re-tired
The West Bank/Judea and Samaria Problem
Personal work section notes. I get headaches and am as slow as a wet week, in dragging up diffs, and even have a geezer's trouble in following these arguments all over several pages, so I can't really make an adequate case. So I'll have to make my contribution in the next few days, according to the fashion I normally work after, when I did work, in the real world. Reflecting from principles, through to the problem, the evidence and conclusions. Apologies to anyone reading this. It's written to help myself get some order into this chat, not to guide others.
- An editorial split between those in favour of using 'Judea & Samaria' to designate (a) parts of, or (b) all, or (c) all of the West Bank and parts of Israel, and those who oppose the usage, except on those specific pages devoted to (i) Samaria (ii) Judea (iii) the administrative territory known in Israel as 'Judea & Samaria'.
- The 'Judea and Samaria' school holds that (a) these are geographical and historical designations predating the West Bank (b) used in a variety of sources published in Israel and abroad to denote the territory, or parts of it, known as the West Bank (c) and that opposition to the employment of these words in wiki constitutes an 'ethnic-based discrimination' against both Israeli and Jewish people.(d) specifically, that MeteorMaker, Pedrito and myself have conducted a campaign to denigrate or deprecate Jewish terms in the I/P area, a kind of ethnic cleansing of nomenclature, in a way that lends substance to fears our position is motivated by, well let's call a spade a spade, anti-semitism.
- The 'West Bank' school asserts that (a) these terms have an intrinsic denotative vagueness because they refer to different geophysical, administrative and political terrains depending on historical period, and that to use the terms of the territorially bounded and defined area known internationally as the West Bank creates cognitive dissonance (b) that these terms, as documented, were used under the British Mandate, then dropped for 'West Bank', which has remained to this day the default term of neutral usage internationally and in international law and diplomacy (c) that, after the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, in 1967, the terms 'Judea & Samaria' were pushed onto the political agenda by an extremist settler group, Gush Emunim, then adopted by the Likud government in 1977, and imposed by government decree on the Israeli mass media, which suppressed the international term, West Bank (d) that, as documented, the terms 'Judea and Samaria' have a potent ideological charge as appropriative nomenclature, renaming Palestinian land presently occupied, annexed or expropriated illegally by Israel (ICJ judgement 2004), over which Israel has no sovereignty, where Israel is establishing illegal settlements at least half of which on land with private Palestinian title, and with its own Arabic toponyms, and erasing the traditional native nomenclature by creating a neo-biblical toponomy (d) that reliable secondary sources explicitly define the term as partisan, even in contemporary Hebrew and Israeli usage (e) that the evidence for usage overwhelmingly documents the prevalence of 'West Bank' (northern, southern) in neutral sources, whose neutrality is affirmed also by the very sources that otherwise employ the words 'Samaria and Judea' adduced by the former school, (f) that if explicitly attested partisan Israeli toponymy and administrative nomenclature is allowed on non-Israeli territory, then by WP:NPOV criteria, automatically this would mean the corresponding Palestinian toponymy and nomenclature, often covering the same areas, would have to be introduced (g)that in this whole debate, the West Bankers have not even represented the Palestinian side, which is absent, invisible, while the Israeli side is being treated as though its national naming were on terms of parity and neutrality with international usage (h) that wiki criteria, WP:NPOV, WP:Undue, WP:RS, WP:NCGN etc. require that neutral terminology, particularly as evidenced by the overwhelming majority of reliable sources, be employed. (i) If we are to allow Israeli terminology to be generally employed in denoting territory over which Israel exercises no sovereignty, but is simply, in law, an occupying belligerent, a very dangerous precedent, with widespread consequences for articles where ethnic conflicts exist, would be created.
(ii)Note on language, naming as an appropriative act of possession and dominion.
'According to the aboriginal theory, the ancestor first called out his own name; and this gave rise to the most sacred and secret couplet or couplets of his song. The he 'named' (tneuka) the place where he had originated, the trees or rocks growing near his home, the animals sporting about nearby, any strangers that came to visit him, and so forth. He gave names to all of these, and thereby gained the power of calling them by their names; this enabled him to control them and to bind them to his will.'[1]
Wa’-yitser’ Yĕhôwāh’ (Adonai) ĕlôhīm’ min-hā'ădāmāh’ kol-‘ha’yath’ ha’-sādeh’ wĕ'ēth kol-ôph ha’-shāma’yim wa’-yāvē ‘ el-hā'ādām’ li-r'ôth mah-yiqrā-lô’ wĕ-kôl ăsher yiqrā-lô’ hā'-ādām‘ ne’pfesh ‘ha’yāh’ hû shĕmô. (20) Wa’- yiqrā’ hā'-ādām‘ shēmôth….
‘And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. 20. And Adam gave names.. .' [2]
Wa-‘allama ādama l-asmā’a kullahā,
In Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon, the narrator Cherrycoke recounts, against the huge backdrop of seismic shifts in the political and scientific world of that time, the story of the eponymous figures who have undertaken to draw a scientific map of the wilderness and terrain between Pennsylvania and Maryland:
‘what we were doing out in that Country together was brave, scientifick beyond my understanding and ultimately meaningless, - we were putting a line straight through the heart of the Wilderness, eight yards wide and due west, in order to separate two Proprietorships, granted when the World was yet feudal and but eight years later to be nullified by the War for Independence.”
Late in the novel, the Chinaman of the piece remarks:
‘To rule forever, . .it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call . . Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,- to create thus a Distinction betwixt’em. –’tis the first stroke.-All else will follow as if predestin’d, into War and Devastation.’ [4]
The dispute here in wiki, like the historical reality it refers to, has its ‘Bad History’. In the novel, the apparently empirical task of defining boundaries is found unwittingly implicated in the later travails of American history, with its exceptionalism, erasure of native peoples, of possible alternative worlds, of Frostian paths never taken. American innocence and pragmatic realism, in the innocuous work of two surveyors, is swept up in the torment of power: cartographic principles embody an Enlightenment’s reach into the unknown, while, applied, to the ends of order and control, they inadvertently engender violent confusion and disarray. What is the ‘right line’ to take on nomenclature, when history’s line demarcating Israel and the West Bank was drawn by war, then the West Bank was occupied in the aftermath of war, and the world of Israeli settlers begins to redraw the map? One thing that happens is that the complexities have drawn editors into a minor war, as Pynchonesque as it is Pythonesque. There is one difference: most the cartographers say one thing, and Israel, the controlling power, asserts a different terminology. So what’s in a name?
Before the world was tribalized and invested by the collateral damage or fall-out from the Tower of Babel, God assigned to the mythical forefather of all, ‘man’ or Adam, the faculty to name the world, though God himself had exercised this right in naming the light (or) day (yom) and the darkness (hôshek) night(layĕlāh) (Gen.1.5) There was only one name for each thing, and in later European thought the primordial language employed in this taxonomy was to be called ‘the Adamic vernacular’[5]. The thesis was that the pristine jargon employed by Adam, being pre-Babelic, represented the true name for every object: every thing had a proper name intrinsic to its nature. The Greeks, as we see in Plato’s Cratylus, were much prepossessed by the philosophical crux of the correctness of names (ὀρθότης τῶν ὀνομάτων): did names have an intrinsic relation to, or represent, things, or was the link arbitrary.[6]. The Confucian school’s doctrine of the Rectification of names (zhèngmíng: 正名). In the Bible itself the Hebrew text is full of the magic of words, of the power of words themselves to alter reality, a belief testified to in Isaiah:
'So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please.'[7]
Modernity, especially after Ferdinand Saussure (1916), has opted, correctly, for the latter position, and disposed of the magical force of naming. But nationalism, another product of modernity, reintroduced it, via the backdoor, in a new sense. Naming was an act of assertive territorial control, of defining ethnic rights over land, especially as Anthony Smith argues, ethnie are defined also by attachment to a specific geophysical reality, the ‘homeland’ that defines in good part their identity [8]). Since national identities are a political construct, the inculcation of a uniform language, and the use of its lexicon to define or redefine the landscape, are crucial instruments in forging a national sense of common tradition. Nationalism demanded toponymic unison, and linguistic conformity.
John Gaddis, glossing James Scott’s recent book on North Dakota roads and maps, remarks on maps that they reflect
‘what states try to do to those portions of the earth’s surface they hope to control, and to the people who live upon them. For it’s only by making territories and societies legible – by which he means measurable and hence manipulable – that governments can impose and maintain their authority. “These state simplifications,” he writes, are “like abridged maps.” They don’t replicate what’s actually there, but “when allied with state power, (they) enable much of the reality they (depict) to be remade.” [9]
The idea of a nation as a territorial unit speaking one language over that territory is a parlously modern ideology, one engineered by nation-builders into a plausible if specious semblance of commonsense. As Massimo d’Azeglio is said to have remarked at the dawn of the Italian Risorgimento, ‘we have made Italy: our task now is to make Italians’[10], 95% of whom could neither read, write and nor often even speak ‘Italian’.
Imperialism, venturing into terra incognita to appropriate foreign land and incorporate it into an empire, went side by side with nationalism, which was a form of internal colonization over, and homogenization of, the disparate cultures that made up an historically defined territory. For the natives, their indigenous naming is ‘essentially a process of asserting ownership and control of place and landscape’[11]
Daphne Kutzner, in her analysis of the role of Empire in classic children’s fiction, looks at the question from the perspective of the intrusive Empire and its refraction of imperial renaming as reflected in popular books, notes that
‘Naming a place gives the namer power over it, or at least the illusion of power and control. Colonial powers literally transform a landscape once they rename it and begin reshaping it.’ [12]
Terra incognita is the foreigner’s name for an ostensibly empty landscape which, had they taken the trouble to learn the local languages, would have revealed itself to be replete from every rocky nook to crannied gulley with ancient toponyms. The tendency was one of erasure, and, as with introduced fauna and flora [13], the landscape was consistently remade as it was renamed to familiarize the alien by rendering it recognizable, a variation on the landscape settlers came from. The new mapping, as often as not, represent as much the settler’s mentality, as the queerly new features of the foreign landscape under toponymic domestication.[14]
Australia is somewhat the extraordinary exception, and broke with the gusto for imperial nomenclature. There, following the pattern set by the earlier land surveyor Thomas Mitchell and his assistant Philip Elliott that “the natives can furnish you with names for every flat and almost every hill” (1828), native names were adopted in a standarized English form for both euphony and their characteristic relation to the landscape, and indeed a resolution was passed as early as 1884 which established the priority of native names in international usage.[15]
Often imperialism and nationalism go hand in hand. Napoleon’s troops, in 1796, could hardly communicate with each other, such were the grammatical, semantic and syntactical rifts between the various provincial patois at the time. By 1814, Napoleon had formed a European empire, and millions of provincials spoke the one, uniform language of the French state’s army. When two nations, or ethnie, occupy the same territory, the historical victor’s toponymic choices, dictated by the victor’s native language, and as articulated in bureaucratic documents and maps, usually determines what names are to be used. However, the presence of two distinct ethnie on the same national soil creates fissiparous tensions in nomenclature. Speaking of French and British conflict in Canada over areas, Susan Drummond, remarks that, 'Symbolic appropriation of a territory is a critical index of control’, and notes that, as late as 1962, the Québec cartographer Brochu, invoked the political dimension of place names as important, in the conflict with the majoritarian English heritage of Canada over the naming of the northern Inuit lands. [16]
Again, in another familiar example, Alfonso Pérez-Agote notes that Spain has its Basque Autonomous region, Euskadi. But the original force of that name covers an area beyond the administrative and territorial units of Spain, and Basque nationalists evoke its symbolic territory, comprising also the Basque area of Navarre in France. Euskadi has, on one level, within Spanish administrative discourse, a ‘territorial political objectification’, and on another level, in Basque nationalism, a ‘non-administratively objectified’ territory extending into a neighbouring country.[17]. The analogy with Israeli and Palestinian nationalism is close. In Israeli discourse, Israel or Eretz Israel can denote Israel and its outriding West Bank, while Palestine, which is the favoured term of West Bank Arabs for the land they inhabit, also can refer to the whole neighbouring territory of Israel as well.
The anomaly, in comparative terms, is that history has settled the question, whatever local separatist nationalisms, revanchist or irredentist, may claim, except for such places as ‘Palestine’. For there, while Israel is a constituted state, it emerged the victor, manu militari in a conflict that gave it control over a contiguous land, but has no recognized legal right, since that land is defined as and ‘Occupied Palestinian Territory. Acts of unilateral annexation, the extension of administrative structures, settlements, toponymic remapping, and widescale expropriation of land in Palestinian title, is not only not recognized, but judged ‘illegal’ by the highest international bodies of law. All major encyclopedias (Encyclopædia Britannica, Encarta etc.,), except Wiki, maintain a strict neutrality, and, in recognition of the fraught difficulties, adopt the neutral toponymic convention of ‘(northern/southern) West Bank’ in order to avoid lending their prestige to the partisan politics of the parties in this regional conflict.
(iii)The specific instance of Palestine and the West Bank
When the British wrested control over Palestine from the Ottomans in the First World War, and established themselves there to administer the region, Selwyn Troen notes that, 'naming also became part of the contest for asserting control over Palestine'.[18]. As early as 1920 two Zionists advising the British Mandatory authority on everything regarding the assignment of Hebrew names, fought hard for the restoration of Hebraic toponymy, and when, with such places as Nablus, or indeed 'Palestine' itself, were given non-Hebrew names, they protested at the designations as evidence of discrimination against Jews. The point is made by the Israeli historian and cartographer Meron Benvenisti:-
'When the Geographical Committee for Names, which operated under the aegis of the Royal Geographical Society (the only body authorized to assign names throughout the British Empire, decided to call the Mandatory geopolitical entity “Palestine” and the city whose biblical name was Shechem, “Nablus” these Jewish advisers saw this as an act of anti-Jewish discrimination, and a searing defeat for Zionism.'[19]
One pauses to reflect. We are being accused here of 'anti-Jewish/Israeli discrimination' for refusing to insert Israeli toponyms into the West Bank. Nothing is said of the logic of this POV-pushing, i.e. that a Palestinian reader might well regard a Wiki endorsement of suc h foreign nomenclature as a 'searing defeat', and adduce it as proof of 'anti-Palestinian discrimination' both by Zionist editors, and Wikipedia itself.
Since Zionism took root, and especially since Israel was founded, the making of a people, living in a defined territorial unit and speaking one language, has followed the universal pattern of modernity. The landscape, full of Arabic words, had to be renamed, often according to Biblical terminology, but, more often, by the invention of Biblical-sounding names. To do this, a good part of the 10,000 odd Arabic toponyms collected by Herbert Kitchener, T. E. Lawrence and others in surveying that part of the Middle East had to be cancelled, and replaced with Israeli/Hebrew terms, to remake the landscape and its topographic songlines [20] resonate with historical depth. Hebrew is a ‘sacred tongue’ (Leshon HaQodesh:לשון הקודש), the Bible describes the conquest of Eretz Yisrael, and the dispossession of its indigenous peoples, who were not part of the chosen: the pattern is repeated in modern times, down to the renaming. The revival of Hebrew, with its potent shibboleths, understandably exercises a powerful hold over the new culture of the country.
