored – they are the 5th Column that has successfully subverted the governments, universities and media in the Western democracies, which as a result have become virtual Israeli colonies. If humanity is to survive, these are the folks who need to be fought tooth and nail.
A troll is someone trying to get attention. The solution is simple don’t pay any attention to them. I’m not sure what you would call those trying to spread disinfo a propagandist I guess.
While the Saker may well be right, never underestimate the willingness of true believers to volunteer for the cause. I doubt the legions of semi-literate GIYUS neanderthals infesting the Guardian’s comment boards are all working for a paycheck.
I find this definition of fascism from the Wikipedia article interesting:
“a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
Not a comprehensive definition of fascism maybe, but seems as fine a summary of Zionism as any I’ve read.
Sean, I can’t find the Wikipedia page you’re referring to. Please send the address – TIA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
The quote is from the section labeled “Definitions.”
Thanks, Sean. I posted my own definition. It was promptly removed. :( A number of people have suggested that Wikipedia is closely monitored by Zionists. As the subject is fascism, they would be on the lookout for anything that would expose Zionism for what it is. If you know anything about how Wikipedia works, maybe we could outfox them.
Verry interesting indeed. The only thing I don’t agre with are that Karl Marx was a fascist who promoted a world view of “we and them”. The division in produktion into the owner of the means of production and the proletariat is real and not just a intelectual construction. Marx wanted to owercome that division by making the means of production common propert.
The same thing can be said about the French revolution. It wanted to owercome the division into aristocracy by birth and commoners by making all frenchmen equal citizens.