Immediately after this she also says that short-term gains & geopolitical power (ie USA).
She just says that racism allows such a system to even exist.
What is her reasoning that racism allows the system to exist? It seems like a desire for geopolitical power could easily create the same situation without racism.
My understanding (with by words - just bcs I find it obvious):
Few people create & maintain the system actively, the rest of them/us just feed it money & don’t do anything when it’s killing children or exploiting the poorest countries on Earth.Racism, lack of compassion, the general idea that we (developed countries measured by GDP?) are automatically somehow something more just bcs we were born here & entitled to nice lives supported by a greater number of lives elsewhere, etc.
(To clarify, racism isn’t just the thing towards black people in USA, every nation has it’s own forms, and they are rarely based on color, usually it’s nationality. So it’s easier to say X country should have lower wages bcs it’s providing us cheap goods.)
Because not seeing the Palestinians as humans makes it easier to ignore the genocide
If people were being genocided, then that would be an issue. However, we are civilized enough in the West to realize that it is merely Muslim Arabs who are being killed. This makes the justification significantly easier to believe
because all things equal it’s easier to get your country to support funding genocide of the other
Sure. But does this additional ease move the needle from impossible to possible? My intuition is that it does not.
I mean yea, that’s usually how it goes. You start with the racism first to build an enemy. Use that as an excuse to gather power and manufacture consent. The genocide is just an after thought to the people in power but it’s part of the whole shebang.
My default position is that the average person is okay with genocide regardless of who is being genocided as long as those people are far away and don’t impact their lives. Caring about people you have never met is not a default human response.
that’s true until they see it on tv / in person
they are only far away if they are out of mind
but if you precondition your population to see them as vermin fist it softens the horror
I think it’s probably more the geopolitics, Isreal is in deep with the Military Industrial Complex, the US Intelligence Agencies, and the future plans the US has for the Middle East (namely the agreement between the US, Israel, the Saudis and India to create a trade passage through the area).
But yeah, if you look at Peter Thiel’s work with Israel’s intelligence R&D company Carbyne you’ll find US agencies near by…
…and lots of these shadey dealing go back generations and have been done by Republican and Democrat Presidents. I think it was Obama who agreed to give Israel 38 billion to buy US weapons - an agreement which basically made the US the sole external supplier for their munitions.
I suppose beyond that it’s historical, religious, and racial… But there’s more to it than that.
She explains exactly this, the meme just cut it all out.
youtube.com/watch?v=Hk1WEhO07Bw&t=759
Immediately after “racism” she also says that it’s for short-term gains & geopolitical power (ie USA).
Continuous racism is what allows such a system to even/still exist.
I mean, racism might make it easier for the US to push forward with less resistance, but the relationship with Israel has always seemed more steeped in religious/geopolitics than anything else. For the US they like having a strong tie to a nation centered in the middle east, and there are some weird Christians who believe that they can enable the second coming.
Also it’s brown people that are dying
You don’t need Israel for a trade passage. The US is trying to pivot away from the region to focus on East Asia, where China is. The US no longer needs the Middle East for strategic reasons as the US has developed its own Oil and Gas resources.
Israel is a liability for the US geopolitically. Of course there is a strong Israeli lobby and there is the intelligence ties, surveillance tech and the like. However i think this is more based on blackmail than a genuine need for the US to get this tech from Israel. The father of Ghislaine Maxwell, who ran the child rape circle with Epstein, had ties to Mossad and other intelligence agencies. It is quite plausible that Mossad has a lot of material on the people involved.
There’s also the concern that if support for Israel is dropped, an Iran-led coalition will go to war with them. Israel being attacked is unimaginable to a lot of people that grew up in the shadow of ww2.
I mean, it isn’t a concern so much as an obvious fact. If the West dropped support for Israel, Iran and its allies would be invading within the hour.
Iran real only enemy is the USA. Doea they really think that Iran want to crush the whole west?
It’s close enough for a soundbite or a headline.
she’s not wrong, if it were white people that were being killed there would be more reaction
heck, trump made up a white genocide in south Africa just to make them look bad
She’s not wrong, but also not 100% right. Racism plays a part, but there’s also a good helping of “I’ve got mine” along with a whole lot of money tired into the military-industrial complex
Another comment mentioned that she did, in fact, elaborate this right after
There’s a reason that class consciousness is social consciousness.
Eh, not necessarily. Class consciousness is important, but thinking that it completely overlaps with social consciousness not true. People compartmentalize things.