The problem is, as Steven Runciman pointed out in the mid-sixties, that the part assigned to Israel by the UN deliberation of 1947 was the western, non-Biblical part, whilst the part assigned to a future Palestinian state, what we now call the West Bank, is precisely the area most infused with Biblical associations cherished by the Jewish people, with sites and names redolent of the founding myths and realities of their ancient forefathers. Israelis, in their secular land, mostly dwell where the Philistines dwelt. The Palestinians dwell where the ancient Jewish tribes once settled. The tensions simmer between the secular Israel, which thrives in its new Mediterranean world, and the religiously-identified Israel that aspires to return to a geophysical space where origins and the present, the sacred nomenclature of the Bible and the modern world of Jewish life, might at least, once more overlap, in an ‘Adamic’ harmony congruent with the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
(iv)The Negev Precedent With the foundation of Israel, and in the aftermath of the 1948 war, the vast Negev and part of the Arava were captured, and Ben Gurion duly established a Negev Names Committee to ‘hebraize’ the landscape’s features, its mountains, valleys and springs. The area already had a rich Arab toponymy, and some on the committee thought these terms might be preserved as a ‘democratic gesture towards the Arab population of the new state.’ It was not to be. The nomadic Bedouin who dwelt throughout the area were rounded up and expelled by force. They had terms for everything, but with their uprooting and displacement, Benvenisti notes, ‘an entire world, as portrayed in their toponomastic traditions, died.' [21] Ben Gurion wrote to the committee setting forth his view that:-
We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state. Just as we do not recognize the Arabs’ political proprietorship of the land, so also we do not recognize their spiritual proprietorship and their names.[22][23]
Political pressure and ‘the influence of patriotic arguments’ prevailed over those who, like S.Yeibin, thought the erasure of Arab names, many of which might preserve an archaic Hebrew origin. Yeibin thought this a disaster:-
‘With a clap of the hand they were wiping out an entire cultural heritage that must certainly conceal within it elements of the Israeli-Jewish heritage as well. The researchers did indeed endeavour to identify all those names that had a link to ancient Hebrew ones in an attempt “to redeem, as far as possible, names from the days of yore.” [24]<
Any Arabic toponym in short only interested the topographers in so far as it might provide a clue to reconstructing the hypothetical Hebraic original that might lie behind it. This consideration, however, often created a mess of concocted pseudo-traditional names. The hebraization of such Arabic toponyms did not restore the historic past, but invented a mythical landscape, resonant with traditionalist associations, that had, however, no roots in Jewish tradition. The most striking geologic formation in the Negev, Wadi Rumman was rewritten as if that word disguised an ancient Hebrew Ram ('elevated'), whereas the Arabic term it was calqued from actually meant 'Pomegranate Arroyo', for example.[25]
Reflecting on Benvenisti’s account in his larger study of language conflict in the Middle east, the Palestinian expatriate scholar Yasir Suleiman makes remarks that,
’By assigning Hebrew names anew to places on the map, the committee was therefore ‘redeeming’ these places from the corrupt and ‘alien’ Arabic names that they have acquired over the centuries’
and likens this process of linguistic erasure of Arabic and the reconstitution of Hebrew metaphorically to the nakba:-
‘The cartographic cleansing of the Negev map of Arabic place names and their replacement by Hebrew names is an enactment of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their homeland’ [26]
The record is therefore one of a linguistic cleansing of Palestine of any trace of its long Arabic history, and, as we shall see, an attempt to remodel Arabic usage in the territories Israel conquered and controls, to conform with Hebrew. Toponyms can only retain some semblance of an Arabic form, if that form is suspected to camouflage, in turn, an original Hebraic name. Adapting the reborn Hebrew[27] language to the alien realities of the Palestinian landscape, the obvious problem was that the nomenclature for much of the flora and fauna, not to speak of the landscape itself, was infused with the very language, Arabic, a revarnished Hebrew had to compete with. As early as 1910 Jacob Fichman, a member of the Language Council, stated that Hebrew:
‘will not digest the new names of plants, especially those which have been taken from the Arabic language’ and that these borrowed names ‘will always be like atrophied limbs’ for ‘despite the fact that the Arabic language is our sister language in the family of Semitic languages, it has no foundation in our |psyche ’[28]
Hebrew was thus to be programmatically sealed off from Arabic, to prevent atrophisation, and cultivate purism by means of a fake Biblical antiquarianism. Theodor Adorno, writing in the melancholic aftermath of the Holocaust on the effects of cultural purism, once remarked on the purging of foreign words from German undertaken by nationalists intent restoring an ideal of cultural authenticity. He saw this as part of the pathology of nationalism in Germany. Foreign words were treated as if they were 'the Jews of language' (Fremdwörter sind die Juden der Sprache)[29]. In expunging the landscape and the human world of Palestine of its Arabic language, of landscape and culture, Zionism likewise treated Arabic as German or French linguistic purists treated loan-words in their own languages, or, later, actual Jews in their midst, as foreign bodies to be expelled, or expunged if a proper 'foundation for an authentically Jewish psyche' were to be successfully engineered. One would call this ironic, were it not so tragically melancholic in its unintended resonances.
(v)The West Bank. History and Naming The relationship between demographic displacement and the loss of one's landscape through the erasure of its traditional placenames in Palestine has been remarked on by Paul Diehl.
‘The exclusive attachment to territory is reflected in the naming and renaming of places and locations in accordance with the historic and religious sites associated with the dominant political group. Not only did the outflow of Palestinian refugees bring about a change in the Jewish-Arab demographic rations, it brought about the replacement of an Arab-Palestinian landscape with a Jewish-Israeli landscape. The names of abandoned villages disappeared from the map and were replaced with alternative Hebrew names . . Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank have taken on biblical names associated with the specific sites as a means of expressing the Jewish priority in these places and the exclusive nature of the territorial attachment. Modern Israeli and Palestinian maps of Israel/Palestine possess the same outer borders, but the semantic content of the name is completely different.. The means by which new landscapes are created to replace or obliterate former landscapes is a good example of the way in which metaphysical and symbolic attachment to territory is translated into concrete realities on the ground.’ [30]
In 1950, when King Abdullah, of the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, unilaterally annexed the territory he had conquered in 1948, he changed the name of his country to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which incorporated the remaining fragment of Palestine as aḍ-Ḍiffä l-Ġarbīyä, or 'the West Bank' of that kingdom. The usage is still current in German (Westjordanland). Though only Britain recognized his annexation, the word itself found ready acceptance in, and was not, 'forced on', the international community, as Binyamin Netanyahu argued. [31]
In 1967, Israel conquered what the world knew as ‘The West Bank’, the Biblical heartland, and a decree calling it ‘Judea and Samaria’ was issued by the Israeli military on December 17 that year with the explicit definition that it would be identical in meaning for all purposes to the West Bank region[32] to replace the interim terms 'Occupied Territories' (ha-shetahim ha-kevushim), and ‘the Administered Territories’ (ha-shetahim ha-muhzakim) in use since the immediate aftermath of the June war.[33] The term 'Judea and Samaria' however was rarely used until Likud took power[34]. The Labour Government never enacted a settlement policy, though Gush Emunim, an extremist settler ground with a fundamentalist ideology, pressed settlement, and propagated the terminology ‘Judea and Samaria’. When the Likud party, the maximalist, expansionist party with strong ties to both religious and ultra-Zionist groups and traditions, was elected in 1977, it imposed Samaria and Judea as the vox propria in modern Hebrew on the mass media, expressly forbidding the use of the international term West Bank[35][36]. Notably, the government's imposing of these terms on Israeli usage was seen as a prerequisite for an envisioned settlement policy, since accepting the terms would predispose the public to accepting the policy.[37]
Gideon Aran describes the achievement:
‘The importance of changing names in the process of conquering territory is well known. Assimilation of the name “Judea and Samaria” in normal and official language, as well as in jargon, attests to G(ush)E(numin)’s political and cultural achievements.' [38]
The Camp David Accords negotiations of and the final agreement, in 1979, only underline how great was the linguistic rift between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's position and the American government intent on brokering an agreement.
‘Begin consistently proved to be the most extreme member of his delegation, insisting on seemingly innocent terms such as “autonomy” as opposed to “self rule,” on the labelling of the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria” in the Hebrew text, and on the use of the phrase “undivided Jerusalem.'[39]
A huge amount of wrangling between the American negotiators and Begin revolved around this term.
‘for what must have been the tenth time, he (Begin) objected to the term West Bank, giving a lesson to the president on the geographic and historical appropriateness of the term and the importance of using the words Judea and Samaria.’ [40]
Begin refused to back down from his ‘rock-hard’ intransigence on using ‘Judea and Samaria’ and at the Camp David signing ceremony, (March 26,1979) several interpretive notes were required to be added as annexes to the basic documents, one specifically dealing with the West Bank, which President Carter annotated with his own hand with the words:
‘I have been informed that the expression ‘West Bank’ is understood by the Government of Israel to mean ‘Judea and Samaria’. [41]
An ambitious programme of colonising settlement, toponomastic Hebraisation and cultural Judaization was undertaken, and indigenous Palestinians were shifted off their land, in a repetition of the Negev programme, which forms the precedent. The programme took wing especially after the unprovoked[42]invasion of Lebanon in 1982, whose key political objectives included ousting the refugee Palestinian resistance in the para-state[43] on Israel’s northern flank from Lebanon, where the PLO projected a 'state in waiting' image that threatened Israel’s plans for long-term control over the West Bank. The war was, the head of the IDF said at the time, ‘part of the struggle over the Land of Israel[44]. It aimed to further the isolation of Palestinians on the West Bank by depriving them of close support, halt the rise to political respectability of the PLO, which embodied Palestinian nationalist aspirations, and deprive that body of its claims to be a political partner in the peace process for Israel’s normalization of its relations with the outside world. [45] One calculation, a minority view entertained by both Ariel Sharon and Raphael Eytan, however, was that, expelled from Lebanon, the PLO would be forced to return to Jordan, topple king Hussein, and establish a Palestinian state there to satisfy Palestinian national ambitions that Israel would thwart on the West Bank. [46]
Changing the realities of occupied territory by the manipulation of language, Hebrew, Arabic, and in controllable sources like the global Wikipedia, became a programmatic goal. The settlers were in fact 'colonists' in the old sense, but Israeli English usage has here prevailed in the politics of the culture wars to determine how the international community perceives the dynamics of that area. The corresponding Hebrew usage is complex (see Israeli settlements), but continuity with the biblical setlement of Eretz Yisrael is evoked by referring to Jewish settlers as mitnahalim. The root *n-h-l directly evokes a passage in the Book of Numbers[47] where each tribe is assigned its portion on entering Canaan, or the Land of Israel, particularly as ' in the pledge by the tribes of Gad and Reuben that they will fight on the west side of the Jordan river to help the other tribes take possession of their assigned portions'[48] Settlers, qua, mitnahalim are not colonizing anybody's land, in this usage: they are simply taking up their 'assigned portions' as those were marked out by God to the Chosen People.
Rashid Khalidi has remarked how the Israeli authorities themselves try to engineer the way Palestinians think in Arabic by tampering with that language's natural idiom in the Arabic broadcasts they authorize. Over Israeli Arabic channels, one does not hear Jerusalem referred to, as it is customarily in Arabic, and by Palestinians, as Bayt al-Maqdis ('The House of Sanctity') or Al Quds al-Sharif ('The Noble Holy Place'). Arabic usage as sanctioned by Israel speaks rather of Urshalim ('Jerusalem') or Urshalim/al-Quds ('Jerusalem Al-Quds'). The purpose is to diffuse a variety of Arabic names for places that are calques on the Hebrew terms chosen for the area.[49].
This goes right through the bureaucratic language, a form of linguistic colonization that reinforces the physical occupation of the west Bank by cultural re-engineering. A new travel permit was imposed on the colonized Palestinians in the West Bank in 2002, and required of any of them wishing to travel in that area. This was issued, printed and released by Israeli authorities who call it in Arabic Tasrih tanaqul khas fi al-hawajiz al-dakhiliyya fi mantaqat yahuda wa al-samara. ('Special Travel Permit for the Internal Checkpioints in the Area of Judea and Samaria.'). Here, Palestinians who must travel in the West Bank, for them 'Filastin', are required to obtain a document which requires that area to be referred to by the settler term, 'Judea and Samaria'. It is this form of Arabic which they are expected to use in negotiating their way with Israeli authorities through checkpoints. But West Bank Palestinians simply abbreviate it and refer to their tasrih dakhili (Checkpoint permit), [50], thereby eluding the settler term imposed on them.
Michael Sfard indeed has spoken of Hebrew being mobilized to lend itself to the national emergency of occupying Palestine, and denying the Palestinians the liberty to be themselves. They are passive subjects of an activist language that wraps them about in bureaucratic euphemisms.
'It has been tasked with providing a soothing, anesthetizing name for the entire project of suffocation, for the blanket system of theft we have imposed on those we occupy . . Thus extrajudicial executions have become “targeted assassinations”. Torture has been dubbed “moderate physical pressure”. Expulsion to Gaza has been renamed “assigning a place of residence”. The theft of privately owned land has become “declaring the land state-owned”. Collective punishment is “leveraging civilians”; and collective punishment by blockade is a “siege,” “closure” or “separation".'[51]
A proposal is now being made to apply the principle of Hebraization, as of 2009, even to those places within Israel which the world designates by traditional toponyms, such as Jerusalem (Yerushalayim) Nazareth (Natzrat) and Jaffa (Yafo).[52][53] According to Yossi Sarid, the process, illustrated further by Knesset proposals to eliminate Arabic as one of Israel's official languages, constitutes a form of ethnocide.[54]
(vi) Analysis of Ynhockey's suggestions
‘Mapmaking was one of the specialized intellectual weapons by which power could be gained, administered, given legitimacy and codified’ [55]
'Mapmaking is not, however, solely an instrument of war; it is an activity of supreme political significance – a means of providing a basis for the mapmaker’s claims and for his social and symbolic values, while cloaking them in a guise of “scientific objectivity.” Maps are generally judged in terms of their “accuracy”, that is, the degree to which they succeed in reflecting and depicting the morphological landscape and its “man-made” covering But maps portray a fictitious reality that differs from other sorts of printed matter only in form.'[56]
After 1967 ‘Cartographers . .had many options, which tended to reveal their political proclivities. Those who were sympathetic to Israel labelled the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and Sinai as “administered territories” and used the phrase “Judea and Samaria” for Jordan’s former West Bank. They also included all of Jerusalem within Israeli territory,. Mapmakers who were ideologically neutral generally referred to “occupied territory” and maintained the term “West Bank”. . . In the post-1993 period a Palestinian Authority has been established in the West Bank and Gaza, yet there is no actual independent state of Palestine. Most international maps have stayed with the terms “West Bank” and “Gaza” but maps published by the Palestinian Authority describe these areas as “Palestine.” Furthermore, Palestinian Authority maps usually leave out Israel and assign its territory to “Palestine,” with the added designation that it is “occupied territory.”Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, Harvey Sicherman, The power of projections: : how maps reflect global politics and history, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006 pp.37-8
We are dealing with a defined territory and its naming. User:Ynhockey would make tidy distinctions, define the bound geographical territory (CIA Factbook) as just a political reality, and use Judea and Samaria for all other contexts. In his own work on Wiki, much of it admirable, we find many maps. Examine the following map he authored and uploaded, and which is employed on the Battle of Karameh
The central colour, a washed acquamarine tint, allows one to highlight the field of movement in the battle, and blurs the neat territorial division between the West Bank, and Jordan. But note that, in a wholly unnecessary manner, Israel is stamped in large bold characters and made to overlay the West Bank, which is placed diminutively in parentheses. Willy-nilly, the impression is that the West Bank is some territorial hypothesis or province within Israel. Whether Ynhockey meant to give the reader this impression or not is immaterial. Maps, as one source already quoted noted, reflect the cognitive bias of the mapmaker as much as an interpretation of a landscape, and here the bias is that the West Bank is under Israel, behind Israeli lines, a subset of that state. It is a fine example of what many cartographers and historians of cartography argue: the making of maps, and toponymic nomenclature in them, serves several purposes, to clarify, as here, a battle landscape, for example, but also to impose or assert power, or claims, or blur facts. Objectively, User:Ynhockey has loaded wiki with a map that cogs our perceptions, tilting them to an annexationist assumption. Indeed, unlike the Israeli government so far, his map actually looks like it has the West Bank annexed.
