Perhaps it is well to remember that Israeli settler extremists in the West Bank are terrorists, and therefore Israel, funding the settlers and giving them guns, is a state sponsor of terrorism.
See “France Calls West Bank Israeli Settler Violence a ‘Policy of Terror’”
I have a suggestion, John. Let's resolve this issue based on the number of young children killed on each side, for they are the only true innocents in this whole business. They don't give money to politicians on either side. They don't influence their peers or their children in either direction. They don't carry weapons. They don't understand the ongoing differences and the conflicts that have roiled this area for so long that time itself has become meaningless. They know only the incomprehensible terror of being in a war zone, as children have done since we begin killing each other en masse over four millennia ago. The real problem here is our mad determination to sort ourselves into groups and sects and factions and all the other reasons we've found to amplify our differences at the expense of our common humanity. How about that. Let's concentrate on that one, shall we.
Ask Schmeekle, my precious, how he would solved the gun problem and weapons of mass destruction in America. The NRA/war machine that is massacreing our own innocent, American children, daily. Why do republicans completely retreat in the face of dealing with the biggest killer of our children (and teachers)? I will wait for however long it takes to hear the answer. Please, someone tell me if he answers as I, respectfully, cannot read "My Precious'" comments, much like I cannot stand to hear the voice and lies of Inmate # P01135809.
I also suggest that, this is mostly a male endeavor. War, aggression, the weapons industry, violent sports, seeing war as glorious, going into the military as "service", all a reflection of this terrible tendency in mostly men (there are of course women who go along, are violent, collude) to use violence and aggression as the first option in any difference or disagreement. That most societies emphasize and even celebrate, this tendency in men, portends poorly for the future of our species.
I am always reminded of the comment Robert E Lee is supposed to have made from the top of Marye's Heights as his army decimated Union troops trying to cross the field below beyond Fredericksburg. "It is well war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it."
We come by this inclination honestly, I'm afraid. It is the legacy of our primate ancestors who needed it in order to survive in a world in which they did not have or need the imagination to lift survival from a necessary daily endeavor to the 'us and them' heights to which we have managed to elevate it.
Also, the idea that war is necessary is just not true, but too many, especially men, around the world see it as an acceptable option. I think some men even like it. That doesn't say much for them or for our future.
This is the argument always used to justify the heinous violence so many engage in. Social forces, and cultural evolution are both tools to use to temper this tendency in us. The level of violence especially done by males varies around the world, from some very violent cultures to others where it still happens but not to the extent, for example that it occurs in the US. When we raise boys through shaming if they exhibit any behaviors thought to be feminine, then we ensure that violence against women persists. When we dichotomize the sexes with strict gender silos and squelch all behaviors that might not be congruent with one sex or another, we ensure the hatred of women persists. When we tolerate making the "other" as threatening or bad, then we encourage this violence. While we may not erase these violent impulses, we can do more to shape those energies into something more prosocial.
"This is the argument always used to justify the heinous violence so many engage in"
I didn't make an argument that either aggression or violence was justified, but rather that it comes from something quite ancient buried in our genes, an inclination that was once absolutely necessary to our primate ancestors, which is why it remains so powerful. Without it, we would not have survived to become human. Nor did I suggest that it was something we could not now control if we truly wished to do so. We do not gain anything, however, by ignoring what we brought with us across the boundaries from reptile to mammal to primate to Homo. To be human is not some special class of being apart from any other and thus devoid of heritage, but rather an animal essence overlaid with another kind of essence that we are still struggling to define with anything like precision. And I'm not sure we ever will so define it, or even should. As the poet Robert Browning once noted, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for."
Yes, I agree that we are part of the animal kingdom and have tendencies for cooperation and competition, both of which helped the species be so successful, along with the huge brain and our bipedalism. But, as you say there is a lot more we could do to control or at least reduce the tendency to hurt and kill, since now both of these no longer serve us all that well. And of course we are shaped by our genes, as well as our environment. But, most of our neurodevelopment happens after birth and is shaped by our environments to a large extent. So we are strongly influenced by social cues and culture. That so many cultures are still male dominated, and celebrate violence and see war as a viable option for solving problems , doesn't speak well for us, since because we have this large brain we are capable of doing about it. We are just as strongly wired for cooperation as we are for competition, but most of the cultures still seem to emphasize one over the other. Women and children then pay the biggest price for this.
"Women and children then pay the biggest price for this."