For example male black homophobes are common in America; Which is ironic because one would think that a black male would understand how it feels being a marginalized caste. Nevertheless, they do not transfer there own experience of racism with their own actions against homosexuals.
So my point is, being class conscious does not guarantee someone to become social conscious as well.
Being bad at one is what makes you bad at the other. Nazbols aren’t class conscious, the term means more than “vaguely aware that the rich run things and maybe they shouldn’t”
Restating your prior point in a different way doesn’t make it any more or less correct. The point is these two things seem to be independent from each other, which, if true, would already disprove the modified claim you are presenting.
The issue is, there exist plenty of people who are bad at both, good at both, and bad at one and good at the other. This pattern doesn’t support a strong connection between being class conscious and being socially conscious.
The thing about explaining simple math like x=y is that the slower, stubborn students that don’t know or understand how these letters can mean numbers usually just need it to be phrased a different way because they’re hung up on some irrelevancey.
The correct method is to actually articulate the irrelevancy; but that takes real work… Either that or perhaps the teacher doesn’t understand what the irrelevancy is, so instead, they resort to just repeating the same thing: not internalizing that perhaps the math isn’t as simple as they think.
Hell yeah. We’ve even got people who voted Trump despite illegal immigrants in their family, or being married to one because: “he’s only going to deport the bad ones”.
There’s also people who themselves came in the same way but eventually did get legal standing/citizenship yet are in full support of what’s going on now.
Remember how the world jumped to save insert long list of European countries during WW2 or the siege of Sarajevo?
The fact that both sides are the same race in this just makes it funnier
She’s right.
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the full quote, which is actually quite accurate and succinct:
“Because of racism, that’s the simple answer I would say. Racism, and uh, basically, desperately trying to defend a destructive deadly system, that systematically puts short term economic profit, and to maximize geopolitical power, over the well being of humans and the planet. And right now it’s very very difficult to morally defend that, it is impossible, but still, they are desperately trying which is… absurd is not the word, but there are no words to describe it.”
I love that Greta’s very existence triggers the right. You may not agree with her methods, but it’s undeniable that she gets attention on the issues she finds important. She’s doing more than me and anyone I know for issues I find important, and I admire her for that.
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It’s sad that this statement is true to the core, but I’ve seen statements and videos of Israelites literally claiming that Palestinians are not considered human. They are considered beneath, or less than human due to their belief, and that is how they are justifying their ethnic cleansing of the area.
Dehumanizing is always the first step. Male them less than human and the people will let you abuse them. Once they get used to that, you can demonize the next group, and it will be even easier to get the rubes on board.
It’s a damn injustice that they clipped that quote down to “racism”.
I mean…is it?
Sure, the extended quote gives more reason and specific examples and highlights the moral bankruptcy of an economic system which never benefitted anyone but its own elite, and now has to cannabilize its values and populace to perpetuate its own existence even as it erodes under the weight of its own demand for consumption and profit while shedding every ounce of legitimacy like a rabid dog shaking off fleas…
but if you weren’t raised as a middle class or above white person in the West, you already knew it was racism.
THIS is what you consider an injustice? Pathetic.
Go drink some water, pal. I thought it was a very well worded statement, and stripping it down like so really robbed it of a lot of its potency, imo. It’s fine to disagree with me, that’s your business, but to extrapolate that I consider this narrow quoting to be the injustice of injustices in this world is a little goddamn silly.
I don’t disagree with you; and I agree that it was well-worded. I just think it’s a pathetic use of the word.
I’m glad everyone is listening to her and not giving a shit about what you think
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If that’s what passes for an insult these days, I’ll happily take it! This world could use more people with vivid imaginations rather than blowhards who get bunched up over semantics.
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Ah yes, the self-righteous, condescending ideologue: the historical harbinger of progress and justice.
This is a naive way to look at a news article.
She may have elaborated further but do you really think the press is going print an essay over a sound bite? Especially on social media?
Greta has made longer statements on this, why not look them up before thinking you know something you don’t?
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Who benefits from her elaborating? I think the one word quote does an adequate job of naming the problem clearly and making it recognizable.
One word answers in a headline are almost always done with express intent of ragebaiting people on social media because it helps algorithms promote posts if people respond to them. Its not about clarity, its about ambiguity
You’re right about the intent, but it still doesn’t diminish what I said. Racism also goes a long way towards explaining the methods that Western media excuses to rationalize violence against the rest of the world (see: all the reporting about Israeli airstrikes in Iran or the anti-immigration protests in N. Ireland)
The sooner we call a spade a spade instead of arguing over specifics, the less people will die.