- ^ T.G.H.Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia,Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1971 p.126; cited by Barry Hill, Broken Song: T.G.H.Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession, Knopf, 2002 pp.436f.
- ^ Genesis, ch.2, verses 19-20, with apologies for my transcription
- ^ For a fascinating study on both the figure of Adam in Islamic tradition, and on commentaries on this particular text specifically, see M.J.Kister, ‘Ādam: A Study of Some Legends in Tafsīr and Hadīt Literature,’ in Joel L. Kraemer (ed.) Israel Oriental Studies, Volume XIII, BRILL, 1993 pp.112-174, p.140
- ^ Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, Jonathan Cape, London 1997, pp.8,615
- ^ George Steiner, After Babel, Oxford University Press 1975 p.58
- ^ Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,, vol.1, tr.Ralph Manheim, Yale UP 1955 pp.119ff.,p.122
- ^ Isaiah 5:11. For this and other passages, see S.J.Tambiah ’s 1968 Malinowsky lecture, "The Magical Power of Words," (the ancient Egyptians, the Semites and Sumerians all believed that “the world and its objects were created by the word of God; and the Greek doctrine of logos postulated that the soul or essence of things resided in their names (pp.182-3). My attention was drawn to this particular essay by Tambiah by Brian Vickers, Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 1984 p.96
- ^ Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origin of Nations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1986 passim
- ^ John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, Oxford University Press US, 2004, p.131
- ^ Abbiamo fatto l'Italia. Ora si tratta di fare gli Italiani
- ^ Regis Stella, Imagining the Other: The Representation of the Papua New Guinean Subject, University Of Hawaiʻi Press, 2007 p.169 gives many Papuan examples. Compare his remark elsewhere in the same book, ‘In indigenous cultures . .(t)he most important means of taking control of the landscape is by naming, Naming provides the equivalent of a title deed, imbues power and identity to that which is named, gives the named place a presence, confers a reality, and allows it to be known.’ Ibid pp. 40-41
- ^ M. Daphne Kutzer, Empire's Children:Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children's Books, Routledge, 2000 p.120
- ^ Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, Cambridge University Press, 1986
- ^ ‘Maps are a kind of language, or social product which act as mediators between an inner mental world and an outer physical world. But they are, perhaps first and foremost, guides to the mind-set which produced them. They are, in this sense, less a representation of part of the earth’s surface than a representation of the system of cognitive mapping which produced them,’ N.Penn, “Mapping the Cape: John Barrow and the First British Occupation of the Colony, 1794-1803.” in Pretexts 4 (2) Summer 1993, pp.20-43 p.23
- ^ John Atchison, ‘Naming Outback Australia,’ in Actes du XVI Congrès international des sciences onomastiques, Québec, Université Laval, 16-22 August 1987, Presses Université Laval, 1987 : pp.151-162 p.154-5
- ^ Susan Gay Drummond, Incorporating the Familiar, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 1997 p.32 .
- ^ Alfonso Pérez-Agote, The Social Roots of Basque Nationalism, University of Nevada Press, 2006 p.xx
- ^ Selwyn Ilan Troen, Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement, Yale University Press, 2003 p.152
- ^ Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape:The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, tr. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, University of California Press, 2000 pp.12-13 cf.'Suffused with the sense that “it is impossible for a present-day Hebrew map not to identify by name the places of Hebrew settlement mentioned in the Bible and in post-biblical Hebrew literature,” they set about identifying these sites and putting them on “Hebrew maps,” which they placed opposite the official Mandatory maps.’
- ^ Cf.Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, Jonathan Cape, London 1987
- ^ Benvenisti, ibid, p.19
- ^ Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, op.cit.p.14. The Arabic names were also found ‘morose’ and ‘offensive’ . As one member put it: ‘Many of the names are offensive in their gloomy and morose meanings, which reflect the powerlessness of the nomads and their self-denigration in the face of the harshness of nature’ (ibid.p.17). On the committee see also his memoir, Meron Benvenisti, Son of the Cypresses: Memories, Reflections, and Regrets from a Political Life, tr. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, University of California Press, 2007 p.72.
- ^ Amar Dahamshe Off the linguistic map. Are Arab place names derived from Hebrew? in Haaretz 30.06.10
- ^ Benvenisti, ibid. p.17, p.18
- ^ ‘The name of the Ramon Crater, for example, perhaps the most dramatic geological formation in the Negev, “is derived from the Hebrew adjective ram (meaning elevated), “states an Israeli guidebook. The fact that its name in Arabic was Wadi Rumman (Pomegranate Arroyo), . . was not considered worthy of mention’ Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid. p.19
- ^ Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East, Cambridge University Press, 2004 p.161, p.162.
- ^ cf.Shalom Spiegel, Hebrew Reborn,, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia 1930, Meridian Book reprint 1962. Shalom Spiegel was Sam Spiegel's more distinguished and erudite brother.
- ^ Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words, ibid p.140
- ^ Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (1951), in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.) Gesammelte Schriften, Bd.4, Suhrkamp, 1980 p.123
- ^ Paul Francis Diehl, A Road Map to War, Vanderbilt University Press, 1999, pp.15-16.
- ^ 'The term West Bank was forced onto the international lexicon only after Jordan conquered the territory in 1948'. Binyamin Netanyahu, A Durable Peace: Israel and Its Place Among the Nations, Warner Books, (1993) 2000 p.20. Netanyahu's dislike of the term (and his faulty memory for dates), is mirrored by the Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti, evidence if ever of the neutrality of the term: cf.‘I did not realize what it meant to be a refugee until I became one myself. When the Israeli army occupied Deir Ghassanah and the whole eastern part of Palestine in 1967, the news bulletins began to speak of the occupation of the Israeli defense forces of the West Bank. The pollution of language is no more obvious than when concocting this term: West Bank. West of what? Bank of what? The reference here is to the west bank of the River Jordan, not to historical Palestine. If the reference were to Palestine they would have used the term eastern parts of Palestine. The west bank of the river is a geographical location, not a country, not a homeland. The battle for language becomes the battle for the land. The destruction of one leads to the destruction of the other. When Palestine disappears as a word, it disappears as a state, as a country and as a homeland. The name of Palestine itself had to vanish. . .The Israeli leaders, practicing their conviction that the whole land of Palestine belongs to them would concretize the myth and give my country yet another biblical name: Judea and Samaria, and give our villages and towns and cities Hebrew names. But call it the West Bank or call its Judea and Samaria, the fact remains that these territories are occupied. No problem! The Israeli governments, whether right or left or a combination of both, would simply drop the term occupied and say the Territories! Brilliant! I am a Palestinian, but my homeland is the Territories! What is happening here? By a single word they redefine an entire nation and delete history.’ Mourid Barghouti, 'The Servants of War and their Language', in International parliament of Writers, Autodafe, Seven Stories Press, 2003 pp.139-147 pp140-1
- ^ Emma Playfair, International Law and the Administration of Occupied Territories: Two Decades of Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Oxford University Press, 1992 p. 41.
- ^ Ran HaCohen, 'Influence of the Middle East Peace Process on the Hebrew Language' (1992), reprinted in Michael G. Clyne (ed.), Undoing and Redoing Corpus Planning, Walter de Gruyter, 1997, pp.385-414, p.397.
- ^ Shlomo Gazit, Trapped Fools: Thirty Years of Israeli Policy in the Territories, Routledge, 2003 p. 162
- ^ 'The terms “occupied territory” or “West Bank” were forbidden in news reports.'Ian S. Lustick, 'The Riddle of Nationalism: The Dialectic of Religion and Nationalism in the Middle East', Logos, Vol.1, No.3, Summer 2002 pp.18-44, p. 39
- ^ 'Begin was happy to castigate the media and the intelligentsia for their views, real and imaginary, and their use of politically incorrect language. Israeli television was now instructed to use “Judea and Samaria’ for the administered territories, annexation became ‘incorporation’ and the Green Line suddenly disappeared from maps of Israel and the West Bank'. Colin Shindler, A History of Modern Israel, Cambridge University Press, 2008 p.174
- ^ 'The successful gaining of the popular acceptance of these terms was a prelude to gaining popular acceptance of the government’s settlement policies'.Myron J. Aronoff, Israeli Visions and Divisions: Cultural Change and Political Conflict, Transaction Publishers, 1991. p. 10.
- ^ Gideon Aran, 'Jewish Zionist Fundamentalism: The Block of the Faithful in Israel (Gush Enumin),', in American Academy of Arts and Sciences, University of Chicago Press, 1994 pp.265-344, p.291, p.337
- ^ Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land: a critical analysis of Israel's security & foreign policy, University of Michigan Press, 2006 p.441
- ^ William B. Quandt, Peace process: American diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1967, Brookings Institution Press, 2001, rev.ed.2001 p.130
- ^ William B.Quandt, Peace process, ibid. p.134. This was then accompanied by a formal note to Begin (September 22,1978), it which it was registered that ‘(A) In each paragraph of the Agreed Framework Document the expressions “Palestinians” or “Palestinian People” are being and will be construed and understood by you as “Palestinian Arabs”. (B)In each paragraph in which the expression “West Bank” appears, it is being, and will be, understood by the Government of Israel as Judea and Samaria.’ William B. Quandt, Camp David: peacemaking and politics, Brookings Institution Press, 1986 p.387
- ^ Howard Jones, Crucible of Power: A History of U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1897,Rowman & Littlefield, 2nd.ed. 2001 p.469
- ^ Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon, Westview Press, Boulder, 1990 p.2
- ^ James Ron, Frontiers and ghettos: state violence in Serbia and Israel, University of California Press, 2003 p.180. Decoded, the statement means, 'invading Lebanon secures the West Bank for Israel and thus achieves the Biblical borders set forth more or less in the Tanakh's account of the early kingdoms'
- ^ Eric J. Schmertz, Natalie Datlof, Alexej Ugrinsky, President Reagan and the world, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997 p.44.
- ^ See Uri Bar-Joseph, Israel's National Security Towards the 21st Century, Routledge, 2001 p.185
- ^ Numbers, 32:18
- ^ David C. Jacobson, Does David still play before you? Israeli poetry and the Bible, Wayne State University Press, 1997 p.50
- ^ Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The construction of modern national consciousness, Columbia University Press, 1998 p.14
- ^ Nigel Craig Parsons,The Politics of the Palestinian Authority: From Oslo to Al-Aqsa, Routledge, 2005 p.299
- ^ Michael Sfard, Occupation double-speak,' at Haaretz, 12 June 2012.
- ^ Jonathan Cook, Israeli Road Signs, Counterpunch 17-19, July 2009
- ^ Nir Hasson, Give Arab train stations Hebrew names, says Israeli linguist, Haaretz 28/12/2009
- ^ Yossi Sarid 'Israel is not killing the Palestinian people - it's killing their culture,' Haaretz 3 Octobr 2014
- ^ John Brian Harley, David Woodward, The History of Cartography: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, Humana Press, 1987 p.506, cited Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid.p.13
- ^ Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid. p.13
Further reading:-
- Mark Monmonier, No Dig, No Fly, No Go. How maps restrict and control, University of Chicago Press 2010
Great talks by John Mearsheimer
Informative, thoughtful and insightful talks by John Mearsheimer:
1. The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine Crisis. "The war in Ukraine is a multi-dimensional disaster, which is likely to get much worse in the foreseeable future." (2 hours 7 minutes), posted in June 2022. Here is transcript of the talk (the video also contains a Q & A session after the talk, but this Q&A is not included in the transcript).
2. How to make (the war in Ukraine) end (21 minutes), posted in May 2022.
3. Insights on how to end the war (99 minutes), posted in March 2022. Mearsheimer: "If the Ukrainians are smart, they would divorce themselves from the U.S. and try to work out a Modus vivendi with Russia."
4. Why is Ukraine the West's Fault? (74 minutes). From Aug. 2015, still highly relevant and pertinent today. It seems practically all of Mearsheimer's key predictions from almost 7 years ago about the Ukraine, Russia, China and the US have come to fruition.
5. Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics (85 minutes). "Mearsheimer provides the first systematic analysis of lying as a tool of statecraft."
The pup and kitten send their love to their granpa Nishidani. Ijon Tichy (talk) 09:32, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks indeed. It's always great to have an opportunity to read, or listen to, anything by Mearsheimer. It can't be a coincidence that recent events and observing a dopey edit at Prometheus Unbound prodded me to finally consider redoing that page, which is about a figure being punished by the cosmic forces of authority for having allowed mankind access to the Tekhnai of civilization. Now of course, man is doing the same to nature, while suffering a slow Promethean strangulation by the latent internal dynamics of the system of ordure he put in the place of the old order. I expect I won't be surprised by M's analyses: the bad side of growing old is being compelled to mutter:'of course' as one disaster after another kicks in, informing the conjunctural chaos of the last decades. There's little consolation in being right, and no room for self-flattery. One doesn't have to be a genius to see the obvious, as Andersen's fable teaches us. You just have to see things as children do, as the imperial procession walks naked in our midst. A pat for the pup, and a caress for the kitten.Best Nishidani (talk) 10:06, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks for your thoughts Nish.
- Here are further highly informative, thoughtful and expertly researched deep insights (51 minutes) about Ukraine, Russia and China, by Gerald Horne and Paul Jay. This conversation between Horne and Jay addresses some of the key issues you alluded to above, including providing insights into the very complex and multilayered historical, social and economic context of the relationship between the West, Russia and China. Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:52, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
- I still hope to get back to you on this, once I've done copyediting a somewhat intricate paper a friend has written on the reception of Kant's theories about Aristotle's 'rhapsodical' categories during the 19th century. Unlike the world ((a) Peter Beinart, America must be consistent. It cannot pick and choose when to follow international law, The Guardian 10 March 2022),(b) (2) Peter Beinart, 'Justifications for Destroying a People:The arguments Russia’s government deploys to dehumanize Ukrainians are strikingly similar to the ones Israel’s government uses to dehumanize Palestinians,' Jewish Currents 8 March 2022) this sort of stuff is refreshingly, compellingly logical, proof that somewhere out there among the exemplars of homo sapiens insipiens, sapient mutants - the sapient sutlers of the Word, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, -survive. Best Nishidani (talk) 13:55, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
- Beinart's second piece essentially states (the obvious) that anyone supportive of Israel's behavior towards Palestinians over the past 55 years is obliged logically to support Russia's obliteration of Ukrainian sovereignty and identity. Of course, discursive coherence is the last thing one can expect these days. Nishidani (talk) 16:43, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks for the links to Beinart's work. Indeed, over the last two weeks or so, in the context of Ukraine vs. Russia, very few - far too few - people have discussed the issue of the Israeli government's decades of violent apartheid against Palestinians, including e.g. Max Blumenthal, Jonathan Cook, Abby Martin, Caitlin Johnstone, Chris Hedges and Lee Camp, mostly on Twitter and, to an even lesser extent, on other social media e.g. YouTube.
