Saturday Commentary and Review #156
America as Zion, Will the USA Abandon Ukraine?, Europe's Farmers Are Simply Right, 'Stigmatized Turks of Balkan Descent', In Defense of Gone With the Wind
Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.
Request: Please hit the like button at the top or bottom of the page. The more likes these entries get, the more attractive it is to new readers. This place continues to grow, and I would like to maintain the momentum. Just click the button at the top like this:
In 2001, the then-French Ambassador to the UK, Daniel Bernard, set off a firestorm due to a comment he made about Israel: "All the current troubles in the world are because of that shitty little country, Israel. Why should the world be in danger of World War III because of those people?" Bernard insisted that his comment spoken at a private function was distorted, but the UK media ran with it anyway. The French Foreign Ministry publicly defended Bernard, but reassigned him to Algeria in 2002.
In the course of my life, no single state’s existence is as controversial as that of Israel’s, as all of you already know. No single conflict sparks as much heated discussion as the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, especially from those who do not have any ties to either of these peoples. The conflict is magnet for all types from across the entire ideological spectrum, spanning almost all the major global faiths, and so on. Even though Israel is indeed tiny (even when you include the Occupied West Bank, Golan Heights, and Gaza), it plays a significantly outsized role in world affairs.
The present conflict that was sparked by the Hamas Raids of October 7, 2023 have seen the global left engage in a tsunami of moralistic grandstanding on behalf of the Palestinians (and some on behalf of Hamas as well, tbh). Unlike other issues where their persistent moralizing has paid off with political wins, they hit the brick wall of entrenched interests this time via the strong backing of Israel on the part of the USA. In their eyes, the USA’s progressive win streak is now threatened by its overt support for a nationalist entity that rejects cherished liberal concepts such as multiculturalism and multi-ethnic democracy.
Unable to sway the centres of power where they have influence (such as the Democrat Party in the USA), they are stuck in the cycle of constant outrage over the slaughter taking place in Gaza, powerless to change the situation. In their minds, Palestinians play the role of enslaved Blacks in the Antebellum South, whose ‘freedom’ must be secured and guaranteed. All other arguments, concepts, and so on must take a back seat to this, including the idea of Israel being a state for the Jews. To them, Israel no longer has the moral standing to continue to exist as a state for the Jews, so it either needs to be converted into a multi-ethnic polity based on the equality of Israelis and Palestinians, or it must be wiped out altogether as its continued existence is a “crime”.
has written an essay (that no one he has pitched it to would publish) that is a ‘modest proposal’: why not move all the Israelis to the country that has been the best to them and where they have flourished the most? That country is, of course, the USA:
If you hold Zion to be not a geographic location but a concept of Jewish safety and success, you could hardly ask for a fuller realization of that ideal than what you find in the Jewish experience in the United States.
Freddie’s argument boils down to the following: “Let’s move all the Israelis to the USA, as it has provided the best safe haven in history for the world’s Jews. The Jews already here have flourished tremendously in all walks of life, and live very safe lives. Israel is not that safe as it is bordered by enemies who want its destruction, and Israel relies on the protection of the USA, a protection that cannot be permanent as no country is a permanent hegemon. This impermanence means that Israel has a set shelf-life. Lastly, by moving Israelis en masse to the USA, that specific conflict in the Middle East can be resolved once and for all.”
Let’s take a look at what Freddie has to say by highlighting some of his own words:
I am, as you know, opposed to Jewish nationalism, for a fairly direct and basic reason - I am opposed to nationalism generally and religious and ethnic nationalism specifically. Beyond that objection in the abstract, modern Zionism has obviously been disastrous for Palestinian Arabs, many of whom have made their home in that space for generations. But I also think that there’s a very pragmatic sense in which the modern Jewish nationalist project makes no sense: there is already a home for the Jews, one in which Jewish people are safe, rich, educated, and healthy. And that home is the United States of America. I’m not speaking metaphorically when I say that America is better at being Israel than Israel is at being Israel. I want everybody to be groovy internationalists like me, because the nation-state is a modern fiction and because nationalism has been implicated in almost all of the great crimes against humanity in history. But if you drop all of that and just fixate on what’s pragmatically best for actually-existing Jewish people, Zionism still looks like a shitty deal. And there’s a better, safer place for the Jews that requires no moral compromise.
