10/7: A Year Later

it's all about Iran's need for an enemy and liberals' need for a victim

A fundamental fact of human existence is that we internalize the Narratives of the community in which we live.

So even someone like me, who lives under the conceit that I’ve read a few books and therefore knows stuff outside the Narrative, still just takes a lot of incoming Narrative for granted.

But in the year since October 7, 2023, I have realized something about Israel and the Palestinian question.

And of course it issues from my understanding of politics obtained from Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. If you are in politics you need an enemy.

And if you have set up a totalitarian revolutionary regime that does not rely on the support of the people, then you really need an enemy.

So, up until recently I half accepted the Narrative that the Palestinians were helpless victims and Something Had to be Done.

The fact is that the Palestinians in Gaza can sit there without a functioning economy in welfare-state limbo only because foreign entities shovel money at them. Part of it is UN money, and part I am sure is money from various western nations. But Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon could not exist without money and arms from Iran.

Iran is at war with Israel, but does not want a direct shooting war with troops on the ground. You can see why. First of all Iran is two countries away, with Iraq and Syria and Lebanon in between. Secondly, Iran would probably not do well in a direct shooting war with Israel. Thirdly, I doubt if the average Iranian keeping his head down is interested in a war with the Jews.

So the use of proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas make sense. Iran can make war on Israel without getting directly involved. And it also helps that the Palestinians are official global “victims” as approved by the Narrative.

Even though Iran is engaged in a war with Israel using various proxies, the Narrative pretty well ignores this and sees the Gazans and the Palestinians as helpless victims that we should be helping, because helping helpless victims is the right thing to do. And because Peace.

It’s important to understand how our liberal friends see almost everything through their victimhood Narrative. When there are victims we should help them and support them, just like liberals help and support their chosen victims in the United States with help and support. When you help domestic helpless victims the result is Justice. when you help foreign helpless victims the result is Peace. That’s what our liberal friends believe and that’s what they teach the kiddies.

This helps us understand why college students all over the west are doing peaceful protests and reciting Palestinian chants about “from the river to the sea.” They are all carefully taught that the Palestinian Question is about the helpless Palestinians and we should help them. And Peace.

But in fact the real issue is that the Iran regime wants a war with Israel, needs a war with Israel. I don’t think Iran actually ever expects to win a war against Israel. It’s just that the Iranian regime needs a war with an external enemy to justify its existence. See Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt above. Fortunately Iran funds its regime with oil money, rather than the proceeds of a commercial economy, so doesn’t have to think about international trade and customers in other countries. Think about it: if Iran didn’t have its war with Israel then it might have to face up to the growing dissatisfaction and opposition of ordinary Iranians. So it’s gotta have a war; experts agree that there’s just no way to fix domestic issues when there is a foreign enemy to be fought.

And the bigger issue is that in the 1948 war the Arabs lost. Normally when you lose a war you have to knuckle down to the winners and deal with it. Hobbes deals with this issue in Leviathan. What do you do after you are defeated and the ordinary people have to deal with the fact of a new sovereign? But in our modern era of making the world safe for democracy and universal human rights and supranational organizations like the UN, the supranational educated elite thinks that they know better than the crudities of war and victory and defeat. So they support the Palestinians with UNWRA and NGOs and who knows what. Which means that the Palestinians have never had to face the fact of their defeat in 1948 and subsequently.

Hey, we are all human, and if we get wiped out by bankruptcy or storm or defeat in war, we get to put off creating a new life if some Uncle Sugar comes in and gives us enough money to keep us going for a while.

Back in the day, when the Saxons were conquered by the Normans they had to deal with the new regime and the Norman barons that lorded it over them. When the American Indians were defeated by the land-hungry Europeans they retreated into the wilderness. And they would have fully integrated to the new regime if our liberal friends hadn’t decided to include them on the roster of victims and create Indian Reservations and recite Land Acknowledgments.

Actually, there is only one victim group that our liberal friends don’t care about and that is the white working class presently dying of despair. You may ask why our liberal friends have made an exception in this case. The answer is that someone has to be the evil oppressor, and the white working class in the US is stuck with the role because it can’t be the liberal educated elite, and it can’t be the white corporate Democrat donors, and it can’t be the middle-class women that live and die for abortion rights.

Likewise with the Palestinians. There has to be an oppressor, and our liberal friends have decided, by an unconscious process of elimination that it has to the the Jews.