- (However, with every passing day, most of the Western corporations that own the social media platforms appear to be increasingly restricting access to, or even deleting, postings that disagree with the Western dominant mainstream daily Two Minutes of Hate against Russia, with Vladimir Putin portrayed in the Western mainstream mass media as the Emmanuel Goldstein du jour; for example, YouTube is now blocking the RT-affiliated channels, including the last 8 years of Lee Camp's work and big portions of Abby Martin's work.)
- Additionally, on a very rare occasion over the last two weeks, a cultural, socio-economic, academic or political leader has called out the double standards on Ukraine vs Russia and Palestine vs Israel, for example see this short video featuring Irish MP Richard Boyd Barrett. Best, Ijon Tichy (talk) 00:16, 12 March 2022 (UTC)
- Y'all probably saw Mondo's article but here anyway for it's pointers to other sources as well. Selfstudier (talk) 11:50, 12 March 2022 (UTC)
- The I/P analogy is obvious, but I don't think it should dominate criticism, since larger historical forces bear down here - all the knots of the last century are gathering on the combteeth, as the Italians say- but I am surprised Israel would arbitrate on this in Jerusalem. (Technically Putin would lose face, which would be political suicide, if Russia signed a ceasefire in Jerusalem because that would be tantamount in law to explicitly recognizing the legitimacy of their cosigning antagonist, the Ukrainian government- precisely what Putin denies.) Zionism is basically an expression of the Slavic world,- its thrust goes wholly against the grain of what occurred in Western Europe in the last seventy years - and any realistic negotiation ending the war - if peace is to be restored will compel Ukraine's leaders to accept humiliating concessions. And if Zelenskyy signs, the 'stab in the back' meme of Nazism will stir Ukrainian nationalists to cite his 'Jewishness' for the destruction of the Ukraine's independence and territorial integrity, and thereby revive the rooted antisemitic history of that area. Of course, some 'heads' may think that in turn will empty the Ukraine of its Jewish communities who will relocate to Israel's advantage to the safety of that country. Empires like the USA, Russia and China don't rule by law: that is just a tool in the kit to be cited when enemies are unruly, and ignored in one's own deliberations, which are rigorously dominated by great power rivalries' (mis)calculations. I'd much prefer people (re)read Piketty's great book on the internal logic of our system (which Russia's kleptocratic entrepreneurial elite mirrors in a caricatural distorting mirror), but it's tasking. Perhaps Victor Grossman's 'Russia and Ukraine: Notes From Berlin,' CounterPunch 11 March, 2022, gives a succinct overview of the larger hypocrisies. Nishidani (talk) 21:36, 13 March 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks for the great insights Nish (and thanks for the important link Selfstudier). Yes, the works of Thomas Piketty and Victor Grossman are very helpful.
- In addition, I also recommend the work of Alfred W. McCoy and Michael Klare, both of whom have published several highly thoughtful and informative books. They both have also written many insightful and powerful essays for TomDispatch over the last 12 years. Their most recent essays are: 'Michael Klare, The Geopolitics of Hell,' (March 6, 2022) and 'Alfred McCoy, War on an Endangered Planet' (March 10, 2022). Ijon Tichy (talk) 05:35, 14 March 2022 (UTC)
- I think this is the best source exposing Western hypocrisy over Ukraine: http://opiniojuris.org/2022/03/17/hamster-in-a-wheel-international-law-crisis-exceptionalism-whataboutery-speaking-truth-to-power-and-sociopathic-racist-gaslighting/ (t · c) buidhe 04:10, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks indeed, Buidhe, for this, esp. because it led me to his paper, Ralph Wilde, Using the Master’s Tools to Dismantle the Master’s House: International Law and Palestinian Liberation Palestine Yearbook of international law 22 (2019–20 20) 3–74, a meticulous analysis of the law on the status of the self-defense argument used by occupying powers, reading which is one of the reasons why I’m late in getting back to you. The I/P conflict has always been for me the canary in the mineshaft for postwar history: w hatever emerges there, the precedents established – to which a status of exceptionality is accorded because of the ostensibly peculiar requirements of Israel – in theory will make for a blowback wave of impacts on the postwar Western institutional and geopolitical order, making its intrinsic contradictions even more explicit and stressed than they have been for that small minority of scholars who note the obvious. Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias will, in short, return from his silence and get the upper hand over Socrates. What Russia is achieving in Ukraine, was long achieved by Israel since 1967, with massive Western complicity and therefore the outrage is profoundly hypocritical, racist. Conflict in far-flung borderlands always has the imperial party assuming different rules apply there, and those ‘lapses’ into barbarism abroad then, eventually, form precedents that come home to roost in the heartland:the US in the Philippines (the ‘taming of the tribal West’ being the background), Germany with the Herero, Turkey with the Armenians, the Soviet Union with the Holodomor (semantically that is not too different from the meaning of Porajmos , the Nazi genocide of Rom and Sinti, still not recognized though the same term ‘final solution’ for Jews was used as early as 1938 for ‘gypsies’ (endgültige Lösung der Zigeunerfrage) at least half of whom were murdered) etc. The justified outrage at theRape of Belgium still has to be read in the light of Leopold’s Atrocities in the Congo Free State . Plus ça change, the more mankind is shortchanged. Some two bit ‘orientalist’ based in Japan speaking on Italian television last night cited a pseudo- proverb ostensibly from the canon of classical Chinese that ran: ‘What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.’ The point was the seismic shift in the old order looks bad, but to those who will survive to dwell in the new world emerging out of the transformations, something of beauty will emerge. People get paid to make moronic cracks like that. But, back to the garden (feeling guilty as spiders scramble out of clumps of weed where they were happily ensconced before some Godzilla like myself barged in to use the soil for a different purpose). I’m as usual, preaching to the choir.Nishidani (talk) 12:45, 24 March 2022 (UTC)
- Here are some interesting insights on how the US and NATO now have a golden opportunity to drastically reduce the power and influence of the fascists - especially the Nazis - in Ukrainian society as well as in NATO countries. Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:14, 24 March 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks indeed, Buidhe, for this, esp. because it led me to his paper, Ralph Wilde, Using the Master’s Tools to Dismantle the Master’s House: International Law and Palestinian Liberation Palestine Yearbook of international law 22 (2019–20 20) 3–74, a meticulous analysis of the law on the status of the self-defense argument used by occupying powers, reading which is one of the reasons why I’m late in getting back to you. The I/P conflict has always been for me the canary in the mineshaft for postwar history: w hatever emerges there, the precedents established – to which a status of exceptionality is accorded because of the ostensibly peculiar requirements of Israel – in theory will make for a blowback wave of impacts on the postwar Western institutional and geopolitical order, making its intrinsic contradictions even more explicit and stressed than they have been for that small minority of scholars who note the obvious. Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias will, in short, return from his silence and get the upper hand over Socrates. What Russia is achieving in Ukraine, was long achieved by Israel since 1967, with massive Western complicity and therefore the outrage is profoundly hypocritical, racist. Conflict in far-flung borderlands always has the imperial party assuming different rules apply there, and those ‘lapses’ into barbarism abroad then, eventually, form precedents that come home to roost in the heartland:the US in the Philippines (the ‘taming of the tribal West’ being the background), Germany with the Herero, Turkey with the Armenians, the Soviet Union with the Holodomor (semantically that is not too different from the meaning of Porajmos , the Nazi genocide of Rom and Sinti, still not recognized though the same term ‘final solution’ for Jews was used as early as 1938 for ‘gypsies’ (endgültige Lösung der Zigeunerfrage) at least half of whom were murdered) etc. The justified outrage at theRape of Belgium still has to be read in the light of Leopold’s Atrocities in the Congo Free State . Plus ça change, the more mankind is shortchanged. Some two bit ‘orientalist’ based in Japan speaking on Italian television last night cited a pseudo- proverb ostensibly from the canon of classical Chinese that ran: ‘What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.’ The point was the seismic shift in the old order looks bad, but to those who will survive to dwell in the new world emerging out of the transformations, something of beauty will emerge. People get paid to make moronic cracks like that. But, back to the garden (feeling guilty as spiders scramble out of clumps of weed where they were happily ensconced before some Godzilla like myself barged in to use the soil for a different purpose). I’m as usual, preaching to the choir.Nishidani (talk) 12:45, 24 March 2022 (UTC)
- I think this is the best source exposing Western hypocrisy over Ukraine: http://opiniojuris.org/2022/03/17/hamster-in-a-wheel-international-law-crisis-exceptionalism-whataboutery-speaking-truth-to-power-and-sociopathic-racist-gaslighting/ (t · c) buidhe 04:10, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
- The I/P analogy is obvious, but I don't think it should dominate criticism, since larger historical forces bear down here - all the knots of the last century are gathering on the combteeth, as the Italians say- but I am surprised Israel would arbitrate on this in Jerusalem. (Technically Putin would lose face, which would be political suicide, if Russia signed a ceasefire in Jerusalem because that would be tantamount in law to explicitly recognizing the legitimacy of their cosigning antagonist, the Ukrainian government- precisely what Putin denies.) Zionism is basically an expression of the Slavic world,- its thrust goes wholly against the grain of what occurred in Western Europe in the last seventy years - and any realistic negotiation ending the war - if peace is to be restored will compel Ukraine's leaders to accept humiliating concessions. And if Zelenskyy signs, the 'stab in the back' meme of Nazism will stir Ukrainian nationalists to cite his 'Jewishness' for the destruction of the Ukraine's independence and territorial integrity, and thereby revive the rooted antisemitic history of that area. Of course, some 'heads' may think that in turn will empty the Ukraine of its Jewish communities who will relocate to Israel's advantage to the safety of that country. Empires like the USA, Russia and China don't rule by law: that is just a tool in the kit to be cited when enemies are unruly, and ignored in one's own deliberations, which are rigorously dominated by great power rivalries' (mis)calculations. I'd much prefer people (re)read Piketty's great book on the internal logic of our system (which Russia's kleptocratic entrepreneurial elite mirrors in a caricatural distorting mirror), but it's tasking. Perhaps Victor Grossman's 'Russia and Ukraine: Notes From Berlin,' CounterPunch 11 March, 2022, gives a succinct overview of the larger hypocrisies. Nishidani (talk) 21:36, 13 March 2022 (UTC)
- Y'all probably saw Mondo's article but here anyway for it's pointers to other sources as well. Selfstudier (talk) 11:50, 12 March 2022 (UTC)
- There are all sorts of elements one can focus on in an extremely complex conflict like this. This appears a bit like the postwar hasbara associating the PLO with antisemitism via Hajj Amin Huseyni. He's done some homework, but a movement that got 2.5% of the vote in the most recent elections, has a battle strength of about 1,000 men (no doubt now significantly decimated at Mariupol), putatively financed by a Jewish Ukrainian entrepreneur, fighting on the side of a Jewish president, with no parliamentary representation, coopting 5% of its militants from ethnic Russians etc., etc., doesn't easy quite so easily with the undoubtedly Nazi record documented 8 years ago. They're against 'queers'? So is Putin with the endorsement of the Russian orthodox church . They engage in ethnic cleansing? idem Putin. They believe in an ethnic cosmology? So does Putin, and his putative ideologist. They are extremists committed to violence to impose themselves? Idem Putin. They hire the scum of foreign extremists to arm their cause? So does Russia sending in Islamic Chechens commanded by a mafia thug to fight the rumoured Azov contingent in Mariupol, and probably rape their way through the survivors etc. Such 'Nazis' are everywhere, well represented in the counsels of many mainstream states. Nishidani (talk) 17:20, 24 March 2022 (UTC)
- I think you are making many valid points Nishidani. I do not disagree with you on any of the issues you raised. But note that, for example, Ukrainian Neo Nazis have renamed many streets over the last 8 yrs, with the most egregious example being the road leading to the massacre memorial site of Babi Yar, that was renamed in honor of Stepan Bandera in 2014. (Bandera and his followers were heavily involved in the massacres of many Jews and Polish civilians.) And other streets in Ukraine have been renamed for various WW2 nationalists, racists, antisemites etc. And Russia isn’t erecting statues of Nazis and Nazi collaborators, Ukraine is. Russia isn’t issuing stamps memorializing Nazis and Nazi collaborators, Ukraine is. Russia isn’t naming streets after Nazis and Nazi collaborators, Ukraine is. Russia isn’t building museums for Nazis and Nazi collaborators, Ukraine is. Ijon Tichy (talk) 01:09, 30 March 2022 (UTC)
- In short, what we are exploring is well known, if off the mainstream record: the West's hypocrisy and precedent-setting. Chomsky has been documenting that for 50 years. One is still obliged to see what's going on in other empires. Timothy Snyder is an historian of Eastern Europe to be reckoned with and in a book written 4 years ago, which I haven't yet read, he makes a cogent argument for Putin's regime as 'fascist' citing figures like Ivan Ilyin (explicity admired by Putin), and also Lev Gumilyov of Khazar notoriety. Though the present era is eerily like the 1930s, the ideological picture is one of extreme fluidity and confusion, with left and right pilfering from their respective archives, so such brandnames are to be handled with care, even if the probabilities are that mankind will have to face the same disorders on a larger scale.Nishidani (talk) 17:58, 24 March 2022 (UTC)
- Vijay Prashad provides additional deep insights about the socio-economic and geo-political struggle between China, the US, Europe and Russia:
- Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:15, 31 March 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks.Just a point about 'Western' coverage. In Italy since day 1, there has been, I guess almost 24/7 coverage of the conflict, with several mainstream channels providing several to ten hours a day of reportage, using journalists (not embedded) in a dozen of the cities under siege in direct contact, analysts of the highest calibre, and the various talking heads of national television. From the beginning the 'Russian' perspective has been present. This is of course in good part a consequence of intense commercial competition for audiences' attention. Everything, down to frame by frame analysis of footage to evaluate whether Lavrov or Kiev's claims hold, is aired. That said, historical background included, no one is doubting the obvious: that Russia has resorted to the same techniques it, like the US in Falluja, the Serbs in Sarajevo, Israel in Gaza, the techniques it used to wipe out Chechen resistance in the late 1990s for its own imperial interests, and that the Ukrainian resistance is legitimate. Nishidani (talk) 08:51, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
- It is good that the Italian media provides a balanced coverage. But in the US, discussion is extremely limited by the mainstream media's maintenance of a single, exclusive viewpoint: the official talking-points of the US gubmint. The Russian perspective - including legitimate Russian grievances - has been banned in the mainstream media in the US; Russia has been effectively canceled in the US, and the Russian leadership - and by extension the Russian people - are largely dehumanized. This is, of course, not too different from how the mainstream media in Israel habitually, automatically and instinctively dehumanizes the Palestinian people.
- (However, fortunately the US has a thriving alternative media, where the Russian perspective is provided daily, and debated freely and openly. Regretfully, relatively few people in the US pay attention to the alternative media.)
- I agree that Ukrainian resistance is legitimate. But the Ukrainian leadership had many opportunities over the last two decades to avoid an eventual war with Russia. Several scholars such as Mearsheimer and Prashad, among others, over the last 10-20 years have warned repeatedly that the Ukrainian gubmint must change course to prevent an almost-certain eventual war between itself and Russia, a war in which the US government, and the Ukrainian government i.e. Ukrainian oligarchy, will ruthlessly and greedily use the Ukrainian people as cannon fodder against Russia. ("The Americans are fighting the Russians to the last Ukrainian.") [Yes, I am aware that Russia, just like the Ukraine, is an oligarchy. So are the US and Israel, in fact most 'significant' countries on the planet are some type of oligarchy/ plutocracy/ kleptocracy to varying degrees.]