Freddie is an internationalist of the left, which means that any and all nation-states are not just bullshit, but are also ‘fascist’. By removing Israelis from the Holy Land, Arab nationalism would be rewarded via this voluntary ethnic cleansing. Freddie appeals to the pragmatic aspects here, in that moving Israelis to America resolves one of the world’s most divisive conflicts.
America as a safer place for Jews than Israel:
Well, some tell me, Israel is a safe home for Jews, but only because of American largesse. This contradicts constant assertions about the unprecedented effectiveness of the IDF, but set that aside for now - if that’s true, then the modern state of Israel is surely doomed, as no patron, even the United States, remains the hegemon forever. No matter how you bobble this particular ball, if it’s true that a distant patron withdrawing its unprecedentedly generous support would cast the existence of Israel into immediate doubt, well, it kind of gives the game away. If Israel can’t survive the end of American economic, military, and diplomatic support (for political or practical reasons, it makes no difference), then Israel has an expiration date, simply by dint of the inevitable cycles of history. America is in slow but certain decline relative to the rest of the world, both great powers and the distributed violent potential of ordinary states. The largesse that Israel has relied on will not last forever. So, if you’re a Jew who wants to build a lineage that will in time see generations living in peace and prosperity, how could you (for example) follow those settler lunatics into the West Bank, knowing that the day the United States turns its back on Israel is the day Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran and all manner of other actors would come to take your land? All moral and political and historical disputes aside, it is the Zionists themselves who say that Israel is mortally threatened by its neighbors. So what do you do when American power declines, as it inevitably will?
He does have a point. Freddie’s problem is that he rejects out of hand any attempts to tie blood to soil, as that would be ‘fascist’. Minimizing/dismissing the bind between Jews and the Holy Land indicates a failure to understand the mindset of millions of Jews who continue to live in Israel.
This next bit is the funniest in his entire essay:
I have argued that the only hope for a secure Israel in a post-American-hegemony world is to become the secular multiethnic democracy that the demographics of the territory it controls insist it should be. And I genuinely believe that that’s the case - the argument for a secular and multiethnic Israel is one of self-interest for Israeli Jews as well as an ethical argument. (A shared Israel-Palestine would also be the greatest beacon for the viability of multiculturalism and peace that has ever existed in history, a living symbol of human progress.)
All multi-ethnic states become paralyzed by ethnic politics, in that this specific type of politics trumps all other issues. Secondly, it is incredibly, incredibly naive to believe that two tribes such as the Israelis and Palestinians would ever work together in good faith in such a set up; they hate each other. Lastly, arguing for the creation of a polity due to ethical arguments is the preserve of an idealist. Idealism has no place in the Old World, which Freddie already knows. The Middle East is very tribal, and that’s not going away any time soon.
According to Freddie, Jews should know better than to engage in nationalism:
But, of course, the (angry) reply will be that the practical question of Jewish safety and Jewish flourishing is not the point. The point is that Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, the basic story of the Torah notwithstanding, and that Jews are thus bound by some cosmic design to occupy that stretch of land, no matter how much greater danger that creates for the Jews who live there or how great the moral crimes committed by the Israeli government, which has been subjugating the Palestinian people for over 75 years and is now engaged in an assault that is as horrific as it is directionless. The Jewish people need the Jewish homeland because they are Jewish and because it is their homeland. Well, people of all kinds absolutely hate it when I make this comparison, but its basic sense compels me to make it again: that’s just blood and soil nationalism. It casts Jews as the volk; this West Bank settler’s dream of a Greater Israel is simply an Israeli Lebensraum. “Our people are who they are because of our genetic lineage and our land is ours by virtue of a quasi-mystical connection we have to it” has been the basic logic of fascism and genocide going way, way back.