Yes, as they have for over four millennia.
There is a reason, of course (and quite a part from their youth and burgeoning strength), why armies depend on young males who are the most susceptible to the idea of proving their manhood with violence and domination, the same urge that makes contact sports so inviting for so many boys and young men, (and why it's so important that boys and young men are given lots of opportunity for that kind of sport - to help bleed off some of that natural aggression). And there is, too, the fact that there is no hard and fast sign of passage from boy to man, unlike the menses that clearly mark a girl's physical maturity. So boys are left with a great deal of uncertainty about that boundary and when and how exactly they cross it. There is and has been for some time now a good deal of controversy about just how to fashion a definition of manhood that is as acceptable to that yearning for manhood as the older version which has always had sheer physical strength, aggression, and domination as its primary manifestation. But such a definition has to include some sort of concession to what is buried so deeply within us, and that, to me, is the primary problem. I'm an older guy now (78), and I was never very physically aggressive, but I have not forgotten the ancient urges. So how to accept and use those in useful and positive ways and not just try to bury them, because that is simply not going to work.
I agree with you. There was a good reason why more traditional cultures would have distinct "manhood" rituals to help the boy traverse from child to adult. Jews have the Bar Mitzva, and some cultures have a series of tests the boy must pass, or particular celebrations that the whole community has when a boy enters manhood. More traditional definitions of both maleness and femaleness are too simplistic, and don't acknowledge that both are more complex than those gender silos would suggest. I agree that we need better ways to help boys channel their energies into more prosocial avenues, and not just leave it up to the boy to try to navigate the cultural messages about what it means to be a man. Some of the problem may lie in how, at least in the recent past, fathers weren't very involved with boys in their early life, so the boy had to use cultural and social signs to help him create a male identity for himself. The more boys can have good solid, relationships with their fathers, allowing room for both the competitive tendencies as well as the emotional aspects of both people, the less likely the boy will grow into a destructive, self-loathing adult.
There is a good deal to be said for your thoughts. Unfortunately a substantial segment of our current political culture isn't exactly the kind of model we need.
Pick one. Any one. Yes, I was referring specifically to the horror which has been going on in the Middle East almost forever, but the base of almost every problem we face as a nation and as a world is traceable to our determination to differentiate ourselves from each other rather then to remember that we are the one species on Earth who have in our hands the means to end all this madness.
p.s. One approach to the fundamental problem of "other-ism" that you identify:
Look for ways of thinking that transcend other-ism.
In western civilization, at the dawn of the Age of Pisces, Jesus Christ universalized the old Hebrew commandment, "Love your neighbor as yourself." In the thought of the time, this got intertwined with Cicero's writing that love of our fellow humans is both essential to the preeminent virtue of justice and the way toward happiness.
I will suggest, following Cicero, that we have a natural inclination to act out of love toward others, understanding "natural" (as Aristotle and Cicero did) to mean maturely developed.
That thought leads to the problem of moral education of adolescents, which seems to be sorely lacking these days.
The question of 'natural inclination' in human beings is a murky and controversial one, given our ancestry and our own inclination to think of ourselves as motivated largely by intellectual independence and rationality. Granted, I speak as one trained as an anthropologist with a specialty in human origins. What exactly we brought with us in terms of genetic inclinations as we crossed the boundaries from mammal to primate to Homo is fraught with complexity. Having said that, I do think that one of the most powerful of those inclinations is territoriality. In animals, of course, this is necessary survival mechanism, but we have taken it to an intellectual and imaginative level far above that, and it has greatly helped to create in us all those 'us and them' tendencies which so bedevil us. Do we have a natural inclination to act out of love toward others? Within whatever groups with which we identify ourselves, perhaps. But we are also, as were all of our ancestral groups, an intensely parochial species. I'd suggest that what MacBeth heard upon his stage was the sound of that of which we are truly made, the animal, the poet, the builder, and the would-be god. It is the sounds and the effects of our fears, our dreams, our tools, and our hubris that has filled the world since the Agricultural Revolution began to fill the earth with enough of us to make us heard well above the sounds of other life forms.
As to the moral education of adolescents, speaking as one who taught boys on the verge of adolescence for over 40 years, I'd ask whose moral code you would prioritize, for there are many, and the boys brought them in from home, from their peers, and from all the myriad and conflicting sources with which we live in these days of far too early a universal access.
