How about an atheist perspective on israel v palestine?
I’ve traveled in the Middle East as an openly, ostentatiously angry atheist, so I drew to me the quiet dissidents in those societies, and I know the horrible mechanisms of totalitarian theocracy in a way Western liberals seem oblivious. I heard a tragicomic love story about the limp dick who ate pussy like a champ and the hooker with a clitoridectomy who couldn’t feel it.
There is no functional dissent in a totalitarian society. There’s no way the good people in russia could have prevented putin’s wars. There’s also no way the good people in the arab countries would be able to prevent their leadership finishing what the nazis started. The islamic leaders have been scapegoating israel since its inception, and are open about not just wanting a genocide, but playing the long game until america collapses and can’t defend the jews any more.
This plays into the hands of the israeli right wing, who make henry kissinger seem warm and cuddly by comparison. A nominal democracy, the good people in israel are trying their best to put the brakes on this shit, but it was just a couple months ago that their lords were using nonlethal military stuff (skunk water) against the general population to disrupt protests.
Now, my natural affiliation here would be with Carlin: any time a bunch of religious people want to kill each other, I’m a happy guy. But that’s a defense mechanism; it’s using dark humor to mask the fact that we, Carlin and I and most all the other atheists in the world, have incredible empathy for the death and destruction experienced by both sides of the conflict. The good people always outnumber the shitty violent ones, even in actual nazi germany I bet, but once the haters take control, it usually spirals into some sort of armageddonish conflict. Once the haters take control, the good people are all under the boot, and it generally takes outside intervention to remove the boot, otherwise it’s almost always a case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.
By the time you hit a bully, he’s already won. Remember this, people. You have to use language, loud and early, to mock the bully, insult the hater, draw him into an argument he can’t win, and be willing to get your fucking ass kicked to death over it. Tyler Durden showed the world how to win from the bottom in this fight. If a few people are willing to do that early, their society won’t have to fight big nasty wars.
KLJ touches on the subject in his book, vis-a-vie nazi punks in the SoCal punk rock scene.