And it’s particularly perverse for Jews to embrace that logic, or so it seems to me. No people in the history of the world have suffered more deeply due to the depravations of nationalism than the Jews. It’s no wonder that the history of internationalism is filled with Jewish movements like Bundism; who else has known the depravations of nationalism as well as the Jews? Who has paid a higher price for that ideology? I have been called anti-Semitic for this comparison several times in my life, but I don’t give a shit. The Jewish people were pushed to the very edge of extinction thanks to “blood and soil” thinking and it breaks my heart to see so many Jews who have embraced it in a misguided effort to secure their people’s future.
Some suggest that Israel was set up to ‘normalize the Jews’, in that they would have their own homeland and that their cousins abroad would stop pursuing internationalist ideologies to the detriment of their host countries. This is considered ‘anti-semitic’ by some, but then again, what isn’t?
Click here to read Freddie’s modest proposal in its entirety.
It’s all bad news these days in Ukraine, and the Russian capture of Avdiivka while Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky was attending the Munich Security Conference was a slap in the face. The mood in western capitals is a mix of sombre and panic, as the fear has set in that the Russians will make a military breakthrough at some point this year, especially if the Americans don’t agree to send another military aid package to Kiev.
The mainstream media line is that the Congressional GOP is held hostage to Trump and his maverick style of politics, blocking the necessary aid package that has been debated for months now. Some charge Trump with seeking strike a grand bargain with Putin, and with the GOP itself being riddled by “Putin admirers”. These types point to Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Vladimir Putin.
This political point-scoring masks a much larger foreign policy issue: should the USA continue to press its advantage against Russia via its Ukrainian proxy force? Or should it finally commit to its long-awaited Pivot to East Asia in order to prevent the more powerful Chinese from expanding their influence in that part of the world? At present, the USA is of two minds: should we tackle one or the other first, or should we try and contain both simultaneously? Some in the GOPsphere argue that China should have priority, and that the ‘pivot’ should happen immediately, even if the cost is a Russian victory in Ukraine. The WSJ lays out the scene as it stands today:
It’s in the U.S., however, that Putin’s wager appears to be paying off, at least for now, as Moscow has successfully inserted itself into America’s culture wars.
Support for Ukraine, widely deemed a self-evident American national interest two years ago, has become a divisive partisan issue in an election year. A notable part of the Republican right has begun expressing admiration for Putin and even for the beauty of Moscow subways and the quality of Russian supermarkets—while pouring scorn on Ukraine’s embattled government and army.
An outgunned Ukraine:
The abrupt nature of the cutoff—which came after months of bipartisan assurances that, one way or another, American weapons would continue to flow—has left Ukraine in a particularly vulnerable spot. Russia has regrouped and is pressing a new offensive across the war’s entire front line, a push fueled by massive shipments of artillery shells and ballistic missiles from Moscow’s newfound ally North Korea.
“It’s not just that American aid has been cut, but it’s been cut without warning and without giving us any time to adjust. And it’s clear that Russia could gain the upper hand if Ukraine doesn’t have what it needs to defend itself,” said former Ukrainian defense minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk, who advises President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration. “If this crisis is not resolved, and Ukraine doesn’t receive the assistance, it will become a huge gift to Putin.”
Damage to US prestige if the Ukrainians do not receive the aid promised to them:
The prospect of an outgunned Ukraine losing much more ground in coming months, coupled with fresh doubts about America’s commitment to defend its allies should Donald Trump return to the White House next year, is increasingly unnerving democracies in Europe and beyond. That’s especially so as Putin has established a de facto military alliance with the rogue regimes of North Korea and Iran while growing closer and closer to authoritarian China.
The sense of anxiety is particularly high in Taiwan, an island democracy that Beijing considers a “renegade province” and has pledged to “reunify” with the mainland. America’s walking away from Ukraine, if it happens, “is going to be a disaster and is going to encourage the dictators in Beijing, in North Korea and in other countries,” warned Wang Ting-yu, who is slated to become chairman of the Taiwanese parliament’s defense and foreign affairs committee. “They will realize that the global leader doesn’t have the strength to keep its patience to support its allies. And if they think that way, they will make wrong decisions and misjudgments.”