- These scholars also provided specific, reasonable, not-very-painful compromises the Ukrainian government could take to prevent the war and save thousands of lives and needless pain and suffering for millions more. Of course, this thoughtful and insightful advice and warnings were ignored by the Ukrainian leadership.
- Yes, I agree that Russia resorted to the same nasty techniques as those in the examples of conflicts you mentioned. In addition to the examples you provided, another relevant example is the brutal, vicious, relentless attacks by the Ukrainian gubmint against the people in the Donbas region, especially over the last 8 years, in which roughly about 14 thousand people were killed, mostly on the side of the separatists.
- The bottom line: after this war is over, the only winners will be the oligarchs everywhere on the planet, including Ukrainian, Russian, European, Asian, North American, South American, Arab, Israeli, etc. oligarchs/ plutocrats/ kleptocrats, while the mass of the people globally are going to gain nothing from this conflict.
- Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:44, 6 April 2022 (UTC)
- apropos this, it is mistitled. Mearsheimer offers no hints as to how the war might end. He simply states that diplomatic negotiations between Russia and the US should aim to cede Crimea to Russia, in exchange for reincorporation of Luhansk and Donetz (in fact an expanded Donbass) into Ukrainian sovereignty. That is extremely vague, almost pointless: how that could be arranged is obscure, and the last suggestion is wishful thinking. The present Russian elite has chosen the Zionist option: invade a country, ignore the fuss; wait 50 years and with the passing of time, it will just de facto be accepted as ‘ours’. Russia has a thousand-year history of patiently, stoically, living through its failures, without reforming the conditions that produce its ongoing dedevelopmental inertia.
- Thanks.Just a point about 'Western' coverage. In Italy since day 1, there has been, I guess almost 24/7 coverage of the conflict, with several mainstream channels providing several to ten hours a day of reportage, using journalists (not embedded) in a dozen of the cities under siege in direct contact, analysts of the highest calibre, and the various talking heads of national television. From the beginning the 'Russian' perspective has been present. This is of course in good part a consequence of intense commercial competition for audiences' attention. Everything, down to frame by frame analysis of footage to evaluate whether Lavrov or Kiev's claims hold, is aired. That said, historical background included, no one is doubting the obvious: that Russia has resorted to the same techniques it, like the US in Falluja, the Serbs in Sarajevo, Israel in Gaza, the techniques it used to wipe out Chechen resistance in the late 1990s for its own imperial interests, and that the Ukrainian resistance is legitimate. Nishidani (talk) 08:51, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
- In short, what we are exploring is well known, if off the mainstream record: the West's hypocrisy and precedent-setting. Chomsky has been documenting that for 50 years. One is still obliged to see what's going on in other empires. Timothy Snyder is an historian of Eastern Europe to be reckoned with and in a book written 4 years ago, which I haven't yet read, he makes a cogent argument for Putin's regime as 'fascist' citing figures like Ivan Ilyin (explicity admired by Putin), and also Lev Gumilyov of Khazar notoriety. Though the present era is eerily like the 1930s, the ideological picture is one of extreme fluidity and confusion, with left and right pilfering from their respective archives, so such brandnames are to be handled with care, even if the probabilities are that mankind will have to face the same disorders on a larger scale.Nishidani (talk) 17:58, 24 March 2022 (UTC)
- I think you are making many valid points Nishidani. I do not disagree with you on any of the issues you raised. But note that, for example, Ukrainian Neo Nazis have renamed many streets over the last 8 yrs, with the most egregious example being the road leading to the massacre memorial site of Babi Yar, that was renamed in honor of Stepan Bandera in 2014. (Bandera and his followers were heavily involved in the massacres of many Jews and Polish civilians.) And other streets in Ukraine have been renamed for various WW2 nationalists, racists, antisemites etc. And Russia isn’t erecting statues of Nazis and Nazi collaborators, Ukraine is. Russia isn’t issuing stamps memorializing Nazis and Nazi collaborators, Ukraine is. Russia isn’t naming streets after Nazis and Nazi collaborators, Ukraine is. Russia isn’t building museums for Nazis and Nazi collaborators, Ukraine is. Ijon Tichy (talk) 01:09, 30 March 2022 (UTC)
- His geopolitical outline is correct in so far as he outlines fatal Nato mistakes and those of the usual bozos in American policy-making bodies. It's like watching a bystander comment on what's wrong with Wyatt Earp with unerring insight, while ignoring the Clanton brothers due to lack of familiarity with their background. He sounds almost totally ignorant of the details of Russian history, wholly out of touch with the resurrection of ethnic nationalism as an ideological component in Europe and Eastern Europe through to Russia, and of the motivations that arise out of its circumstances as, economically, a third-world country (with a GNP inferior to that of Texas or Italy, and investment in health care less than a 10th of Italy’s) with a bigpower mentality and massive nuclear armaments. And worse still, a public so dirt-ignorant that it can listen with alacrity, nightly, on prime time television to fuckwits that describe an aspiration to autonomy in a neighbouring country as proof of ‘satanism’, Nazism, or the homosexualization of the world. So, when he says Putin would restore Luhansk and Donetz, or the expanded Donbass to Ukraine as autonomous regions, to Ukrainian sovereignty, he is daydreaming. Given the way events have turned out, with the humiliation, so far, of Russia’s vaunted military power, and the massive attrition of its young soldiers, he could never ‘rationally’ accept any outcome except the bankable one of having permanently secured those territories to ‘mother Russia’. No rational actor in major geopolitical contentions, having won on the ground (which Russia will do) would feel obliged to do anything other than secure the loots and humiliate the vanquished.
- There is no solution. The Ukraine has no option but to play into the attritional strategy, which will leave it comprehensively fucked, - it will continue to suffer a vindictive Curtis LeMay carpetbombing back to the stone-age, where it will continue to dream of joining the EU, a bit like a black ghetto asking to be redefined as an outlying part of Manhatten. Even in the best scenario, Zelensky, if he did what all analysts other than the starry-eyed say is inevitable, cede territory and allow Russia to trample on international law, would ipso facto, be washed up as someone who sold out, who stabbed the nation in the back, the target of the growing constituency of Ukrainian irredentist nationalists.
- Putin’s gambit was rational: a developing Ukraine was a threat to the stability of the age-old Russian system of a vast and relatively impoverished population ruled over by a kleptocratic, somewhat 'modernish'-looking elite, which has vindicated its internal tyranny by stoking populist nationalism, blustering about its international prestige as a great power. To challenge the Western order,-a natural temptation for any other world-power - one needs a stranglehold on the key resource bases: oil, gas and grain. He had the first two, and with the Ukraine, is effectively securing the third. The logical step to render even what remains of the Ukraine a basket-case, would be to seal the maritime outlet from Mariupol to Odessa. That is difficult, only half accomplished and to complete the encirclement,- as far as Transnistria, a long term intention, -perhaps recourse to tactical nuclear weapons will be thought necessary. This is all the unfortunate consequence of Nato, the EU, and Russia riding roughshod over Mearsheimer’s advice back in the 90s to allow Ukraine to retain its nuclear arsenal.
- Well, best to get back to tending my vegetable patch. Bees are rarer despite ample borage; once unsighted orange tips now make themselves known; and fireflies morsecode in luminescent flashes across the evenscape a full three weeks before they were due.Nishidani (talk) 12:35, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
- @Ijon Tichy. As you will have intuited, I disagree with Mearsheimer and, I might add, Chomsky on this. Everything reminds me of the events starting with the Spanish Civil War and I've found myself turning back to reread Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. Many 'leftist' readers have often been disconcerted by Slavoj Žižek's writings. I too. But I find myself in substantial agreement with his op ed in the Guardian on Ukraine.
- Slavoj Žižek, Pacifism is the wrong response to the war in Ukraine,' The Guardian 21 June 2022. No need to reply (Sorry to disappoint on this score). Best Nishidani (talk) 13:57, 21 June 2022 (UTC)
I sat down at my computer and started to write a long, detailed response to the piece by Zizek. I was going to offer a point-by-point rebuttal for every argument made by Zizek. I was going to start with the fact that his arguments do not present the proper context - for example, the war in Ukraine did not start back in Feb. of this year, in fact the Ukrainian gov't has been brutally and viciously shelling, bombing and attacking its own Russia-affiliated citizens in the Donbas for the last 8 years - and the Ukrainian gov't has continued to kill people in the Donbas practically every day since the Russian invasion. I was going to write about the larger geo-political regional and global context over the last 30 years and the importance of the deep involvement of the US empire in the region, as well as the role of Russia and the Ukraine in the competition between the US and China for global dominance, as articulated above by Mearsheimer, Gerald Horne, Chomsky, and many world-class scholars writing in e.g. TomDispatch, CounterPunch, etc. I was going to write about how Ukraine is one of the worst oligarchies/ kleptocracies/ plutocracies on the planet (yes, I know Russia, the US, Israel and the Arab states are also), and the pervasive, deep corruption in Ukraine including social, economic and political corruption. I was going to mention (again) the widespread admiration and adulation for nazis, nazi-collaborators, racists and antisemites in Ukrainian society.
But then I discovered that an author I greatly respect, Ron Jacobs, has already written a partial rebuttal to Zizek's article, and considering that Jacobs is a much better writer than myself, I'll just provide a link to Jacob's piece, which will free-up my time to grab some breakfast and take my sweet little dog and cat for a walk: Slavoj Zizek Does His Christopher Hitchens Impression. (Referring to Hitchen's apparent Islamophobia and Hitchen's enthusiastic, vocal, persistent advocacy for the US violent invasion of Iraq and bloody, nasty, prolonged war on the Iraqi people).
BTW, you may also be interested in: The Guardian Churns Out Embarrassingly Awful Empire Propaganda, by another one of my favorite independent/ non-mainstream journalists, Caitlin Johnston.
Last but not least, the pup and kitten say hi to their beloved granpa Nishidani. --- Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:20, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
- What occurred in 2014 in Donbas was, technically, a civil war which broke out between Russian-backed secessionists and the legitimate Ukrainian government. The enabling power was extraterritorial, with Russia engaging in a proxy war, identical to what would be the case were Austria to furnish arms, instructors and 'volunteer' ex-servicemen to German-speaking secessionisrt groups in northern Italy. Both sides - the sovereign authority and the secessionists -bombed, killed and behaved with criminal abandon. The casualties on both sides are roughly par. One can only grasp the logic of events by drawing up a close chronology: post hoc ergo propter hoc. Any generalization in favour of one narrative flies in the face of the complex details of that particular war.
- I know Rob Jacobs is a good egg, solid for comments on many contemporary issues, but, he is way out of his depth with both Žižek and the Ukrainian dilemma, which Jürgen Habermas described as a Scylla-Charbydis dark passage between 'two evils – a defeat of Ukraine or the escalation of a limited conflict into a third world war.' In any case, what one has is, geopolitically, multiple Western actors who, each representing national calculations while struggling to defend a supranational political entity, the EU, bound by legal, moral and rational choices, pitted against an autocratic empire that has decided to play Russian roulette with history, where no known legal, moral or rational codes condition their engagement in ‘the Great Game’. It is, apart from the undisguised fascist thrust of its ethnocidal rhetoric of self-justification for endeavouring to wipe out the political, cultural and historical identity of over 40 million people (on the example of China's success in destroying the Uyghur), pure poker, bluff, upping the stakes endlessly, while making everyone else at the table aware that, whatever the lay of each player’s card-hand, the bluffer does have his holstered gun at the ready, if anyone insists that you can’t keep endlessly upping the ante but must answer the call to put your cards on the table (negotiations). How do you negotiate with a state which subscribes to an ideology that the post-modern world has dispensed with truth?[1]
- I generally agree with Chomsky that a negotiated settlement must be the uppermost priority. But Chomsky's analysis is too America-centric. He says that US policy is pitched to hamper that and use Ukraine to exhaust Russia, and that Zelenskyy’s known position is the royal road to a compromise. Putin has rejected that several times. Lavrov today repeated their view that negotiations must be premised on the acceptance of Russian terms and demands, i.e., capitulation. C's analysis ignores the realities of European responses: from Macron (France is widely known to be the one European power whose total autonomy at this level of decision-making is such that it is not subject to US pressure), to Draghi and Scholtz, every attempt to bring Russia to the table has failed, with an invariable ‘Nyet. Not yet.’ Coping with a huge refugee influx, it has not provided, like the US, any massive military aid apart from essentially symbolic military assistance (in comparative terms). The two powers doing most of that are imperial or ex-imperial powers (US and Britain) All Europe has done of weight is to back severe sanctions that wittingly will cause blowback, with more grief to their economies than to Russia. It is immensely significant however that European countries that have always studiously avoided an entangling commitment to NATO, and lie close to the Russian Federation, have, independently read the Ukrainian invasion as one which, if not seriously confronted by countermeasures, will have deeper historical ramifications in terms of future threats, on their own countries. You cannot attribute that radical change of perception to US armtwisting. From Sweden to Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Poland, this is not about the Ukraine, but about having, if the Ukraine capitulates, a triumphant Russia even closer to their borders, with a longterm confidence that US-style violence pays.
- I agree with everything he says about the way what Russia is doing is exactly what, historically, the US has done.[2] But if you employ that mirror logic, the inference must be that we not endorse a Russian-dictated resolution any more than one would have endorsed US- dictated ‘ resolutions’ in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan or, closer to home, Israel/Palestine. The negotiations on the I/P roadmap have effectively allowed the invading power to totally absorb its defeated adversary and, from there, to systematically destabilize all states save Jordan and thuggish Egypt in its near and distant neighbourhood, uncannily like the Yinon Plan hoped for. Russia won’t negotiate (why should it?) unless if finds itself in serious difficulty, militarily rather than economically (its population is used to poverty. Object and they will screw you even more). In any case, given the remarkable success of its action in threatening to cripple European economies (it is inevitable gas will be shut off for the winter), in technical terms, for the moment, Putin’s gamble is paying a very significant geopolitical dividend in the short term, giving him no strong grounds for altering his inflexibility.
- Under Putin, the Russian Federation has, quite intelligently in terms of a certain imperial vision of a restored ‘Great Russia’, sought to make the EU, and particularly its historical centre, bar France, which has retained its nuclear power plants, dependent on Russia for its core resources (i) gas (2) oil (c) food (d) and minerals. For a long time, under Merkel, German calculations were that Russia could be ‘domesticated’ by making their two economies so intricately meshed that, eventually, Russian economic blackmail – as the US, for its own reasons warned (it too is an able practitioner of economic blackmail), - would become increasingly improbable, rationally self-defeating. Détente was feasible in so far as the West’s interlocutor remained a lucid actor with intelligible imperial/national interests (as was true with the late Soviet régime). It began to show itself dysfunctional with Putin’s unpredictability which, of course, is not peculiar to him. Bush’s invasion of Iraq showed the same tendency at work in the Western alliance – totally irrational and doomed to immolate itself through the iron logic of what we call, after Wundt, the heterogensis of ends, or, more familiarly after Merton, the law of unintended consequences. Of course, the actors who set off these effects are politicians with a vision, but near to zero knowledge of historical realities and the probable side-effects of what they think are rational choices. You will always find two diverse constituencies of experts weighing in at such moments: analysts who have a fair and often deep awareness of the collateral risks, and advise caution, and the ideologues quite aware of the chaos and damaging side-effects of these Rubicon-crossing bets, but consider those devastating outcomes only a 'problem' for the affected countries whose weakening will benefit US interests. The ideologues usually win out.
