Finally saw Zone of Interest. It was meh, but one thing it does well— not seen in many other Holocaust films—is show how much the Nazis saw themselves as settler colonists in the East. You can see why Glazer made the speech he did at the Oscars. The movie is not simply about the violence you create on the other side of paradise; it's about the paradise you violently create from what you assume to be wasteland that you're living on. The film takes us out of the midcentury perception of the Holocaust as the work of careerist bureaucrats—you see

People always think if you say it's not fascism, you're saying it's not dangerous or a problem. Not so. I just have a different analysis of the danger. If you're interested, here are some examples of that analysis. newyorker.com/books/under-re… politico.com/news/magazine/…

1/ So apparently my statement on Trump and fascism is the least controversial thing I've said today. Far more contentious is my enthusiasm for a forthcoming translation of Marx's Capital. How could this new one add anything? I've only begun to dip in, but here goes. 2/ Here is the Fowkes translation of one passage.

60 years ago, social scientists thought Americans were primed to consensus. Now they think Americans are primed to polarization. They also invoke evolution as the explanation. But how could evolution's triggers and human nature change in just 6 decades? washingtonpost.com/science/2024/0… The lack of historical self-awareness of the disciplines is a real problem. In college, I was taught that before you to try to understand society, you have to see how your predecessors understood society. And never assume that the newer understanding simply represents progress.

1/ I really disagree with this claim, which a lot of people have made during and in the wake of the Gay controversy. Forget Gay's work. This notion, that there are some scholarly claims or statements, that can only be made in a certain way, is not true in my experience. Also,

https://twitter.com/mdpollak/status/1743069532028105081

2/ part of what makes formulas or anything boring is a refusal to cast them differently, to make them fresh, particularly for a new audience. I'm writing a book now on economic ideas, and it just stuns me how often, writers, even people who write about economics who are not

If this is indeed Toscano's theory of fascism, he is literally just describing the conservative tradition, almost exactly as I described it in The Reactionary Mind, in my chapter on "The Private Life of Power," and simply slapping a new label on it: "fascism." Just to be clear: I'm not interested in claiming any ownership over the idea or accusing Toscano of taking it. I'm saying something different and more critical about the whole fascism discourse: A lot of it is just relabeling, with a word, and a word only, an assemblage of

1/ I hesitate to make @whstancil a stand-in for anything of importance, but it just struck me that, perhaps, he does signify something. About 20 years or so ago, a new generation of journalist/bloggers came on the scene, heralding, as their calling card, their mastery of various 2/ academic arcana. Unlike the older generation of journalists, they didn't rely on gossip or Washington insider knowledge. They read poli sci articles, they were stats whiz kids, they dove into J-STOR, they "knew" the literature.

1/ Arendt's leeriness of the State of Israel went far deeper than any of her specific writings on Zionism from the 1930s and 1940s would suggest. It's at the heart of her most profound—and most Jewish—book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Some excerpts from a piece I wrote 8 years ago. 2/

"Of all the co-optations of Arendt none is more outrageous than the parallel...between Palestinians and Nazis. Arendt rejected that analogy (in a 1948 letter to the Jewish Frontier) and few of the protagonists in the struggle so reminded her of Nazis as the Zionists themselves,

https://twitter.com/Return2Sanders/status/1734982374297866480

"particularly those of the Revisionist tendency, whose influence Arendt was among the first to notice. From its inception, Arendt argued, Zionism had exhibited some of the nastier features of European nationalism.

1/ This is probably not a question to ask on Twitter, but I'm genuinely curious: When did people of influence and power, not just hardcore Zionists but also their fellow travelers and useful idiots, come together around the idea that intifada=genocide? This seems new. 2/ For many years, the term "intifada" was used either positively or neutrally to describe one set of events between 1987 and the early 90s and another set of events between 2000 and 2005.

1/ Listening and watching liberal, progressive, and mainstream Jews lining up behind Israel; criticizing in increasingly Manichean terms the faces and voices of campus protest; denouncing young people's embrace of the Global South; 2/ stating their heartfelt belief that their very lives and collective existence are endangered by student activists and people of color, that they don't feel safe in their own homes, that they and their families are under siege—

1/ "Israel’s assault is different. Experts say that even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza show that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century. 2/ "Conflict-casualty experts have been taken aback at just how many people have been reported killed in Gaza — most of them women and children — and how rapidly. It is not just the unrelenting scale of the strikes...It is also the nature of the weaponry itself.

