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I'm having a lot of trouble with Afterwar. I think maybe it's because we aren't after war anymore, we're in war. Anyway, I sometimes work better to high-tension music, so I have the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars playing.
Frank says:"So you're listening to some of the cool things Jews came up with as a counterpoint to the news?" Only he doesn't say all that, because people in my family often start a sentence and leave it hanging because everybody can tell where it's going.
Well, I wasn't thinking of that. But I would like to remind myself that nationality, culture, ethnicity, whatever, does not determine or even I think all that strongly influence political behavior outside of giving names and shapes to the political entities involved. It's not reasonable to expect that because the Jewish tradition we hold to in our family is a tradition of social justice and internationalism and other obsolete values, that any modern Jewish entity would behave any differently from any other entity sharing their economic and political realities. I have nothing personal to be outraged by, except in that genocide is always personally outrageous. Clarinets are not related in any way to missiles, in other words.
One of the things that people do to get away with doing and thinking things that perpetuate racism is to pretend to symmetricality. One way to do this is to pretend that all bigotry is the same, that all prejudice is the same. "It's just as bad that so many black people hate white people." (well, no, because black hate hardly ever ruins white lives) "The Palestinians don't even recognize Israel's right to exist." (not that it did the Palestinians any good to repeatedly endorse the two-state solution)
When you do this you take as equal the resistance of an occupied people and the oppressive actions of the occupiers. It's possible to use the word "violence" to describe both behaviors, and it's possible to find individual and group crimes, but one carries with it the power of the state. And that makes the difference.
on another front, just to remember it:Gastronomicon, thanks to cicadabug. (Yes, I ave given up on the personhead: there is a personhead-shaped hole in my brain where the code for the lj-user tag belongs. I have learned that code more times than I can count, and forgotten in more times than that. The href tag, though, I know and remember)
And another thing: Afterwar is now at 88,800 words, more or less, even though it's annoyoing as all hell to write. I think I have only the last bit to write in a really short chapter I just decided recently to write (the referendum!)
Frank says:"So you're listening to some of the cool things Jews came up with as a counterpoint to the news?" Only he doesn't say all that, because people in my family often start a sentence and leave it hanging because everybody can tell where it's going.
Well, I wasn't thinking of that. But I would like to remind myself that nationality, culture, ethnicity, whatever, does not determine or even I think all that strongly influence political behavior outside of giving names and shapes to the political entities involved. It's not reasonable to expect that because the Jewish tradition we hold to in our family is a tradition of social justice and internationalism and other obsolete values, that any modern Jewish entity would behave any differently from any other entity sharing their economic and political realities. I have nothing personal to be outraged by, except in that genocide is always personally outrageous. Clarinets are not related in any way to missiles, in other words.
One of the things that people do to get away with doing and thinking things that perpetuate racism is to pretend to symmetricality. One way to do this is to pretend that all bigotry is the same, that all prejudice is the same. "It's just as bad that so many black people hate white people." (well, no, because black hate hardly ever ruins white lives) "The Palestinians don't even recognize Israel's right to exist." (not that it did the Palestinians any good to repeatedly endorse the two-state solution)
When you do this you take as equal the resistance of an occupied people and the oppressive actions of the occupiers. It's possible to use the word "violence" to describe both behaviors, and it's possible to find individual and group crimes, but one carries with it the power of the state. And that makes the difference.
on another front, just to remember it:Gastronomicon, thanks to cicadabug. (Yes, I ave given up on the personhead: there is a personhead-shaped hole in my brain where the code for the lj-user tag belongs. I have learned that code more times than I can count, and forgotten in more times than that. The href tag, though, I know and remember)
And another thing: Afterwar is now at 88,800 words, more or less, even though it's annoyoing as all hell to write. I think I have only the last bit to write in a really short chapter I just decided recently to write (the referendum!)
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