- Most of the analyses you mention are grounded in US/Russian superpolitics, and the pragmatics of ‘realism’ by parties outside Europe, and the Ukraine. Apart from Putin’s direct intervention in the election of Trump, this is all very distant, and, whatever the outcome, won’t substantially inflect the quality (or lack of it) of average lives. This is not true of those caught up, sandwiched between the two superpowers, the various nations of Europe, whose core foundational countries’ populations have had their eirenic postwar complacencies shaken to the roots– their sense that the bellicose or brutal thrusts of these two empires are essentially the idiocy of ‘beyond’, alien to what we are about, aside from their endless niggling at European unity, their wrestling for a role as cultural or political dominus over that wedge which is the historic heartland of the ‘West’. Europe, though an ally, has so far beaten the US on every issue of quality of life, longevity, public infrastructure, education, and internal peace (though much of that is fraying as the ideology of American ‘rationalist’ economics and the financialization of the world baits politicians, so far, as in Britain, with disastrous success ).
- As to Russia, civilly, culturally, it was viewed as a basket case, despite its endless meddling under the table, a playground for its predatory financial shysters whose cosying up to elites from Italy, Germany and Great Britain had, as is obvious now, a geostrategic dimension, a place where direct support and financing of rising Christian-conservative right-wing ultranationalist parties was engineered to break the hegemony of the traditional left/right party structure, and drive a wedge between EU countries to play one off against the other and undermine the momentum of the EU’s consolidation as an independent global power. In rhetorical terms, much of the disinformation efforts concentrate on repeating the idea that Nato is a major problem for Europe (whereas Nato has traditionally been a rather cheap European scam to get US protection without paying the economic, as opposed to policy, dues, serious membership would require). Impressively, Russia tried to stage a coup in the Montenegrin elections in 2016, co-opted Orban in Hungary, the Lega in Italy, and that enormous anomaly, Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, which held dual allegiances to the Russian-sponsored rightwing parties of Europe, and to Steve Bannon’s Republican Trumpist ideologues. Go figure). The Baltic states, some with a quarter of their population Russian, are particularly fragile in this regard, and subject to endless sectarian manipulation by Russia. Virtually every European intelligence service over the last few decades has monitored and duly reported to Parliaments, ongoing Russian attempts, by influence, resource-supply threats, social-media manipulation, political bribery/blackmail, cyberwarfare and traditional spying to mould pro-Russian policies or orientate public opinion. From an observation point like Italy, this has been very obvious for a decade, and give rise to numerous scandals.
- Newspapers like CounterPunch tells us in great detail about US meddling. That kind of information is all too obvious, I have no difficulty with it. Coverage of Russian interference, 80% of the known external pressures on European policy formation (the other 20% being Chinese) are off the radar of public attention, at least untill recently, with the Ukrainian event. Again, all this is to be expected by superpowers, but critical diffidence has traditionally, in the cultural sphere, focused on the US/Nato axis. If you want to assess what the Ukraine moment actually is about, all the major geopolitical powers have to be included in one’s judgment, rather than approach it with a reductionist, Manichaean ‘it’s- either- the-US- or- Russia’ perspective, as all of your analysts do. There is a tertium quid: the dynamics of the EU project, which has slowly struggled (perhaps illusorily) to secure an independent worldview for decades against both of these superpowers. To adopt a metaphor from one of Žižek’s best books, one must in this fraught discourse, where pressures to fall back on a standard set of default positions are intense, seek a parallax perspective. ’the apparent displacement of an object(the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight’. Slavoj Žižek , The Parallax View, MIT Press 2006 p.17
- What you say of Ukraine exceptionalizes it when its corruption, oligarchies, flawed laws and rightwing ideologies are normative for that western area, (Byelorussia, Moldavia, Transnistria etc) and all states under Russia’s southern flank. Singling it out is wrongheaded. The one distinctive difference the Ukraine has shown, since 2004 at least – almost two decades – is the emergence of a fairly vibrant metropolitan ‘liberal’ culture among the younger generation, that, through news outlets, social media, and public demonstrations, has consistently asserted a powerful desire that the future of their country be patterned after a European democratic model, not an-ex Soviet Russian style zenophobic, ethnocentric, kleptocratic state where the primary thrust of politics excludes most of the population from articulate representation and prospects of socio-economic improvement. In part this was a natural outcome of the breakdown of the Soviet order, and the parliamentarization of easterrn bloc countries, and economic logic. In the Ukraine’s case, the impact of over a half a million Ukrainians managing to gain work in European countries has, by feedback to their homelands, and repatriated earnings to support extended families, has meant, by a multiplier effect, that Ukrainian society began to grasp how more promising prospects were in the West, than those available in Russia where indeed, a much larger expatriate population lives.
- The result, among the younger generation, was the rise and diffusion of a westernised youth culture, impatient with the stagnation of their past, and its heavily russified torpor. You see this in the early months on the battlefield: the Ukrainian grunts were mostly adept at using smartphone technology, whereas their young Russian adversaries didn’t have that, or were forbidden to use it. You see it in the truckloads of commonplace domestic hardware – televisions, washing machines, even toilets, ripped out of houses in invaded townships and villages, to be sent home, where such quality products were hard to come by. One of the real fears of the Russian plutocratic order was that in their near neighbourhood, something like a viable independent civil society and economy might be slowly forming, precisely of the kind Russian politics fears within its own national borders. A possible exemplary model on its doorstep, readily visible to those Russians who travel to the Ukraine, or to the huge number of Russians who have relatives there.
- What all observers do agree on, Russian and Western alike, is that the massive Ukrainian resistance, and its ‘heroic’ ethos, were totally unexpected. The idea of popular resistance is a powerful institutionally celebrated cultural memory in many western countries, but generations have entrusted the idea of defense and the residue of the ancient ‘heroic’ ethos, as Habermas notes, to professional armies (Israel of course still maintains the ‘heroic’ ethos, mainly because the army is the reserve vehicle for consoilidating national identity there). It used to be reflex on the left to back any invaded country's resistance movement. That is now out of fashion, as one bows to 'realism' and accepts capitulation as the best guarantor of civilian lives. Boh!
- Of course, in saying this, I am not suggesting that the West be sucke(re)d into Ukraine’s (understandable) hyperbolic rhetoric with its public fantasies insisting on an ultramontane request the West blindly leap into its cause and risk its own civilisation to ensure the restoration of that distant country’s borders. Those borders aren’t the concern: it is an ineludible concern that, if the Ukraine were to capitulate, - for negotiations, at this moment in time, of the kind suggested mean capitulation, given that there is, in the public record, no evidence Russia under Putin will stop short of his imperial design there- Ukraine’s future will be that of a banana/ borsch (an Ukrainian dish) pseudo ‘republic’, a dull pawn under the tutelage, via puppet stooges, of its big brother to the east, with a renewed nomenclature of the usual kleptocratic party mobsters, playing second string in Russia’s resource-based longterm geopolitical blackmail strategy. Once more (Israel being another case) the tenuous legitimacy of an international order based on law will be undermined, an autocracy consolidated, the use of economic blackmail endorsed, a recourse to war vindicated, and therefore propaideutic for future scenarios of the same kind. All for what? To stop a fledgling modernity in a fragile border society from showing a dictatorial regime that democracy can produce the social goods kleptocracy wants for its own restricted coteries (I say this fully aware of the same trend in the West). Every time in Russia, some loosening of its archaic feudal polis/mindset has occurred, things of extraordinary, universal value have flourished, if briefly.
- You know, reading Žižek, that he has read all of the intricately difficult sources closely, and drawn his own conclusions. To read the wikibio, it is clear that the editors are familiar with the gossip, but not with his work, or the manifold of its philosophical groundings. Jacobs wrote a quickie review based on insinuation and dislike, scarcely stopping to think, which is, like him or not (and his Lacanianism always finds me wary), something Žižek causes his readers to do.
- Well, I should have spent these two hours cutting more wood foraged from trees in my vicinity for the stove I use to heat my house and cook with over winter. I only use gas for a morning shower. I’d better hie to the rubbidy-dub to mull out more ways of cutting back dependence on external sources. I already have daily water consumption in this drought-stricken place down to about 120 litres, which covers also watering my vegetable garden. There’s surely more room for further survivalist tricks, if one must survive, which, well, who gives a rodent’s rectum for that, these dazed days, except for the consideration that a lot of animals, even the sparrows nesting outside my window, rely on quietly placed basins of water, hedgehogs nuzzle into food left for them at night, cats dutifully sit, waiting for their daily snacks at regular hours. A caressing pat to your’s. Best Nishidani (talk) 17:09, 23 June 2022 (UTC)
- ^ 'But simply trying to prove that Russian claims are false misses the point made by Aleksandr Dugin, Putin’s court philosopher: “Post-modernity shows that every so-called truth is a matter of believing. So we believe in what we do, we believe in what we say. And that is the only way to define the truth. So we have our special Russian truth that you need to accept.” Slavoj Žižek, 'War in a World that Stands for Nothing,' Project Syndicate 18 April 2022. What is disconcerting about this is that the Dugin POV is plagiarized straight out of Karl Rove's definition of the Reality-based community in his interview with Ron Suskind in 2004, a remark made to vindicate the appropriateness of invading Iraq on false grounds, and used now by Russia to justify invading Ukraine on similar preposterous grounds, i.e. 'denazification' requires Hitlerian tactics. Some day, an analyst will document the formative influence of US policy makers or fakers under Bush on the emerging policies and think tanks around the early Putin administration. If I ever get time I will write an essay on the history of this idea, whose modern form took shape by syndicalist thinkers around 1906-1910 who had a major impact on fascist ideology, though its roots like in Plato.
- ^ We must analyze the ambiguity of our support of Ukraine with the same cruelty we analyze Russia’s stance. Slavoj Žižek, 'We must stop letting Russia define the terms of the Ukraine crisis,' The Guardian 23 May 2022
- Thanks for your detailed, thoughtful analysis. Regretfully, I disagree with most (not all) of your analysis. However, I am traveling right now to visit my sister residing in the wilderness of the beautiful Sierra Nevada mountains, so it will be some time before I am able to write a long(er) response. In the meantime, you may be interested in the following in-depth, insightful analysis:
- A more recent talk by John Mearsheimer: The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine Crisis. "The war in Ukraine is a multi-dimensional disaster, which is likely to get much worse in the foreseeable future." (video, 2 hours 7 minutes), posted in June 2022. A transcript of the talk (the video also contains an interesting Q&A session after the talk, but this Q&A is not included in the transcript).
- A lemming leading the lemmings: Slavoj Zizek and the collapse of the anti-war left. "The left has sunk a long way since the Iraq war. The renowned public intellectual Slavoj Zizek is the latest recruit to the war hawk camp over Ukraine." By Jonathan Cook, an investigative journalist who, as you know, has written extensively about the Israeli government's terror and brutal oppression of the Palestinian people.
- ‘Not a Justification but a Provocation’: Chomsky on the Root Causes of the Russia Ukraine War, by Ramzy Baroud, another great journalist who writes extensively on Israel's horrific, brutal oppression of the Palestinians.
- Moon of Alabama - Media Are Now Whitewashing Nazis They Had Previously Condemned.
- #GTGraphic: (Arbitrarily transforming Ukraine) from a "corrupt nation" to the "beacon of democracy", all it takes is a word game by Western media.
- Thanks for sharing details of your personal daily life. Very interesting. I enjoy reading your descriptions of your daily routines, including your kind, compassionate interactions with domestic animals and wildlife, as well as your work in your garden(s) and nearby forest.
- As always, the pup and kitten send their love to you. Ijon Tichy (talk) 07:20, 30 June 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks for your detailed, thoughtful analysis. Regretfully, I disagree with most (not all) of your analysis. However, I am traveling right now to visit my sister residing in the wilderness of the beautiful Sierra Nevada mountains, so it will be some time before I am able to write a long(er) response. In the meantime, you may be interested in the following in-depth, insightful analysis:
- Well, hope my canine and feline grandkids enjoy the trip with you. Wilderness is the right place to be these days. Italians rigorously drive with their windows shut, in cold or hot weather (preferring to switch on the 'egg conditioner' and physically I have always a reflex desire to wind the window on my side down, whatever the weather, and put my elbow out and enjoy the breeze, always remembering how our 'Rex', a splendid mongrel, for 15 years would hop into the Valiant, and sit on someone's lap, and nose the air, lapping up the breeze, as we went anywhere from a short drive to a 1,000 km trip. No need to reply, or waste time better spent with one's sibling, but of dozens of unsaid things, one or two need to be remarked on.
- Mearsheimer is often incomprehensibly naïve in his reading of the documentary record in this case. He takes Putin at his (ostensible) word for the various statements that there is no such thing as the Ukrainian people, and that the Russian and Ukrainian people are one and the same The most extraordinary thing for an analyst of the realist school of his standing and abilities is that here, uniquely among his colleagues, he takes a politician’s public speeches at face value. Goodness, no geopolitical analyst I know of thinks public statements sum up what really motivates a president or dictator or average politician’s decisions. Effectively Mearsheimer asserts that Putin does not lie, misrepresent, or camouflage his thinking when going on the public record. What an amazing man Putin must be, unique in political history. Mearsheimer’s fatal weakness is his inability to go beyond phrases in a bare statement to read them for nuance and context, I.e.,
there is significant evidence that Putin recognized Ukraine as an independent country. In his July 12, 2021, article about Russian-Ukrainian relations, which proponents of the conventional wisdom often point to as evidence of his imperial ambitions, he tells the Ukrainian people, “You want to establish a state of your own: you are welcome!”
- But of course, all that statements means, grammatically, is that Putin believes the existing state of Ukraine ( as recognized by the Russian Federation in the 1990s, and underwritten by the only referendum ever conducted by the countries that were successor states within the Soviet Union) does not properly exist. Ukrainians ‘want to establish a state,’(not the existing one which, it is implied, is not 'their own') means that for Putin at that time, the one they live in doesn’t exist. Putin said he has no objections if Ukrainians decide (at that point in time) to construct some state called Ukraine in the future. Putin’s statement emphatically does not ‘recognize Ukraine as an independent country’. It recognizes only a right by Ukrainians to establish a state they will call Ukraine, which will be, 'their own', implying they haven’t yet done so.
- This is confirmed by his second quote from the same speech:-
“And what Ukraine will be—it is up to its citizens to decide.” It is hard to reconcile these statements with the claim that he wants to incorporate Ukraine within a greater Russia.
- Not at all, rubbish. Note the future tense. It would be perfectly legitimate to take that language as indicating that several months before the invasion, Putin thought that while the Russian Federation would move into the Ukraine, some pieces of it would remain outside of its reach – wars always lead to a negotiated settlement – and that territory would be some kind of rump stateThe way Russia is hammering the arse out of it, it will be a rump steak whose Ukrainians would have his personal blessing to make of it what they will. The expostulative exclamation mark (!), in such a reading, sounds thoroughly ironic, both a condescending piece of denial of the reality of an existing state, and a mocking innuendo that, some time in the future, once the illusion of an ‘Ukraine’ is dispelled, they can by all means pick up the bits and try and (re)construct some semblance of this putative Ukraine.