This letter from Harvard professors to the president of Harvard is an example of genuine intellectual and moral leadership, at a moment when there is precious little of that on campuses, aside from the actions of students. Bravo. medium.com/@acfreedomfacs… "The University's commitment to intellectual freedom and open dialogue seems to be giving way to something else entirely: a model of education in which the meaning of terms once eligible for interpretation is prescribed from above by a committee...

Every student of democracy knows that democracy is more than the state or the vote; it's a deep practice of everyday life, in which ordinary people argue over and contest and shape the largest and seemingly most remote forces that affect them. Far from democracy dying, we've been seeing, since Occupy, a birth and maturation of democracy. It's not just the protests and increased voting rates. It's ordinary people, often young people, breaking with the patterns of deference to experts and elites that set in during the 1980s. It's amazing that people now

I've been genuinely surprised by the inner civil war on the left this explosion in Palestine and Israel has created. Those of you who follow me know how much I care about this issue, but, as an analyst of politics, I've been, as I say, surprised that it has seized progressives by the throat in the way that it has. Though I don't think there's any kind of moral equivalence between the cause of the Palestinians and that of the Israelis—the former are the dominated, the latter are the dominators—I can only explain the inner civil war among progressives

This is a major deal. Three lessons here:

1) If you know anything about the history of the labor movement and US foreign policy, this crack in the labor monolith signifies a lot. There's a lot of potential here.

2) BDS, which was pushed in the US to challenge the *cultural* hegemony of Israel as a first step toward changing US policy toward Israel, is bearing fruit. There's a reason pro-Israel forces targeted BDS with such vehemence.

I understand and even sympathize with the perspective this professor articulates here, and on most issues, I'd say the same thing. (Though, I hope, less snottily than he does, but that's Twitter.) What I don't think he understands, or at least shows no appreciation of, here, is

https://twitter.com/arash_tehran/status/1717339836791529587

that to get to the position he wants people to get to, if they are Jewish, requires a bit of a reckoning, intellectually and morally and politically, with Zionism. I grew up in the American Jewish community, and am still a member of that community. I know its tropes pretty well.

I decided 30 years ago—in the summer of 1993—that I would never support this state, never go or send a child of mine there, never apologize or temporize for it, b/c I never wanted, as a Jew, to be a part of this. All states are brutal, but to affirmatively align myself with this?

https://twitter.com/muhammadshehad2/status/1717271851884331179

Not long after I came to this position, Avishai Margalit, the Israeli political theorist, published a book called "The Decent Society." He argued, "A decent society is one whose institutions do not humiliate people....A decent society is one that fights conditions which

I wouldn't quite phrase it this way, but the recent debacle does confirm what I've argued for some time. The GOP is disorganized, undisciplined, unfocused, and weak, holding on by a thread. The real question is whether and how the left (not just the Dems) seizes this opportunity.

https://twitter.com/samhaselby/status/1716937633333711062

The speaker chaos is not a product of one faction or another but the larger breakdown in the party's ideological mission and coherence and its longterm victories over the left (broadly defined). When the left was still a force, the right was disciplined into coherence and unity.

Great thread and article. I'd wrinkle Greg's main claim in one way. Greg says elite legal right is succeeding while populist bomb-throwers are failing. Agreed. But adds that this happened in the past. There I'd complicate the claim (and, yes, this relates to the fascism debate).

https://twitter.com/ThePlumLineGS/status/1677282766457634816

Between the 1950s and 2000s, there was a synergy between the right-wing Impeach Earl Warren campaigns, the street violence from the right (which was far worse than it is today) and more elite legal and political campaigns for power. Rehnquist, Powell, Bork, Scalia, Thomas, etc.,

The problem w/Thomas isn't that he doesn't rely on the work of professional historians. In Tombs v Indiana, he has multiple cites to Eric Foner's book on Reconstruction. In McDonald v Chicago, he has cites to Stephen Kantrowitz's book on Tilman and Curtis's book on the 14th A. He

https://twitter.com/Stephen_A_West/status/1677026619104346113

even has multiple cites to Aptheker's book on slave rebellions (just mentioning that, since it's probably not widely known that Thomas cites him). Thomas is certainly ideologically opportunistic in his citations; he's a right-wing judge, after all. But the idea that the problem