Two causative perspectives and a mechanistic summary description — regarding the slaughter in Gaza

25 November 2023

Hand of God, Yaweh or Allah?

Or is it just humans, doing their accustomed swaths of mass killing?

Consider the following two . . .

. . . conceptually different perspectives, regarding Israel's hammering of Gaza.

Let's start with Howard Kunstler's (conventionally Zionist) stance

No wimpy — 'let's all get along-ism' — from him:

What’s going on in the Bible lands now is a demonstration that the wrath of Yahweh is a match for the wrath of Allah.

The West appears to abhor this battle, as it derives from the deepest and darkest sector of the West’s own psychology — a place the West fears to go.

Having spurned the Judeo-Christian God lo these many decades, the West is horrified to see that dreadful figure step back onstage hurling lightning bolts and roaring.

[T]he West affects to be chagrined by Israel’s refusal to join the West’s new gnostic suicide cult.

Here, too, is a failure to comprehend the phrase Never Again.

We know where that succinct slogan comes from — the West’s previous suicide attempt, 1939 to 1945, in the course of which the annihilation of Europe’s Jews was a featured set-piece.

In short, according to Kunstler, hammer-and-tong extermination of an influxing (a verb) foreign element is a great idea.

Such a slaughter-prone response to alleged nasties in our midst is, maintains Kunstler, cultural suicide prevention.

Ergo, let's all kill each other, according to the dictates of the egotistical figures predominantly residing in the Old Testament.

Or according to whatever other books of alleged Dictates from On-High that one wishes to drag into humanity's clan-designated circles of fire.

Certainly, Kunstler's conception harmonizes with the way that Homo sapiens' marauding groups have traditionally done things.

And furthermore — given what Kunstler legitimately sees as Western cultural suicide — due to uncontrolled, society-clashing immigrations into Europe and the United States — his perspective is difficult to persuasively quarrel with.

Ergo, your Deity against mine, and we will see what happens after.

Then, there's Dmitry Orlov's more secular . . .

. . . 'follow the Hegemon's money' analysis.

His causative view is just as historically accurate as Kunstler's.

Here, with my italics added:

The reason that Israel exists is because of Jewish money from the U.S. No other reason.

Now, how long do you think that’s going to go considering the state of finances in the U.S.?

So, once that gravy train leaves the station forever, what’s going to become of Israel?

I don’t think that it has much of a chance. It’s a project. It’s an outpost.

It’s not a real country or nation or anything like that. It’s just a colonial outpost, a beachhead.”

The entire discretionary spending part of the US federal budget is getting swallowed up by interest payments.

So where is Israel in that? Nowhere. It’s nowhere.

And so we don’t really have to worry about anything. We have to just sit back and watch things unfold, because the trends are unmistakable.

Colonial outpost?

Certainly so, given the actual history of Israel's creation.

Last and more foundationally descriptive . . .

. . . regarding the shared swath-of-destruction component of both the above analyses — comes Ted Rall's mechanistic version of what I call, historical gangrene.

Historical gangrene occurs when a more powerful group destroys its adversary's life-supporting environment.

This habitat destruction can be motivated according to either:

Kunstler's fight between Yaweh and Allah

Orlov's Western colonialists' flow of Israel-propping money.

Rall's description of the habitat-alteration mechanism lies at the heart of both of the above explanations:

[K]illing people is not the Israelis’ goal. They’re out to flatten Gaza. Flattening some Gazans is a side effect of flattening buildings.

Most species don’t go extinct after being hunted to death. Their habitat is destroyed.

Israel’s war aim in Gaza, I believe, is to destroy so many apartment buildings and shops and schools and hospitals and other infrastructure that the territory becomes uninhabitable.

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi sees the near future. “What is happening now in Gaza is an attempt to force civilian residents to take refuge and migrate to Egypt, which should not be accepted,” Sisi complains.

But he can’t do anything to prevent it.

If Sisi’s prediction comes true, it will be a huge win for Israel.

Most importantly, Israel would annex Gaza. They’d clean up the debris, cart away the rubble, and transform Gaza into luxurious seaside resorts and vacation homes.

Destruction is what humans do

We invent reasons to justify it.

Sometimes the reasons are (arguably morally) legitimate.

Other times, probably definitively, not.

Depending upon one's perspective, at least some of these destructions take the metaphorical form of soul gangrene.

For example

Kunstler's postulate runs into trouble because he ignores the fact (as Zionists always do) of how Israel was plopped down onto an already occupied geography.

That place having been selected to accord with Zionists' arguably preposterously egotistical interpretation of a pre-existing religious history, which the Islamic people (who were already there) would automatically object to.

The trouble-inviting absurdity with which Israel's location was chosen — and forced upon non-Zionists — readily predicted subsequent decades of mass-deadly events.

Dmitry Orlov's — 'follow the Western Hegemon' — interpretation more accurately reflects what causatively really happened, than does Kunstler's religiously self-serving, process-truncating explanation about Zionists now having to avoid cultural suicide.

Most basically (morally speaking) — you don't get to force yourself in someone else's home — steal it and slaughter its inhabitants — and then claim that you are justly defending yourself against religious and cultural suicide, when they fight back.

Rationally and legally speaking, Kunstler's argument better justifies Hamas' response, than it does to Zionist Israel's.

All told

Ted Rall's — 'smash the habitat and collaterally the people in it' — most foundationally explains how (rather than why) modern humans compete for valuables and the territory those lie in.

Reasons for habitat-smashing can be justified in religious, cultural or simply avarice-based terms.

Ted Rall's is essentially a Darwinian take on this most foundational of human behaviors.

The moral? — And so it goes

What's a few dead folks, when I want what you have?

Pertinently, keep in mind, Israel and the West's wish to own currently Palestinian-controlled gas fields.

With regard to the Israeli and Gazan future — what with the rest of the world sitting back, including Hezbollah, according to the applicable leaders' self-interested complacence — we will see who wins out in the slaughter-atrocity that has been New Zion.

I make no predictions. Seems to early and indeterminate in forces-allocation for that.

Taking humanity as a whole, historical gangrene (my phrase) seems metaphorically most accurately descriptive of the extermination-of-others process.

We invent justifying reasons to (directly or indirectly) kill masses of our fellow human beings off.

We are an figurative organism that perennially murders its variously off-shooting limbs.

Homo sapiens is, most probably, the only species that does so with cognitively self-aware intent.

Intent lends the numbers-trimming process an expansive (and expandable) emotional and pseudo-intellectual base — which makes serial butcheries more vicious, than they might otherwise need to be.

Consider in evidence, the ongoing Ukraine war:

A war in which the Devil's man (Zelensky) keeps feeding more and more physically unfit and temperamentally unsuited Ukrainians into the now hopeless butchery zone.

This appalling squandering of lives taking place, simply to keep Zelensky's personal — and fascist West-sponsored — Nazi Boy corruption going.

Evil comes in no more explicit form, than this.

In sum, the worst impulses — and people — predominate in shaping humanity's cauldron of needless death and destruction.

These are not called 'deadly sins' — and sinners — for no reason.

They're all gangrene of the human soul.

Ethics have, again debatably, a rational base. The above medical analogy is, we might intuit, not entirely an inept one.

Humans are self-parasitizing demon-analogues.

One can see why Manichean good and evil perceptions so quickly intrude.

And when one questions the alleged over-simplicity of black and white reasoning, one must also wonder what would be lost in its obliteration.

When in doubt, should we kill the perceived intruder?

PeteFree.com

Two causative perspectives and a mechanistic summary description — regarding the slaughter in Gaza