There are other factors. And they’re all rooted in racism.
Even the corruption of things like AIPAC. It’s racism weaponized via bribery and blackmail. I don’t know what AIPAC is called in other countries and don’t care. But I know it exists. And its all just racism.
There is no grey area here. There is no debate. There are no “buts” here. An illegal settler occupation is ethnically cleansing an indigenous population. There is good and evil. And the ones doing the slaughtering are evil. Categorically, ontologically, indisputably evil. Period.
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Okay, but the question is about why the world is not reporting it, not why Israel is doing it. Racism and secularism are the main culprits for the way it’s being reported.
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Yeah, no one is innocent here. No one. I don’t see Hamas genociding Israelites here though, do you? Secularism is for sure at play here. Christian nations are against the dirty Palestinian Muslims and their barbaric practices /s. They got most of their book from Judaism. They all worship the same fricking God though, Muslims included. You can’t make it make sense, and it never will to outsiders unfortunately. I am not uplifting anyone into the spotlight, but at least some people ha e actual morals.
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The correct word would be chauvinism: racism is chauvinism based on racial differences, but it could also be based on wealth or religion, on food preferences or anything arbitrary…
chauvinism is the root cause for all evil in the world
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I would argue that is misleading only because it removes the central operating mechanism of the West’s massive accumulation of wealth and domination of global politics; namely, the ideological belief that not only are Europeans superior, but that they are superior as a function of immutable, natural characteristics that can be elucidated through reason, intellect, and scientific inquiry and observation.
To cheapen the global Western project of white supremacy by simply calling it a derivative of chauvinism belittles the intentionality and institutionalization of the cultural project and lends credence to the idea that Europeans simply did what any other group would have done under the circumstances. Besides the apologist rhetoric apparent there, it also gives ammunition to the argument that the descendants of these people hold no responsibility for inheriting such a legacy, and therefore have no incentive to stop its perpetuation.
It is not belittling if i called an asshole not the correct type of asshole…
So if we ship the Palestinians to say Australia, and the Palestinians get support of money and weapons from a major superpower and then start to take land and resources from Australians and start to bomb them to dust. It will be ignored like how it is now?
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Because of the USA
Europe isn’t doing much either. Especially Germany and Italy stay on Israel’s side.
Germany at the very least are very overt about their “unwavering support for Israel” being wholly because they’re “the Jewish Nation”, which is about the purest Racist motivation possible.
One might claim, as others did, that for the US geostrategical concerns apply, but for Germany the only reason for their support of that nation whilst it murders Palestinian children is the ethnicity of the genociders.
it’s ironic they used to genocide jews and now by trying to not step on their toes again, they once again choose the side of facism and genocide, same for Italy
edit: removed accidental formatting
It’s doubly ironic that by insisting on the idea that a nation committing such a violent Genocide represents all Jews - and doing so against actual Jewish voices saying that “they do not represent us” - they’re implying that all the horrible actions commited in this Genocide are Jewish things to do.
So Germany is back at associating being a Jew with some of the most horrible things a person can do AND at telling Jews that they know better what the nature of being a Jew is than the actual people who are Jewish and deny that Israel represents them.
Instead of Humanism were the duty of compensation is to the actual victims independently of race, they anchored their theatre of making amends on good old race discrimination and racial prejudice (only supposedly “positive”) so naturally and as was bound to happen, ended up in their traditional racist tropes of “knowing better than Jews what beings Jew is” and “associating being a Jews with horrible actions such as murdering babies”.
The folklore and symbology of Nazism might have been made illegal, but the way of thinking about other people as nothing more than members of races who should be treated differently depending on race, and which is the foundation of Nazism, is alive, well, and continuing to be promoted.
So, racism.
$$ Money $$
There’s no money in helping Gaza.
That’s only kind of true. There’s a lot of money that could be found in funding Gaza. As someone made a point elsewhere in this thread. Money was made in Ukraine due to us funding it and some creative accounting, but the smart money move was to allow Russia to invade and save money/exploit off the back of the chaos.
In an almost identical way the U.S. could have funded Gaza and made money dragging out the war, but it didn’t happen because of decades of entrenched racism and Zionism.
There was no money in helping Ukraine, yet it was done. 100% lack of optics due to racism.
Not directly, but by sending weapons etc to Ukraine, the US can basically wage war against Russia with no casualties of their own, while replacing the old stuff they send with new stuff, as well as justifying more military spending in the budget. For the right people, there’s plenty of profits to be made.
I would say “interests at large” rather than dollars.