That’s a warning echoed by the Biden administration and by some leading Republicans, including the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, who helped to shepherd through this month’s bipartisan bill, which would provide $95 billion in aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. “The entire world of democracies thinks this is important, and we are the leader of this free world. We cannot back away,” Sen. McConnell said about helping Ukraine in an interview. “This is not the time, in my view, to be sending the message that we are not up to the task.” Much of that funding, he added, will flow back to create jobs in U.S. industries.
They do have a point: if the Ukrainian Army does collapse, the Russians can snatch a total victory instead of just a tactical one. That would definitely harm the USA’s standing globally. This is why it is in the USA’s strategic interests to not allow this to happen. It can do this by arming the Ukrainians to continue to fight longer, but it requires a negotiated settlement where not too much is ceded to the Russians:
“The level of U.S. investment in the project of Ukraine’s independence has increased, and therefore [so has] the extent to which U.S. credibility is judged based on Russia’s ability to accomplish or not accomplish its objectives in Ukraine,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the think tank RAND who has advised caution over Ukraine in the past. “If there were to be a dramatic reversal of fortunes in Ukraine, there would be a whole lot more confidence in the emerging pseudo-bloc of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.”
The irony here is that it is the USA’s actions that have forced this bloc to coalesce against it.
On the “need”to pivot to East Asia:
“The U.S. has to focus more on East Asia. That is going to be the future of American foreign policy for the next 40 years, and Europe has to wake up to that fact,” Sen. J.D. Vance, a Republican from Ohio, said last week at the Munich Security Conference, where he declined to attend a congressional delegation meeting with Zelensky. “The problem with Europe is that it doesn’t provide enough of a deterrence on its own because it hasn’t taken the initiative in its own security. I think the American security blanket has allowed European security to atrophy,” he added.
The bond between Russia, North Korea, Iran—and China—makes that pivot to Asia even more urgent, said Elbridge Colby, a leading Republican strategist who served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Trump administration. “It increases rather than diminishes the importance of prioritizing because we can expect them to act collaboratively, to stretch us out and to distract us. And because China is the dominant player in that alliance, we can expect that alliance to distract us from the decisive theater, which is what is happening,” he said.
The decline of the American industrial base and America’s inability to quickly replenish the stocks of munitions that had been supplied to Ukraine limit America’s foreign-policy options, he added. “We have to operate in conditions of scarcity, like a company that is overextended. We are in a world of bad choices now,” Colby said. “That’s our fault because we continued to believe, like the president and some senior Republicans, that we could do everything when we can’t, and because the Europeans didn’t step up.”
Colby makes an excellent point on scarcity, but I believe that the prestige argument will take precedence in policy planning.
Click here to read the rest.
I wish there was a way to measure the gulf between ruling elites and the people that they lord over. Don’t Political Scientists have such a methodology already on hand? I don’t know.
What I do know is that this gulf is very palpable on both sides of The Pond, and that this gulf shows no signs of narrowing any time soon. Whether the issue is migration, crime, COVID-19, etc., it seems that the views of the people are simply ignored by those who can and do ignore them, and proceed to make policy that suits their own interests and the interests of their allies and class.
Judging by American media reporting, you would most likely not be aware that massive farmers’ protests are rocking the European continent as we speak. From Portugal to Poland, farmers are protesting the EU’s drive to push policies like “Net Zero” in order to “combat Climate Change”……policies that would severely impact the livelihoods of our food producers. These proposed changes are entirely top-down, indicative of just how divorced the Brussels elites are from the daily lives of the people whose lives they wish to upend with a stroke the pen. “Oppose us? You must be far right….probably a Nazi too.”
The ‘far-right’ political libel against hard-pressed farmers is really a sign of how far the EU elites have lost touch with the reality of life for the peoples of Europe. We should ignore the slurs, and get behind the fighting farmers.
The protests by angry farmers have spread across the European Union, with mighty convoys of tractors blockading roads and cities from Romania to Rome, from Portugal to Poland, from Bulgaria to Brussels and beyond.
There might be some national variations in the farmers’ specific demands. But what unites them all is opposition to the way that the EU elites are subordinating agricultural policy to their Green agenda and Net Zero obsession, leading to more hardship for farmers and higher food prices for other Europeans.