He reiterated that same point for a third time on February 24th, when he announced that Russia would invade Ukraine. In particular, he declared that “It is not our plan to occupy Ukrainian territory” and made it clear that he respected Ukrainian sovereignty, but only up to a point: “Russia cannot feel safe, develop, and exist while facing a permanent threat from the territory of today’s Ukraine.” In essence, Putin was not interested in making Ukraine a part of Russia; he was interested in making sure it did not become a “springboard“ for Western aggression against Russia, a subject I will say more about shortly.
- In 'Today's Ukraine', that 'today' is a dead giveaway that, pace Mearsheimer, Putin is thinking of changing the borders. That can be read as asserting that the ‘special operation’ was not an invasion of Ukraine, not an occupation of ‘Ukrainian’ territory but the assertion of Russian sovereignty in the ‘New Russia’ formed by the two secessionist republics of Donetz and Luhansk, which the Duma in a resolution ratified on February 15 (9 days earlier) asked Putin to recognize as in dependent states. This itself was farcical since Putin asked the Duma to do precisely this, so that he could then ‘ratify’ it as if there were some institutional negotations between Putin, an independent Donetz/Luhansk, and the Russian parliament. Putin clearly indicated that Russia would be operating in an area which, in his view, was not a sovereign Ukraine.Nishidani (talk) 14:39, 30 June 2022 (UTC).
More French needed
Would you care to take a look at the Victor Guérin translations on Maaroub and Deir Kifa?
"which brush invades from all sides" doesn't sound right to me, alas, that was what translate.bing.com gave me :/ Cheers, Huldra (talk) 23:43, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
- "which brush invades from all sides" is fine English. Google has "which are invaded by brush on all sides" which is also fine. I'll leave it to Nish to say whether these match the French. Zerotalk 04:12, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
- Brushing up on French, I'll scrub the Deir Kifa text:) 'Scrub' and 'brush' lend themselves to ambiguity because both words refer to a type of undergrowth, and to what I've been doing this morning, scrubbing floors and brushing/combing my balding pate. There's a natural analogy between landscape and cleaning because types of broom (cytisus scoparia) are harvested for sweeping.Nishidani (talk) 10:31, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
- Finally found the passage that the French text reminded me of.
'The same creeping gorse which struggles over the stony ground. Ivy and other clinging plants embrace a circle of white stones, which like giant sentinels of a senate of nature, break off their deliberations the instant an intruder's step is heard.' Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, (1933) 2017 p.17.Nishidani (talk) 13:51, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
- Brushing up on French, I'll scrub the Deir Kifa text:) 'Scrub' and 'brush' lend themselves to ambiguity because both words refer to a type of undergrowth, and to what I've been doing this morning, scrubbing floors and brushing/combing my balding pate. There's a natural analogy between landscape and cleaning because types of broom (cytisus scoparia) are harvested for sweeping.Nishidani (talk) 10:31, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
Holocaust survivor?
Russian attack on Kharkhiv kills Holocaust survivor-96 The Guardian 21 March 2022 Tragic news that also poses one with a linguiistic conundrum.Nishidani (talk) 22:26, 21 March 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks for the link. Where do you see a linguistic conundrum? Ijon Tichy (talk) 00:33, 22 March 2022 (UTC)
- Our article reads, reflecting English usage,'The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.' The Ukrainian gentleman who survived the death camps only to be murdered now was not Jewish. On the Italian sister article, the word olocausto is defined as what occurred to all groups targeted for extermination by the Nazis, and not just Jews (aside from having a shockingly stupid reference to a supposed 'group barbeque'.Nishidani (talk) 09:24, 22 March 2022 (UTC)
- In other words, of the roughly 17-18 million people murdered for their ethnicity by Nazi and their 'kind', one-third were Jewish. If you count, for example, slavic people massacred en masse on racial grounds, you get a similar figure, roughly 5-6 million. We have no generic term for the implementation of a general policy of racial extermination for this period, and holocaust is reserved for its execution as regards people of Jewish ethnicity only. I thought of this while examining the reaction in Israel top Zelensky's speech, and was reminded of it by the Guardian article which, unusually, breaks the linguistic convention by treating a Slavic person in the death camps as a Holocaust survivor. He was, in the general sense outlined above, but usage, always partisan, militates against mixing the two groups: Jews and non-Jews murdered on the grounds of their race. Nishidani (talk) 11:51, 22 March 2022 (UTC)
Yindjibarndi people
The first sentence of the native title section of Yindjibarndi people, which you added, doesn't quite make sense. There seems to be some words missing but I'm not quite sure what you wanted to say there. If you got some time, could you please fix it up? Calistemon (talk) 23:18, 21 March 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks. If you or anyone else notes absolute crappy sentences like that, or any other defect, on any of those pages I wrote on aborigines, don't ask me for permission. Just remove it. I don't own them.Nishidani (talk) 11:51, 22 March 2022 (UTC)
Limited recognition
So you agree that State of Palestine should be in this cat but Israel not? Just checking. Selfstudier (talk) 17:38, 22 March 2022 (UTC)
- User talk:Place Clichy Discussion ongoing here. Selfstudier (talk) 17:41, 22 March 2022 (UTC)
- I'm very wary of (wiki) cats also from a native dislike of any form of discursive stereotyping, with its false equivalences between states where the 'limitation' ranges from isolates to fully fledged members of the international community in all known institutional forms. All I think of while reading Place Clichy is Henry Miller's memoir of life in that area of Paris, distracting. I won't get into an argument over it. I'm on too short a time leash:)Nishidani (talk) 17:55, 22 March 2022 (UTC)
- I have to admit that it is easy to see cats as geeky, at a minimum. Slicing one cake this way and that way perhaps has some merit now and again for certain things but I cannot readily see the advantage of doing so when it is the entirety of WP. If all the energy expended on cats was instead expended on the articles, the lists, the templates (3 cuts of the cake already), then I am almost sure that WP would be better off for that. Ah well.Selfstudier (talk) 18:24, 22 March 2022 (UTC)
- Look at this one :) SoP has just been added for the flag and for the coat of arms, I haven't looked at the other ones yet. Selfstudier (talk) 19:50, 22 March 2022 (UTC)
- I'm very wary of (wiki) cats also from a native dislike of any form of discursive stereotyping, with its false equivalences between states where the 'limitation' ranges from isolates to fully fledged members of the international community in all known institutional forms. All I think of while reading Place Clichy is Henry Miller's memoir of life in that area of Paris, distracting. I won't get into an argument over it. I'm on too short a time leash:)Nishidani (talk) 17:55, 22 March 2022 (UTC)
Blue Wolf
Which article does this belong in? Zerotalk 00:57, 25 March 2022 (UTC)
- We don't (yet, hint hint) have a sub-article of Israeli occupation of the West Bank for Israeli surveillance and spatial control of Palestinians, would include things like that and this, and this and this and this to plant an idea in some better editor than myself. nableezy - 03:02, 25 March 2022 (UTC)
Gross violation of POV
I also need to address how you grossly misrepresent sources, massively select oriented sources, and that, systematically without providing contradictory sources. Very often selecting specific quotes, that are then oriented and added in a text filled with critical stances. For neutrality I need dialecticism, or at least coherence in that mash-up. That was not part of my edit, which was essentially about intellectual honesty when you quote or present sources.--Vanlister (talk) 02:12, 30 March 2022 (UTC)
- So far you haven't 'addressed' anything.
- Now you declare you 'also' have to address 'how (I) grossly mispresent sources'.
- Very interesting. A notification of an urgent existential need you feel. Well, now I know your state of mind, I look forward to seeing concrete documentation of how I 'misrepresent sources'. In the meantime, please try to write comprehensible English, because
- 'massively select oriented sources' is close to gibberish. What has 'massively' to do with 'select'? What is an 'oriented source', one that went 'east'?
- What is a 'contradictory source'. One that purveys a view differing from preexisting source or one that contradicts itself?
- What does 'select a specific quote mean, as opposed to simply choosing one quote rather than another? All elicited quotes are 'specific' by virtue of their having been 'selected'.
- How does one 'orient' a quotation?
- Why is buttressing a text with illustrative quotes from the given source a problem for a text that you say already adopts a ‘critical stance’?
- Can you distinguish ‘facts’ from ‘critical stances’. We do, as per policy.
- The grandiose ‘For neutrality I need dialecticism’ sent this wordmaven, for one, scrambling for the dictionaries, where I discovered that ‘dialecticism’ is an American neologism meaning primarily ‘the use of dialect’. But I see it also apparently has circulation in some philosophical schools where it is used to mean:
that the world consists of opposite but not necessarily opposing ideas or concepts which, when put together, either negate each other or synthesize into a whole (e. g. man + woman = a couple; right wing + left wing = government).’
- I guess that means that a page on a half century of military occupation should strive for a neutrality defined as a point by point balancing of Palestinian claims of land theft or torture or the denial of civil rights, or nightly raids on private homes where children are bailed up, by detailed excurses by the occupying power as to why the land is expropriated, why people are regularly tortured, or why they have no right to have civil rights, so that the facts of one party (the Palestinians) are ‘negated’ by the ‘critical stances’ of the occupying power? In other word, the facts of violence must be ‘explained’ as necessary in an Israeli POV. Well, we do actually provide many reasons justifying these practices of abuse. They don’t ‘negate’ the facts, they gloss them with the Israeli justifications.
- You need ‘coherence in that mash-up.’ Mash-up is not a synonym for ‘mishmash’: it means an eclectic mix of images and sounds for video entertainment. But probably you mean the article is an incoherent hash of text without rhythm or reason. If that is your impression, document it. For several years no one has contested its sequential cogency and thematic orderliness .
- ’intellectual honesty’? One source statement’s accuracy has been questioned in several years of scrutiny, and when verified adjusted.
- All the indications here are that with 750 edits, you are inexperienced, but eager to attack this article, of the 6 million we have. Well, instead of dotting user pages with generic complaints, set forth your putative evidence, on the relevant talkpage. And do so in comprehensible English.Nishidani (talk) 10:12, 30 March 2022 (UTC)
- I don't care about select or selected, the thing is you put your views in the text. You will definitely write that Israel deny all your allegations, and put the POV of that party. Also, you can't just pick and choose quotes and orient sources to make a point. I will write less gobrish whenever I will.--Vanlister (talk) 21:56, 30 March 2022 (UTC)
- 'I will write less gobrish whenever I will.'
- Construal.
- 'Generally I write gibberish, but here from time to time, I will elect to tone the crap grammar down, as my mood at any one time suggests to me.'
- Implication.
- There's no need to read or respond to your edits or remarks. Kindly desist from this page. Nishidani (talk) 08:06, 31 March 2022 (UTC)
- Note to self. Sandstein's advice still holds.
- I don't care about select or selected, the thing is you put your views in the text. You will definitely write that Israel deny all your allegations, and put the POV of that party. Also, you can't just pick and choose quotes and orient sources to make a point. I will write less gobrish whenever I will.--Vanlister (talk) 21:56, 30 March 2022 (UTC)
Article for you
I struggle with one language. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2022/multilingual-hyperpolyglot-brain-languages/?itid=hp-more-top-stories Zerotalk 15:16, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks. Interesting. Reminded me of Sallam the Interpreter, of Khazar fame, who is said to have interpreted between 30 languages. The most phenomenal linguist I've read about was Kenneth Hale, who could get along in over 50, delivered a talk inj Norwegian after reading a teach-yourself Norwegian grammar overnight on a planetrip to that country, and astonished his friends in Australia when they observed him, scarcely after 30 minutes sitting with aborigines on the pavement in a new town, conversing with them in one of the new languages he encountered there on his arrival. Sergei Starostin must have been able to work with a similar range of languages, but seemed to memorize them from books rather than by auditory osmosis. Cut down in his prime, Starostin apparently mastered the contents of a Gilyak dictionary in a single night for a bet.
- Of course, while fascinating, the problem always remains: trying to say something fresh, original and intelligent in one's mother tongue, as opposed to chatting fluently in dozens. Hale for one certainly could, bless his memory. Now that our Danny has passed on, Australia has only, as far as I know Alexandra Aikhenvald with this level of linguistic facility. Nishidani (talk) 16:53, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
- I'm dubious about claims like this, I think they are overly sensationalised. One might learn vocabulary and grammar from a book, but isn't the same as learning the language. It reminds me of the Turing test for when a machine can really converse like a human. Fluency for me means that a native speaker can't tell that the polyglot isn't a native speaker. Zerotalk 07:10, 6 April 2022 (UTC)
Fluency for me means that a native speaker can't tell that the polyglot isn't a native speaker
- Sorry chief, will commit seppuku on request if my contrariness on this offends the deity, but that is patently wrong. Polyglottism has nothing to do intrinsically with a perfect accent. Magisterial English writers like Nabokov or Joseph Conrad wrote with an elegance and grammatical nicety that few native writers have achieved, and yet they spoke with decided accents. The opening of Lolita (alert, this is an ancient piece of my original research) has a beautiful description of the pedophile Humbert Humbert reciting lushly the name, Lolita, he coins for his nymphet Dolores Haze.
'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, My soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue making a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
- A close phonological analysis will reveal that the way the 't' is pronounced reflects a Russian/French articulation of that consonant, not the Spanish or English 't' one might expect from the narrator's profile (ignoring for the mo' the labile status of two 'l' sounds in sequentially distinguished palatal positions). In other words, it's a slip that got past the guard of the foreigner but the otherwise super linguistically attuned author's attention Etc. Must go out to shop.
- I see we have a List of polyglots, much of which is WP:OR confusing people who can handle several languages with this quite distinct kind of linguist.Nishidani (talk) 08:00, 6 April 2022 (UTC)
- Nah, you can't escape by recourse to accent. Accents are about speech, not about language. In the Turing test, the secret machine-or-human doesn't give away their identity by speaking in a natural human voice or like Siri. Similarly, in my language fluency test, some way to exclude accent as a clue will be employed. Zerotalk 08:11, 6 April 2022 (UTC)
Accents are about speech, not about language
- I can hear Saussure loitering in the background, with a ghastly smile. In tonal languages, you can write out, transcribed, numerous phrases that are identical grammatically but can bear different meanings, according to 'accent', if ya know wod I mean, guv. Ask for a writing brush (毛筆: máobĭ) in Chinese and get the accent wrong, and someone might think you are propositioning them for a 'hairy snatch' (毛屄:máobī) But I must duck out again to do some banking.Nishidani (talk) 10:33, 6 April 2022 (UTC)
- Let me illustrate. I was telling my mate Karl Kampmark (former lecturer at James Cook Uni) about the odd experience I was having in ordering cigarettes at the time (Japan 1975). 'Uh, a pack of Seven Stars cigarettes, please.' The persons in the various tobacco booths would reach aside to pick the required brand for me, and then turning and raising their heads, would suddenly stutter with shock 'No spik Engrish', withdrawing the packet. I.e. as long as they didn't see me, they heard my remark as perfect Japanese, but as soon as they caught sight of me, a foreigner, they burked and mentally cancelled out their instinctive understanding, replacing it with a common code which went, in those days,'no foreigners can master our impossible language.' Karl replied with an anecdote of his own. ('d seen people weep when he spoke Japanese, for its elegance and learning. He was a very accomplished linguist, fluent in several languages) He was walking in the backblocks of northern Japan up a mountain to visit a shrine one hot summer morning. Halfway up, a farmer, descending to the village with a burden of wood on his shoulders, greeted him, a salutation Karl of course returned. After a few hours, he went back down, and came across the old man, who was going up back to his woodsman's hut. They passed, with a friendly nod each way, and then, the old man stopped and called back. 'Excuse my rudeness but. . .what area of Japan do you come from?' Karl replied: 'Actually I happen to be Danish. You know, it's that small country just east of Germany.' 'Oh, really! I hope you have a pleasant journey. It's perfect weather for travelling about' etc. The point was that, relatively uneducated this old gentleman had none of the metropolitan prejudices of a good schooling. He saw a chap with an unusual face, who, on being greeted, replied fluently, and that meant the person must be Japanese, but not one who looked like all the other Japanese he had encountered. So, he thought, Karl must be some Japanese from way down south.
