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Tom London

@TomLondon6

Apr 24

Extracts from "Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims" by Edward Said (1979)

Very little is said about what Zionism entailed for non-Jews who happened to have encountered it; for that matter, nothing is said about where (outside Jewish history) it took place, and from what in the historical context of nineteenth-century Europe Zionism drew its force. To the Palestinian, for whom Zionism was somebody else's idea imported into Palestine and for which in a very concrete way he or she was made to pay and suffer, these forgotten things about Zionism are the very things that are centrally important.

Edward Said (continued)

Present political and cultural actualities make...an examination extraordinarily difficult, as much because Zionism in the postindustrial West has acquired for itself an almost unchallenged hegemony in liberal "establishment" discourse, as because in keeping with one of its central ideological characteristics, Zionism has hidden, or caused to disappear, the literal historical ground of its growth, its political cost to the native inhabitants of Palestine, and its militantly oppressive discriminations between Jews and non-Jews.

Edward Said (continued)

The special, one might even call it the privileged, place in this discussion of the US is impressive, for all sorts of reasons. In no other country, except Israel, is Zionism enshrined as an unquestioned good, and in no other country is there so strong a conjuncture of powerful institutions and interests-the press, the liberal intelligentsia, the military-industrial complex, the academic community, labor unions-for whom [...] uncritical support of Israel and Zionism enhances their domestic as well as international standing

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Tom London

@TomLondon6

Mar 12

“It is often very illuminating...to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?”
- Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“...we can best understand the furies of war and politics by remembering that almost the whole of each party believes absolutely in its picture of the opposition, that it takes as fact, not what is, but what it supposes to be the fact”
- Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. ... the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out”
- Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

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Tom London

@TomLondon6

Feb 24

"Silence in the face of injustice is complicity"
- Henrik Ibsen

#Gaza

"The measure of a civilised society is how it treats its dissenters"
- Henrik Ibsen

#repressionofprotest

"Fear is the weapon of those who seek to maintain power through oppression"
- Henrik Ibsen

#whippingupIslamophobia

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Tom London

@TomLondon6

Jan 15

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language: -
"The words [fascism], democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides ... Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different"

George Orwell: -
"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?"

George Orwell:-
"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible ... Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them"

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Tom London

@TomLondon6

Dec 12, 2023

"Love of Zionism in West has always had a troubled relationship with genocide. Its origins as a political ideology lay in an era when European empires routinely justified the exterminability of what they considered to be inferior people & uncivilised barbarians"
- Article by @UssamaMakdisi in @jacobin
1/?

"The latest instalment of philozionism [Oct to Dec 2023] exposes more clearly than ever the ruthless double standard that underlies it: Israeli history and life are cherished; Muslim and Christian Palestinian history and life are fundamentally devalued"
- @UssamaMakdisi
2/?

"While leading Zionists grappled with the antisemitism of Europe, they also shared many of the foundational racist tropes of 19th century Western culture...Eastern people were more primitive than Western ones...mentally inferior, uncivilised and thus without historical or ethical value"
- @UssamaMakdisi
3/?

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Tom London

@TomLondon6

Aug 28, 2023

Hannah Arendt was one of the most brilliant writers on the human condition of the 20th C. She wrote this about PROPAGANDA. Very relevant in 2023.

"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil”
- Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist”
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

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