As tractor convoys blockaded German cities in January, farmers’ association president Joachim Rukwied spelt out that they were protesting not just against the government’s proposed cuts in fuel subsidies, but against an EU-wide system where “agricultural policy is being made from an unworldly, urban bubble and against farming families and rural areas.”
This week in Poland, 62-year-old protesting farmer Janusz Bialoskorski told the media that, “They’re talking about climate protection. But why should it be done at farmers’ expense?” Farmers, he pointed out, are not responsible for industrial pollution, and “nor do we fly to Davos on our jets.”
Pitchfork Populism. The fact that the elites in Brussels have invited this in a year when elections for the EU’s Parliament are scheduled to occur indicates just how out of touch they really are.
These farmers are now in the front line of a wider populist revolt, against those elitists who DO fly in their private jets to the World Economic Forum in luxurious Davos, Switzerland, where they lecture the rest of us about how to save the planet by sacrificing our living standards.
Their protests expose the yawning gap between the high-minded talk of the Brussels Green oligarchy, and the grim reality of what those Net Zero policies mean for normal people in the muddy fields of Flanders or on the supermarket shelves of Florence.
If you can’t shut them up, call them ‘far right’:
Last weekend, UK Observer newspaper (Sunday sister of the liberal Guardian), the most pro-EU voice in the British media, worried aloud about how the European farmers’ cause “has been enthusiastically adopted by a resurgent populist far-right.”
Similar fears have repeatedly been expressed in the Brussels-backing news media this year: “Brussels struggles to placate farmers as far-right stokes protests,” and “EU farmers egged on by the far-right” (Financial Times); “How the far-right aims to ride farmers’ outrage to power in Europe” (Politico); “Far-right harvests farmers’ anger across Europe” (France 24) etc., etc.
The EU establishment and its media pals are so out of touch with the reality of people’s lives that they apparently imagine Europe’s naïve farmers are protesting only because they have been “egged on” or “stoked up” by ‘far-right’ agitators. The idea that these farmers might be entirely reasonable, hard-working people who are simply at the end of their collective tether with EU bureaucracy seems beyond the comprehension of those bureaucrats and their media mouthpieces.
‘A Silent War on Farming’:
As the title of a recent report by the think-tank MCC Brussels puts it, Europe’s agricultural communities are facing nothing less than a “Silent War on Farming,” waged from Brussels.
For decades, EU agricultural policy was about the efficient, cheap, and safe production of food to feed the peoples of Europe and ensure that the continent never suffered famine again. Now, that policy has instead been captured by Green ideology, which demands that farmers use less land and less intensive methods to produce lower emissions. In sum, that must mean less farming—and less food being produced.
Farmers are bearing the brunt of the ideologically-driven regulations imposed by the EU, with falling incomes and the closure of family farms. The rest of Europe faces a scarcity-driven surge in prices—with shortages being met by food imports from countries with far higher emissions than the EU’s hi-tech farming sector.
For many Europeans now supporting the farmers, however, this is about even more than the price of food on their table. Farming and rural communities are at the heart of traditional European ideas of community and self-image. People who live far from the countryside can now identify with farmers who are resisting the same sort of threat to their way of life that they see posed by, for example, EU policies on mass migration.
All Brussels seems to be able to do these days is pass laws to micromanage the lives of Europeans, while increasing the contempt that these same people have for them.
The eastern third of my mother’s village is called “Milakova Mala”. ‘Mala’ is a corruption of the Arabic word محلة maḥalla, which means ‘neighbourhood/district/quarter’. It got this name as the land here was owned during the late Ottoman era by the landowning Milak family who were local Bosnian Muslims. My mother’s side of the family worked their fields until the Turks were kicked out of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878.
It was in 1878 that Habsburg forces defeated the Ottomans in Bosnia, occupying the land. That year also saw some 200,000 Muslims from Bosnia leave because they could not and would not live under non-Islamic rule. These exiles resettled elsewhere in the Balkans where the Ottomans were still in charge. The next few decades saw the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and with it the migration of Balkan Muslims to Ataturk’s Turkey. Half of the Milak family was part of this migration (the other half who remained in Western Bosnia are to this day very poor).