- The point is that language use differs from person to person. We might all speak 'English', but every single person has an individual thumbprint that marks his grasp and usage of a shared 'mother tongue' as subtly different. 'Language' is an abstraction. The grammars we write never reflect spoken realities, or evince a descriptive exactitude for what 'native speakers' do or may say. As Sir Ernest Gowers once put it:'There are few rules that could not be illustrated as freely in the breach as in the observance'. Ultimately, it is one's accent which determines whether native speakers accept you as a scion of their mother tongue, not grammar, and it is the pitch-perfect phonological mimicry of these polyglots, rather than the content of their 'speech acts', which suggests 'native' fluency.Nishidani (talk) 12:39, 6 April 2022 (UTC)
- Nah, you can't escape by recourse to accent. Accents are about speech, not about language. In the Turing test, the secret machine-or-human doesn't give away their identity by speaking in a natural human voice or like Siri. Similarly, in my language fluency test, some way to exclude accent as a clue will be employed. Zerotalk 08:11, 6 April 2022 (UTC)
April 22
Please read [[wp:npa] and wp:minor, commenting on users, and not what they say is never a minor edit. Slatersteven (talk) 17:04, 16 April 2022 (UTC)
Another threat to Western civilization and Russian military ethics quashed.
In an atmosphere of terror attacks, the last restraints holding the army back are cast off. Who didn’t they kill? The toll included a 17-year-old boy in Kafr Dan; a 34-year-old lawyer at the entrance to Tul Karm University; a 14-year-old boy in Husan, two days after they killed a half-blind widow with six children in the same village. Seventeen dead Palestinians in two weeks, all of them said to be terrorists but most of whom were not deserving of death. The media reported only briefly, if at all, and always with the trappings of the propaganda-style information dictated by the security services, at least some of which consists of lies, convenient lies for every Israeli’s ears. The blind widow was trying to stab someone, and, damn it, when no knife was found on her, not even a sling, the explanation was that she may have been trying to commit suicide. The lawyer bringing his nephew to school had participated in clashes; the dead boy had thrown a Molotov cocktail; even the crippled and cancer-stricken youth who can hardly stand was arrested by soldiers, after allegedly throwing lethal stones with his emaciated arms, which can barely lift a shoe. Israelis bought all of this blindly, perhaps enthusiastically, since anything is permitted when it comes to Palestinian lives. Gideon Levy, 17 Palestinians Have Been Killed in the Past Two Weeks. That's Not Terrorism? Haaretz 17 April 2022 Nishidani (talk) 15:10, 17 April 2022 (UTC)
Five years! |
---|
Precious anniversary
--Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:15, 24 April 2022 (UTC)
Well, well, well.
Noted this; it seems like "our old friend" has moved on from hating Israel/Palestine editors to hating transgenders. (Actually; I had a little bird indicating that to me months ago). Frankly, I hope he ends locked up a looooong time, Cheers, Huldra (talk) 22:01, 24 April 2022 (UTC) Also on CNN Nypost, and lots of others. Hmmm, soon notable for a BLP ;/ (Nope; I am not starting it!) Huldra (talk) 22:09, 24 April 2022 (UTC) And search for "Wikipedia" on this page, Huldra (talk) 22:15, 24 April 2022 (UTC)
- Reading the FBI report, I immediately thought: なるほど。やっぱり儂が想像したように引き籠もりだ。Poor bugger. The best years of one's life spent closeted and ranting with fidgety fingers on a keyboard. He's not notable: no one in that vast tribe that confuse a computer screen with the world, and views that jar with one's clichéd worldview, as a clear and present danger (that ridiculous phrase has an interesting history), deserves wiki notice: that is best left to a clinician's files in some obscure backwater. That's punishment enough. Nishidani (talk) 10:02, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
- The Daily Beast has a pretty colourful article about it, which mentions harassment on Wikipedia. ← ZScarpia 14:57, 26 April 2022 (UTC)
- Pardon my flippant remark about a BLP; of course I don't advocate one. I agree that he needs treatment; alas, it is difficult to treat people who don't believe there is anything wrong with them. I also note how other "venues" reacted to his remarks, like Merriam-Webster shutting down an office for days. It seems that his Wikipedia "history" only taught him that he could get away with literally anything. It seems as if it was only when he went beyond Wikipeda that people reacted. Not exactly a good advertisement for Wikimedia T&S, to say the least. Huldra (talk) 23:42, 26 April 2022 (UTC)
Settler colonialism
Did you miss Zionism as settler colonialism :) (Buidhe is on a roll) Selfstudier (talk) 15:47, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
- The arrival of such accomplished and productive historians in the I/P area is one of the consolations of retirement.Nishidani (talk) 20:14, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
- There is online, a copy of "The Jewish labour movement in Palestine: its aims and achievements", published in 1928 by Verbandsbüro Poale-Zion, which is at pains to contrast Zionist settler colonialism with the normal, imperial, version, settler colonialism being seen as a "good thing", representing progress, at the time. ← ZScarpia 15:12, 26 April 2022 (UTC)
Hi
Can you set your comment on the Al-Aqsa RM in the right alignment and place, please? It looks very odd where it is. Salud! Selfstudier (talk) 15:53, 30 April 2022 (UTC)
- Ignore that, Nableezy fixed it:) Selfstudier (talk) 17:20, 30 April 2022 (UTC)
- Toe cracked when a 13 kilo basalt rock landed on it after tumbling two feet. 8.30 am here after 8 hours overnight in a distant hospital and having to walk several miles at an ungodly hour to work out how to get home, I need some shuteye.Nishidani (talk) 06:20, 1 May 2022 (UTC)
- Bet that hurts like blazes. Vino and a snooze, be right as rain. Selfstudier (talk) 21:48, 1 May 2022 (UTC)
- Toe cracked when a 13 kilo basalt rock landed on it after tumbling two feet. 8.30 am here after 8 hours overnight in a distant hospital and having to walk several miles at an ungodly hour to work out how to get home, I need some shuteye.Nishidani (talk) 06:20, 1 May 2022 (UTC)
Another feather in the cap of those running the denazification campaign
Two days ago, the National Seed Bank of the Ukraine was blown to smithereens. Perhaps some great mind among the Great replacement theorists inspiring contemporary Russian ideological fantasies thought that thus they'd strike a blow against the threat of genetic modifications of nature (mother Russia) It contained 162,000 seed types, many unique. Nishidani (talk) 16:38, 18 May 2022 (UTC)
- Apparently it was the "planting for seed sale" which was bombed, while the conserved material "are secured under a bunker and the main institution has not been affected", according to this, cheers, Huldra (talk) 22:47, 18 May 2022 (UTC)
- I can't read Twitter so thanks very much for that, H., which is a great re-leaf. I heard that on an Italian Tv channel which has 12 hours coverage a day, with correspondents all over the Ukraine and a few in Russia (and which translates the Russian Channel One evening debates: quite extraordinary stuff - we endlessly argue about the Azov battalion, while, there, key journalists talk of 'Ukrainian satanism' and the need to extirpate it root and branch, in language that is eerily evocative of Goebbels. Perhaps we need an article on that topic, come to think of it: messianic apocalyptic end-of-world manichaesm in Russian religio-political discourse, what one commentator called 'satanodicy'). So, while citing it, I was dissatisfied with the lack of specific detail. Generalities are the domain of spin, from whatever source. Der Teufel steckt im Detail or as Aby Warburg preferred to put it, Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail. Grazie. Nishidani (talk) 11:12, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
- Timothy Snyder, ['We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist,' New York Times 19 May 2022. Uh, finally the obvious, this time by an accomplished authority on Eastern European history. Nishidani (talk) 14:19, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
- I can't read Twitter so thanks very much for that, H., which is a great re-leaf. I heard that on an Italian Tv channel which has 12 hours coverage a day, with correspondents all over the Ukraine and a few in Russia (and which translates the Russian Channel One evening debates: quite extraordinary stuff - we endlessly argue about the Azov battalion, while, there, key journalists talk of 'Ukrainian satanism' and the need to extirpate it root and branch, in language that is eerily evocative of Goebbels. Perhaps we need an article on that topic, come to think of it: messianic apocalyptic end-of-world manichaesm in Russian religio-political discourse, what one commentator called 'satanodicy'). So, while citing it, I was dissatisfied with the lack of specific detail. Generalities are the domain of spin, from whatever source. Der Teufel steckt im Detail or as Aby Warburg preferred to put it, Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail. Grazie. Nishidani (talk) 11:12, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
- Apparently it was the "planting for seed sale" which was bombed, while the conserved material "are secured under a bunker and the main institution has not been affected", according to this, cheers, Huldra (talk) 22:47, 18 May 2022 (UTC)
Q?
Your most recent edit at Temple Mount, who was it a reply to, me? :) Selfstudier (talk) 14:44, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
- Wodda careless old fuckwit(less) I've become. Clarified. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 15:23, 1 June 2022 (UTC).
- Nah, I thought that was what you intended, I aligned the :'s, no sweat. Selfstudier (talk) 15:26, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
WP:CITEVAR
... exists for a reason – a good reason, in fact. It's bad enough that you once started changing the existing references to a different format without any prior discussion; that you choose to edit-war when your mistaken change is reverted is ... well, incomprehensible to me. You've been here for a while, you surely know all this. Please self-revert forthwith. Thank you, Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 17:41, 6 June 2022 (UTC)
- I see you have been editing that page. For two years it has two tags heading it. {{Disputed|date=January 2020}}{{Lead too short|date=January 2020}} What have you done to fix the page so that those notifications no longer apply? When I glanced at it, my impression, which I am documenting on the talk page and to which you have not deigned to comment on to any significant extent, was that it was rife with poor sourcing, inaccuracies, with over a dozen serious flaws. Your editing there shows no awareness of this. It maintains significant amounts of material that are not worthy of an encyclopedic article.
- I expressed a willingness to roll up my sleeves and work the page from top to bottom, to wikify it and bring it up to a minimum standard of respectable information. I can do this because I happen to know the classical languages, which you admit you do not, which are drawn on for over half of the text.
- Your response is (a) not to engage with my comments on the talk page (b) engage in mechanical reverts to the shambles of an article that pre-existed my intervention.
- The citational forms used on the earlier article are not uniform. Unless you are ready to do the necessary overhaul demanded by this flawed article, the sensible thing would be to hold off unIil someone like myself does the thorough review it obviously requires. A little patience and the glaring errors still abundantly visible there will be removed. At that point, by all means you can rewrite in to the one single reference system you prefer if you dislike the one I am using.
- In the meantime, I'd appreciate your responding directly to the numerous points I am making about the primitive, erratic state of the text as it exists. Otherwise my impression would be that you cannot recognize the problems, which are obvious to any editor familiar with those classical sources
- To engage me thus would be collaborative. It is not collaborative to ignore the talk page and keep reverting to your preferred sentences while the rest of text remains an amateurish hash. If you likewise undertake to do a thorough revision, then of course, I'll step aside. Nishidani (talk) 20:36, 6 June 2022 (UTC)
- I think you generally should make a note on the talk page suggesting that a citation style be adopted first, but I also think citing CITEVAR for a page that has no established citation style, with the references going from citation templates to
{{r}}
templates, to just unnamed ref tags to be a little over the top. But yes, you should check with the talk page and suggest such and such be converted before doing so imo. nableezy - 21:32, 6 June 2022 (UTC)- Citing WP:CITEVAR to block on technical grounds an editor introducing one single and respectable citational style (best use here), in order to conserve a text which is a hodgepodge of different citational annotations, is irrational. That I didn't notify the page, well, WP:IAR for the punctilious. Unless someone undertakes to wikify the page and bring it up to snuff, which, looking at the edit history for the last two years, no one appears to be willing to do, I'll proceed with my approach, which, as is known, is extremely intolerant of non-academic/non-specialist sources. We need less rule-obsessive nitpicking and more programmatic Sitzfleisch.Nishidani (talk) 21:42, 6 June 2022 (UTC)
- But thats the point of CITEVAR, if you want to establish a citation style by modifying existing citations you need to get an agreement on the talk page. I dont think you should have reverted when you were reverted. You can say IAR for your edit, but when its challenged you need to go back to the talk page and not just revert again. You might even get an agreement on the talk page if you tried. nableezy - 01:10, 7 June 2022 (UTC)
- Citing WP:CITEVAR to block on technical grounds an editor introducing one single and respectable citational style (best use here), in order to conserve a text which is a hodgepodge of different citational annotations, is irrational. That I didn't notify the page, well, WP:IAR for the punctilious. Unless someone undertakes to wikify the page and bring it up to snuff, which, looking at the edit history for the last two years, no one appears to be willing to do, I'll proceed with my approach, which, as is known, is extremely intolerant of non-academic/non-specialist sources. We need less rule-obsessive nitpicking and more programmatic Sitzfleisch.Nishidani (talk) 21:42, 6 June 2022 (UTC)
- I think you generally should make a note on the talk page suggesting that a citation style be adopted first, but I also think citing CITEVAR for a page that has no established citation style, with the references going from citation templates to
Pro-memoriam to self whenever I ever hear, as the other day, the usual dead-in-the-water claptrap
In a talk delivered in May 2022 in Tel Aviv, Eric Alterman stated that he would leave bequests to Jewish Peace groups out of his will and fund only serious scholarship on the history of Judaism, adding, according to Philip Weiss, that, 'Judaism is itself in crisis because its only content is pro-Israelism. . .Israel has lost American Jews and liberals because it has no “content” to offer besides stale Everyone-hates-the-Jews propaganda that is meaningless to young Jews.' Philip Weiss, 'Young Jews are ‘walking away from Judaism’ because its only content is ‘pro-Israelism’,' Mondoweiss 20 June 2022 Nishidani (talk) 15:11, 21 June 2022 (UTC)
Blush
Your kind words are much about appreciated and help me keep going as it gets harder. Thanks. Doug Weller talk 17:50, 21 June 2022 (UTC)
- Doug, if my words might be of help, I'd be willing to drop a backhoe's bucket your way every day, and I write that snubbing my instinctive wariness about brown-nosing blandishments. I can't remember a false step in 16 years of interaction, and that includes a suspension or two you handed out my way! My very best wishes (by the way I still owe you an article on Sheba, and take the occasion to apologize for not coming through on that so far.) Best regards Nishidani (talk) 22:30, 21 June 2022 (UTC)
Brand old news from the Quisling front, for articles on this topic
Associated Press, Palestinian Authority routinely tortures detainees, says rights group,' The Guardian 1 July 2022
Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip systematically torture critics in detention, a practice that could amount to crimes against humanity, an international rights group has said.
Human Rights Watch/Lawyers for Justice, Joint Submission by Human Rights Watch and Lawyers for Justice to the Committee Against Torture on Palestine 74th Session, July 12-29, 2022,' Human Rights Watch 30 June 2022 Nishidani (talk) 14:49, 1 July 2022 (UTC)