Zionism and the Colonization of Language

by Roger Tucker

Part II – The Emperor Has No Clothes: Of Genes and Memes

This is the second in a three part series that deals with the phenomenon we call “the State of Israel.” This can only be a rudimentary sketch, of course, as the subject is vast and this essay must be very brief. Israel is not a nation-state like other nation-states, which accounts for the hysterical attempts of the Zionists to sell the idea that it is. Israel is what used to be called a Rube Goldberg machine , in this case a jury-rigged attempt to create a modern state out of nothing but an ideology consisting of tribal fantasies and deep-seated paranoia, and to do so through the violent colonization of an already well-established society. An excellent piece on this topic is Interpreting the Zionist Dream, by Gilad Atzmon. To put it another way, an ideology had to be constructed, a people had to be invented; a colony had to be planted in an arbitrarily chosen place, populated by this newly invented people who in turn had to be swindled into thinking they were doing something that made some sort of sense. That the con artists who pulled off this real estate scam were successful is a marvel that never ceases to astonish me.

Everything that happens is the result of previous causes and conditions, so how do we account for the establishment and continued existence of this house of cards known as Israel? I am going to take an unusual approach to this question, which involves understanding genes and memes. Charles Darwin, in his seminal works, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, described the evolution of all living beings, including human beings. What he called the process of natural selection is now understood to be mediated through the mutations of genes, biochemical strands of coded information that make possible the replication of life forms. However, human genetic revolution effectively stopped occurring some five thousand years ago. Jared Diamond, in his masterful work, Guns, Germs and Steel, takes up where Darwin left off, describing the process of cultural evolution. He enumerates a broad set of conditions that are conducive to technological and economic development, but he postulates no mechanism similar to genes. A number of people are of the opinion that cultural evolution is mediated by a set of different transmitters of information, analogous to genes, that have been termed memes. Rather than consisting of biochemical units that together constitute a code, memes are mental in nature, consisting of patterned connections in the brain, which when strung together emerge as thoughts. As memes are culturally transmitted thoughts, they must be spread through the agency of language. The emerging science of memetics is new and not yet part of the canon – there is still a great deal of work to be done in that area – but the notion of memes has become popular and comes in handy when one tries to understand why people do what they do, particularly when it appears to be clearly against their own self-interest.

Memes are cultural replicators, just as genes replicate the information that organize the development of life forms. As memes are unconscious, we aren’t aware of how they form our thoughts and ideas, which can lead to bizarre results. Memes that reinforce one another become “complex memes.” To quote Roger Cohen, in an article in the NYT writes, “here’s Netanyahu’s summary of the struggle of our age: ‘It pits civilization against barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify life against those who glorify death.’.” The insanity of the Zionist project is encapsulated in those words, the projection onto the “other” of one’s own psychopathology. It is Mr. Hyde pontificating about the primitive and dangerous Dr. Jeckyl. Cohen merely calls it “facile and unhelpful.” The Nobel Prize winning South African novelist J.M. Coetzee, in his ‘Waiting for the Barbarians,’ illuminates this myopic, Eurocentric supremacist view and where it leads to. Until Cohen and myriads of other Gatekeepers like him wake up and see Israel and Zionism for what they are, the sufferings of tens of millions of people will just continue.

The most complex memes become organized into belief systems, in which all the various elements are solidified into one seamless whole. They manifest as ideologies and religions. Israel is the embodiment of the ideological belief system called Zionism, supported by its symbiotic religion, the Holycause. They are like the two sides of a sacred scroll, placed in a Sanctum Sanctorum dedicated to their new God, the Golem (a creature, like all gods, of their own making). If one can break the seal and take a peek inside, what do we find? – a little boy pissing his pants. Like all schoolyard bullies, imitating their abusers, the Israelis are craven cowards underneath all the macho bravado. When the media announced that primitive weapons like Scuds were being fired by the Iraqis, or Qassams by the Palestinians, all of Israeli society would go bananas in a paroxysm of fear, hiding in basements, taping up windows, donning gas masks and the like. In south Lebanon they ran like rabbits when they met any organized resistance. But they become ecstatic when their “boys” are murdering civilians by the hundreds – 85% of Israelis approved of the Gaza Massacre. It is a very sick society.