"Will the world be content merely to brand our institution as among the most insidious enemies of humankind? Will our fellowmen condemn us thus and let the matter rest? Or will the heirs of those whom we have dismembered in our own peculiar Holocaust clamor for another Nuremberg?
"I don’t mind telling you that this matter has haunted me; it has haunted me particularly over the past five years. It has haunted me because I know that if I am tried I will be found guilty, very guilty, without extenuating circumstance...."
As heir to a long line of English teachers, I'd suggest that Mr. Budhoo's letter, whatever its factual nature would have benefitted from a great deal less self-immolation and verbiage and a great deal more specificity. I say that not as a comment on the actual nature of what he's trying to describe but rather to suggest that if he wanted to get his point across to a sufficiently wide audience, he went about that in far too verbose and convoluted way.
Budhoo's letter was an international sensation, but it was blacked out of the U S. news media. His use of college-level English from the 1980s challenges today's younger generation.
You can't have read much of his 100-page letter that has quite a bit of specificity.
p.s. My father was an English teacher; I grew up in a house full of books.
Perhaps you are aware of Strunk and White's Elements of Style (the Little Book, as it is known), which has been one my guides to clear English prose. Applying its dicta to the letter in question would be enlightening.
I'm ignoring nothing. But in the midst of enough horror going on in the world to make angels weep, one with a point to make about any one situation should eschew a mountain of verbiage and come straight to that point or he will lose the audience he hopes to convince. For example, Mr. Budhoo's entire first paragraph is little but inchoate guilt and rage. That is simply sound and fury with little to engage the reader in the actual situation he wants to convey. If he wants to convince people, he should leave the emotional outpouring to a minimum and get to the point.
Lisa59, i wonder where he gets all of those fake news links he posts?? I also proudly support Buden for free.
So do I. And I really don't need the money anyway, as I continue to get my monthly check from Soros, as most of us here do -- am I right?
Me too, Doug. 😉
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-16-2024/comment/47485611
Joe "bought-and-paid-for" Biden received more money (by far) from the Israel lobby than any other senator in history:
https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?cycle=All&ind=Q05&mem=Y&recipdetail=S
Reuters says the same thing:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/i-am-zionist-how-joe-bidens-lifelong-bond-with-israel-shapes-war-policy-2023-10-21/#:~:text=During%20his%2036%20years%20in,to%20the%20Open%20Secrets%20database.
Perhaps it is well to remember that Israeli settler extremists in the West Bank are terrorists, and therefore Israel, funding the settlers and giving them guns, is a state sponsor of terrorism.
See “France Calls West Bank Israeli Settler Violence a ‘Policy of Terror’”
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/france-calls-west-bank-israeli-settler-violence-policy-terror-2023-11-16/
and
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-gaza-west-bank-settler-violence-palestinians-rcna123311
and "The Rise of Settler Terrorism" (published in Foreign Affairs)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41720862
I have a suggestion, John. Let's resolve this issue based on the number of young children killed on each side, for they are the only true innocents in this whole business. They don't give money to politicians on either side. They don't influence their peers or their children in either direction. They don't carry weapons. They don't understand the ongoing differences and the conflicts that have roiled this area for so long that time itself has become meaningless. They know only the incomprehensible terror of being in a war zone, as children have done since we begin killing each other en masse over four millennia ago. The real problem here is our mad determination to sort ourselves into groups and sects and factions and all the other reasons we've found to amplify our differences at the expense of our common humanity. How about that. Let's concentrate on that one, shall we.
Ask Schmeekle, my precious, how he would solved the gun problem and weapons of mass destruction in America. The NRA/war machine that is massacreing our own innocent, American children, daily. Why do republicans completely retreat in the face of dealing with the biggest killer of our children (and teachers)? I will wait for however long it takes to hear the answer. Please, someone tell me if he answers as I, respectfully, cannot read "My Precious'" comments, much like I cannot stand to hear the voice and lies of Inmate # P01135809.
http://www.bradyunited.org has all the statistics on our gun violence culture.
I also suggest that, this is mostly a male endeavor. War, aggression, the weapons industry, violent sports, seeing war as glorious, going into the military as "service", all a reflection of this terrible tendency in mostly men (there are of course women who go along, are violent, collude) to use violence and aggression as the first option in any difference or disagreement. That most societies emphasize and even celebrate, this tendency in men, portends poorly for the future of our species.
I am always reminded of the comment Robert E Lee is supposed to have made from the top of Marye's Heights as his army decimated Union troops trying to cross the field below beyond Fredericksburg. "It is well war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it."
