• 0 Posts
  • 467 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 4th, 2025

help-circle




  • but it was the main one putting future united humanity, progress, science, equality, humanism and secularism into the center of its cosmology

    Just llike with many people, what they say and what they do can be two very different things.

    In the USSR’s case, they talked socialism while being totalitarian state capitalists. This was even noted at the time of the Russian revolution by people such as Rosa Luxemburg. And in terms of its foreign policy, they talked internationalism and cooperation while carrying on the legacy of Russian imperialism.

    When it failed, all those things listed also got a hit.

    All those things also took a hit at the end of WW1, in the Great Depression, and during WW2. Nobody who was paying attention believed the Russian bullshit, before or after the collapse of the Communist Party’s rule. The double-dealing in the Spanish Civil War, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the crushing of the Prague Spring, and many other events put paid to that naivety.











  • one lesson on Israelite history

    If you regard the Old Testament as history, the violence is probably exaggerated because of it being written by nationalistic zealots. It almost certainly also exaggerates the scale of Israel’s conquests. They were never more than a minor force in the region, not much more than a city-state. Other ancient national epics are just as bloodthirsty and just as unreliable.

    Canaanites, now Palestinians

    I’m pretty sure the Palestinians got their name from the Philistines. In Arabic, the place is still called Falasteen and the people Falasteeni.

    That doesn’t say anything about descent, though. The genetic evidence is that the people in Palestine now are genetically quite similar to people in Palestine in ancient times. The population has been pretty stable, despite wars, conquests and language changes. Modern Palestinian people are also closely related to Jewish people-- probably the closest of any non-Jewish group.

    They’re the OG evil

    Far from uniquely so. The whole region was prone to genocidal wars, enslavement of whole nations, and general chaos and brutality. Most other “advanced” societies 2500 years ago weren’t much better, at least not for long.

    I think the bigger question is why those primitive tribal values should be considered a guide to how we live now.