Ukraine is military strategic interest (nobody in Europe wants to have Russia to randomly decide to start a war with an EU country)
In Middle East (with oil) is dollars
In Taiwan is military strategic interest
On the other side of the spectrum? Myanmar, Gaza, random African conflicts, etc
There’s rare earth minerals.
Gaza has nothing other than beachfront real estate, but you got to remove them in order to take advantage of that.
Ukraine is one of the worlds bread baskets and critical to global infrastructure. There was very much money in helping Ukraine.
And yet, as soon as Trump took office they stopped helping ukraine. Your argument is shit, mate.
Because Trump is a Russian asset and defunding Ukraine benefits Putin.
Your basic understanding of global politics is shit, mate.
Oh, i thought it was only racism. My bad, cant believe where i got that idea from.
It’s your lack of basic reading comprehension. See, she said “racism”, not “ONLY BECAUSE OF racism”.
See those extra words? They modify the context.
Oh boy, now I have to define context…
Oh boy. If you they would have put that into their argument so that it wasn’t shit 😄
The word you’re actually looking for is xenophobic, not racism. Xenophobia explains the decisionmaking of states where the culture is at odds.
I don’t think that’s the main reason. Racism is probably a factor, but the main reason is imperialism. Israel benefits The U.S. and NATO strategically. Even if Gazans were, say, russian-speaking Cossacks instead, I think the situation would not be terribly different.
But imperialism IS racist at it’s core though. The justification historically (and implicitly today) is these people are better off either dead or under our control, because they don’t share our European bloodli- I mean values.
What was the motivation when the Aztecs or Mongolians did it?
The motivation is not ethnicity. It’s resources.
Always has been.
Yeah, racism is a huge impetus for imperialism, sure. But if for some reason Gazans gradually became white over the past 75 years, I don’t think the imperialism would stop now. The log’s rolling.
Yeah fair enough. There’s just too much momentum.
Israel is the West’s ally so the West backs Israel
Ethics are only used to draw support to your side, they don’t really exist
Israel is an abusive relationship, they’re constantly killing us civilians and soldiers, and selling our stuff to russia
Systemic is an important word to include. Systemic racism.
Sounds right?.. Right?
Also money and power.
Brought to you by, racism (nepotism too to another degree)
I feel like she is a bit naive about that. Racism is like a really big driving force that has lead us to where we are today, and it is still a huge part of the problem. But even if you snapped racism out of existence right now, I think that specifically the Gaza situation would only slightly improve. I think there are a few really critical things that you would also need to eliminate:
- The biggest driving force in that area is religion, both Christianity and Judaism in Israel and the US (not all of them, but a lot of powerful parts of them) really want Jerusalem and Gaza as they are both important parts of the return of the Messiah if I remember correctly
- Second and very close to first is power. For the US Israel is the Middle East HQ, supporting the Israeli government is basically non-negotiable. Only if the US government changes to one with actual morals (Yeah right) will they actually go against Israel. And for Israel it is currently with a government built on corruption that leans heavily towards extreme right and religious parties.
- The rest are money, racism, and other common culprits.
I truly believe that if tomorrow racism was gone there would be very little difference in the overall situation, and this is not to reduce from fact that racism is a huge reason of how we got here.
I don’t know why you are being downvoted because your analysis is on point. Yes it is racism, mainly on the US part, but religion on Israel part.
However, we should note that Israel treats semitic jews as sub-jews. So it’s still racism, at its core.
Not sure if it is just racism here in NL or because the Ukraine war is more important for us here since it is a lot closer and more relevant than us.
The bullshit in the US is also something we have a bigger impact on than the war in Gaza even though we will have new elections soon.
AIPAC
What does that mean?
Money for US politicians, weapons for Israel and more dead palestinians.
American Israeli Political Action Committee - a very right wing group that backs politicos seeking election while ensuring the strings attached include unquestioning support for Israel.
Vote for non aipac politicians
Aipac’s sole job is to make that either impossible or unlikely to work. They’re very good at that.
They make it harder but everybody who know how to use internet can educate itself and vote for the right people
Entirely true, assuming you can find enough politicians in your voting area that can’t be bought with money and power.
Nah. It’s a war of religion, so even more stupid. Christians think this is all signs of the End Times and are counting on the rapture.
That just fuc…
looks around
Ya know, I’m not gonna count that out just yet.
Then why are they not preventing the objectively abhorrent genocide in Burma that even China has assisted to prevent?
Because they don’t give a fuck?
Judaism and Islam don’t make good neighbors? Who knew
The problem isn’t Judaism, the problem is white colonialism.