We come by this inclination honestly, I'm afraid. It is the legacy of our primate ancestors who needed it in order to survive in a world in which they did not have or need the imagination to lift survival from a necessary daily endeavor to the 'us and them' heights to which we have managed to elevate it.
Also, the idea that war is necessary is just not true, but too many, especially men, around the world see it as an acceptable option. I think some men even like it. That doesn't say much for them or for our future.
This is the argument always used to justify the heinous violence so many engage in. Social forces, and cultural evolution are both tools to use to temper this tendency in us. The level of violence especially done by males varies around the world, from some very violent cultures to others where it still happens but not to the extent, for example that it occurs in the US. When we raise boys through shaming if they exhibit any behaviors thought to be feminine, then we ensure that violence against women persists. When we dichotomize the sexes with strict gender silos and squelch all behaviors that might not be congruent with one sex or another, we ensure the hatred of women persists. When we tolerate making the "other" as threatening or bad, then we encourage this violence. While we may not erase these violent impulses, we can do more to shape those energies into something more prosocial.
"This is the argument always used to justify the heinous violence so many engage in"
I didn't make an argument that either aggression or violence was justified, but rather that it comes from something quite ancient buried in our genes, an inclination that was once absolutely necessary to our primate ancestors, which is why it remains so powerful. Without it, we would not have survived to become human. Nor did I suggest that it was something we could not now control if we truly wished to do so. We do not gain anything, however, by ignoring what we brought with us across the boundaries from reptile to mammal to primate to Homo. To be human is not some special class of being apart from any other and thus devoid of heritage, but rather an animal essence overlaid with another kind of essence that we are still struggling to define with anything like precision. And I'm not sure we ever will so define it, or even should. As the poet Robert Browning once noted, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for."
Yes, I agree that we are part of the animal kingdom and have tendencies for cooperation and competition, both of which helped the species be so successful, along with the huge brain and our bipedalism. But, as you say there is a lot more we could do to control or at least reduce the tendency to hurt and kill, since now both of these no longer serve us all that well. And of course we are shaped by our genes, as well as our environment. But, most of our neurodevelopment happens after birth and is shaped by our environments to a large extent. So we are strongly influenced by social cues and culture. That so many cultures are still male dominated, and celebrate violence and see war as a viable option for solving problems , doesn't speak well for us, since because we have this large brain we are capable of doing about it. We are just as strongly wired for cooperation as we are for competition, but most of the cultures still seem to emphasize one over the other. Women and children then pay the biggest price for this.
"Women and children then pay the biggest price for this."
Yes, as they have for over four millennia.
There is a reason, of course (and quite a part from their youth and burgeoning strength), why armies depend on young males who are the most susceptible to the idea of proving their manhood with violence and domination, the same urge that makes contact sports so inviting for so many boys and young men, (and why it's so important that boys and young men are given lots of opportunity for that kind of sport - to help bleed off some of that natural aggression). And there is, too, the fact that there is no hard and fast sign of passage from boy to man, unlike the menses that clearly mark a girl's physical maturity. So boys are left with a great deal of uncertainty about that boundary and when and how exactly they cross it. There is and has been for some time now a good deal of controversy about just how to fashion a definition of manhood that is as acceptable to that yearning for manhood as the older version which has always had sheer physical strength, aggression, and domination as its primary manifestation. But such a definition has to include some sort of concession to what is buried so deeply within us, and that, to me, is the primary problem. I'm an older guy now (78), and I was never very physically aggressive, but I have not forgotten the ancient urges. So how to accept and use those in useful and positive ways and not just try to bury them, because that is simply not going to work.
I agree with you. There was a good reason why more traditional cultures would have distinct "manhood" rituals to help the boy traverse from child to adult. Jews have the Bar Mitzva, and some cultures have a series of tests the boy must pass, or particular celebrations that the whole community has when a boy enters manhood. More traditional definitions of both maleness and femaleness are too simplistic, and don't acknowledge that both are more complex than those gender silos would suggest. I agree that we need better ways to help boys channel their energies into more prosocial avenues, and not just leave it up to the boy to try to navigate the cultural messages about what it means to be a man. Some of the problem may lie in how, at least in the recent past, fathers weren't very involved with boys in their early life, so the boy had to use cultural and social signs to help him create a male identity for himself. The more boys can have good solid, relationships with their fathers, allowing room for both the competitive tendencies as well as the emotional aspects of both people, the less likely the boy will grow into a destructive, self-loathing adult.
