In a move that experts say could significantly hurt Israel’s military readiness, pilots and other personnel issued a warning after Benjamin Netanyahu pressed ahead with a plan to limit judicial power.
More than a thousand pilots and other personnel in the Israeli Air Force reserve said on Friday that they would stop reporting for duty if the government pushes through a contentious plan next week to reduce judicial power without broader consensus.
In a joint letter released Friday, 1,142 Air Force reservists — including 235 fighter pilots, 98 transport plane pilots, 89 helicopter pilots and 173 drone operators — said they would not serve if the government proceeded with its plan to reduce the ways in which the Supreme Court can overrule the government.
They only read what is presented to them and as we all know the “official narrative” lacks a lot of details and includes outright lies. Any true telling of history would always result in “oh so we should probably do what the Soviets were doing… and improve it.” Instead the US being dominant after WWII has led to so much ridiculous and insane propaganda that can even the light suggestion to Americans to rethink their ideas on China and the USSR (and the US or Israel on the other side of that coin) is instantly smashed with YOURE A COMMIE FASCIST! Great world to live in…
I think this was all fairly well predicted by many people way before my time and smarter than me, but it seems kind of obvious that in a world of declining hegemony and in turn declining material conditions that the average workers of the world either push to the far left and embrace socialism or to the far right into fascism. It’s basically inevitable in the long run.
The problem is one ideology seeks more equality, fairness, etc. and to end exploitation by capitalists around the world so everyone can live lives of dignity and we can all work in our own and each other’s common interests of, you know, not destroying the world.
Fascism kind of plays on the same mindset of “someone is fucking me. But who?” and smashes in whatever ethnic or racial group is convenient to hate. Black people, “the Jews!”, Arabs (“Muslims” to Americans), South Americans and Mexicans, Chinese people, etc. Instead of the logic of cooperation towards a common goal it just sells cooperation but only within your assigned group for their betterment and the extermination of other groups.
given two paths basically, one which requires overcoming whatever baked-in resentment, fears, racism, whatever people all are raised to have in this world and the other which says “no, all that bullshit is actually correct. most basic primal urge to kill everyone else because you think you’ll die otherwise is correct.” Obviously there’s some amount of “some people are like that” because I don’t think I’ve ever really thought like that, but of course there’s also a learned and socially instilled component helped along by lack of education and straight up misinformation (propaganda) that can lead otherwise “good” people to just follow along, believe the zero sum game bullshit, and commit any atrocity in the imagined grand idea of defending themselves and their people from the others who they were purposely denied ever actually knowing and learning about.
We’re kind of at an unfortunate point now too where it seems like (and who really knows?) we’re heading towards some incredibly bad times. More wars and a shitload more deaths as the world transitions from US hegemony to sharing it with other nations, China being the biggest right now. It feels like we’re fighting an impossible battle of winning over minds already complacent to the right wing. The Marxist, et al. education in “the west” is essentially zero and the world can basically count on the US/EU to fight every step of progress along the way if any progress is to be made at all. I mean look at the whining over China who has explicitly pretty much stayed out of foreign politics. They have a few loans around the world and the west is in full-on baby crying mode. Just imagine where it’s likely headed (and this is not blaming China who has every right to do what any other nation does. The US/EU are clearly the ones in the wrong here).
So I dunno. Shit’s fucked, people are uneducated and falling for bullshit fascist shit, and the left seems unable to keep up with radicalizing people. Not for lack of trying or for lack of “being correct” but because of really too many reasons to go into… probably the chief reason being the fucking US lucked into its position post-WWII and that basically setup the world to get bent over and fucked by fascism sold under a different label. The US isn’t called “the fourth reich” for no good reason after all. I’ll stop rambling.
I enjoyed your rambling actually! Lots of good points there.
My own two pence is something that Yanis Varoufakis once said in an interview: leftists don’t win elections. This has always stayed with me because he is largely correct. The only times you had proper, true left socialist governments elected was immediately after WW2 (Attlee, Hatoyama), or during the great depression (FDR, and some extent Truman). The moment there is any prosperity of any kind, the world tilts back into greed and individualism. Only during times of existential threat does the ego of the average voter subsume enough to adopt a meaningful, collectivist attitude of actually cooperating and working together for the betterment of all. And yet, some of the most championed constructs of the 20th century came out of those leftist governments, such as social security in the US and the NHS in the UK.
But it’s just so weird to me that when times are anything but awful (literally mass starvation) everyone only focuses on themselves and their own enrichment, which is why outside of a global depression or world war, most voters elect from centre to the right, but rarely left. Even in China today, they’re hardly Bernie Sanders leftists anymore, much closer Andrew Carnegie style laizzez faire capitalists now.
I think the reason for this is because humans are fundamentally shitty creatures, right down to their chimpanzee DNA. We’re just not designed to work for a collective good and share resources equitably. And, because chimpanzee society is also based around a 1% top dog who controls 90% of the resources, so too do humans always build stratified societies where all power and wealth is held by some elite 1%. From Mesopotamia, to ancient Egypt, to Rome, to the middle ages, to today, it is always that there is some rich elite that own everything, and struggling peons who hate one another and are always looking for an excuse to fight someone and go to war.
Hence, I don’t think it’s necessarily about lack of education or propaganda or indoctrination. I think it’s more to do with biology and DNA itself. As a species, we’re sadly fucked, and setup to fail. And it will always be fascism, racism, and oligarchy which wins out, because that is who we are at an existential core.