It is estimated that up to 20% of all Turks living in Turkey today are the descendants of these Balkan Muslims who re-settled in places like Istanbul, Izmir, Bursa, and so on. They are generally viewed as being much less Islamic than Anatolian Turks, and more western in culture, but still fierce Turkish nationalists.
Turkey is The Borg. The Turks assimilate all, including these formerly Balkan Muslims. Turkey does not recognize any other ethnic groups besides the Turks, much like how the Greeks don’t recognize ethnic minorities either. Despite this, some claim that prejudice and bias towards these Balkan Muslims still persists in Turkey, as this report describes:
Continuous wars and conflicts in the Ottoman Empire prompted major migration waves from the Balkans to Anatolia, the heart of modern-day Turkey.
The collapse of the empire at the end of World War I accelerated this migration, and huge numbers of Muslims from the Balkans, including Bosniaks, Albanians, ethnic Turks and others, migrated to Anatolia.
The total number of Balkan migrants to Turkey is unknown because the country’s constitution does not keep records of people’s ethnic backgrounds and counts all citizens as Turkish. But demographers estimate that at least 20 per cent of Turkey’s 85 million population have Balkan ancestry.
Hate speech against the descendants of these migrants is not a new trend in Turkey, especially during election times and tense political environments, when it usually appears in the discourse of nationalist and Islamist politicians.
Apologies for the screenshots, as I am having difficulty copy/pasting:
Those from the Balkans as “more secular, nationalist, and republican” than those from Anatolia:
With them came economic competition for those already settled in Turkey:
If this is happening in hyper-assimilationist Turkey, imagine how a ‘Binational State of Israelis and Palestinians’ would function.
We end this weekend’s SCR with a defense of the novel ‘Gone With the Wind’:
Even as early critics (begrudgingly or not) acknowledged GWTW’s popular appeal, what distinguished it from the sentimental Southern romances of yore was Mitchell’s knack for granular historical detail. The daughter of the president of the Atlanta Historical Society, Mitchell grew up immersed in documents and scholarly accounts of the Civil War and later trained as a jour. Her sole novel was the product of a decade’s worth of archival research. In an otherwise lukewarm review for the New York Times, Ralph Thompson conceded that “[t]he historical background is the chief virtue of the book.” Another critic admitted, “[f]rankly and blatantly I did not ever expect to read a book anything like this written by a woman.”
Unsurprisingly, progressive critics of the New Deal Era struggled to reconcile the book’s erudite command of Civil War military history with what they rightly clocked as Southern self-regard. Evelyn Scott remarked that Mitchell “writes with the bias of passionate regionalism, but the verifiable happenings described eloquently justify prejudice.” More pointedly, Louise Kroenenberger detected beneath the veneer of historical veracity “a nostalgia and melodrama that have been written about the Confederacy from the time of Thomas Nelson Page to that of Stark Young.” Still, a far cry from the accusations lobbed during the fever-pitch of George Floyd protests that Mitchell had penned an American Mein Kampf.
The refreshingly nuanced early reception of GWTW offers a foil to the braindead quagmire that passes for the culture industry today. To approach Mitchell’s work by this route, one must slog through thickets of official “context” that repackages it as a didactic object lesson in the Evils of White Supremacy. But readers who take the time to actually read GWTW, as I did again this past fall, will find an argument far more provocative than the antebellum nostalgia it is accused of harboring.
Click here to read Catherine’s defense of this important work of American literature.
Thank you once again for checking out my Substack. Hit the like button at the top or the bottom of this page to like this entry, and use the share and/or res-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment below if the mood strikes you to do so. And don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t done so already.
And don’t forget to join me on Substack Notes!
I don't understand why Freddie, who is opposed to all forms of nationalism, seems to focus on Jewish nationalism so much. What about all the Arab and/or Muslim nationalism, why not focus on that at least as much, or even a little bit?
"Nationalism has been implicated in almost all of the great crimes against humanity in history." Except that internationalism (communism) killed more people in the 20th Century than all nationalisms combined - and it's not even close.