There is a good deal to be said for your thoughts. Unfortunately a substantial segment of our current political culture isn't exactly the kind of model we need.
What issue are you trying to resolve?
Pick one. Any one. Yes, I was referring specifically to the horror which has been going on in the Middle East almost forever, but the base of almost every problem we face as a nation and as a world is traceable to our determination to differentiate ourselves from each other rather then to remember that we are the one species on Earth who have in our hands the means to end all this madness.
p.s. One approach to the fundamental problem of "other-ism" that you identify:
Look for ways of thinking that transcend other-ism.
In western civilization, at the dawn of the Age of Pisces, Jesus Christ universalized the old Hebrew commandment, "Love your neighbor as yourself." In the thought of the time, this got intertwined with Cicero's writing that love of our fellow humans is both essential to the preeminent virtue of justice and the way toward happiness.
I will suggest, following Cicero, that we have a natural inclination to act out of love toward others, understanding "natural" (as Aristotle and Cicero did) to mean maturely developed.
That thought leads to the problem of moral education of adolescents, which seems to be sorely lacking these days.
The question of 'natural inclination' in human beings is a murky and controversial one, given our ancestry and our own inclination to think of ourselves as motivated largely by intellectual independence and rationality. Granted, I speak as one trained as an anthropologist with a specialty in human origins. What exactly we brought with us in terms of genetic inclinations as we crossed the boundaries from mammal to primate to Homo is fraught with complexity. Having said that, I do think that one of the most powerful of those inclinations is territoriality. In animals, of course, this is necessary survival mechanism, but we have taken it to an intellectual and imaginative level far above that, and it has greatly helped to create in us all those 'us and them' tendencies which so bedevil us. Do we have a natural inclination to act out of love toward others? Within whatever groups with which we identify ourselves, perhaps. But we are also, as were all of our ancestral groups, an intensely parochial species. I'd suggest that what MacBeth heard upon his stage was the sound of that of which we are truly made, the animal, the poet, the builder, and the would-be god. It is the sounds and the effects of our fears, our dreams, our tools, and our hubris that has filled the world since the Agricultural Revolution began to fill the earth with enough of us to make us heard well above the sounds of other life forms.
As to the moral education of adolescents, speaking as one who taught boys on the verge of adolescence for over 40 years, I'd ask whose moral code you would prioritize, for there are many, and the boys brought them in from home, from their peers, and from all the myriad and conflicting sources with which we live in these days of far too early a universal access.
I identified my "problem" of choice a year ago, in this reply to HCR:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-15-2023/comment/11967315
"Will the world be content merely to brand our institution as among the most insidious enemies of humankind? Will our fellowmen condemn us thus and let the matter rest? Or will the heirs of those whom we have dismembered in our own peculiar Holocaust clamor for another Nuremberg?
"I don’t mind telling you that this matter has haunted me; it has haunted me particularly over the past five years. It has haunted me because I know that if I am tried I will be found guilty, very guilty, without extenuating circumstance...."
As heir to a long line of English teachers, I'd suggest that Mr. Budhoo's letter, whatever its factual nature would have benefitted from a great deal less self-immolation and verbiage and a great deal more specificity. I say that not as a comment on the actual nature of what he's trying to describe but rather to suggest that if he wanted to get his point across to a sufficiently wide audience, he went about that in far too verbose and convoluted way.
Budhoo's letter was an international sensation, but it was blacked out of the U S. news media. His use of college-level English from the 1980s challenges today's younger generation.
You can't have read much of his 100-page letter that has quite a bit of specificity.
p.s. My father was an English teacher; I grew up in a house full of books.
Perhaps you are aware of Strunk and White's Elements of Style (the Little Book, as it is known), which has been one my guides to clear English prose. Applying its dicta to the letter in question would be enlightening.
You have moral depravity to ignore Budhoo's confession to crimes against humanity while quibbling over the style of his English.
I'm ignoring nothing. But in the midst of enough horror going on in the world to make angels weep, one with a point to make about any one situation should eschew a mountain of verbiage and come straight to that point or he will lose the audience he hopes to convince. For example, Mr. Budhoo's entire first paragraph is little but inchoate guilt and rage. That is simply sound and fury with little to engage the reader in the actual situation he wants to convey. If he wants to convince people, he should leave the emotional outpouring to a minimum and get to the point.