The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.

It's from this 1980 article by James Baldwin

Notes on the House of Bondage | The Nation.

[Editor's note] In this piece (from the November 1, 1980, issue), Baldwin sheds light on the state of America by surveying the dispiriting array of candidates for the 1980 presidential race.

There's more that I could quote because he rants as is his nature but this is creepy enough.

The last paragraph feels like he copy and pasted it from The Onion.

archive.today • Opinion | Why Israel Is Acting This Way - The New York Times

By Thomas L. Friedman

[...]

So Hamas essentially said, “OK, Jews, we will go where we have never gone before. We will launch an all-out attack from Gaza that won’t stop with soldiers but will murder your grandparents and slaughter your babies. We know it’s crazy, but we are willing to risk it to force you to outcrazy us, with the hope that the fires will burn up all Arab-Israeli normalization in the process.”

Yes, if you think Israel is now crazy, it is because Hamas punched it in the face, humiliated it and then poked out one eye. So now Israel believes it must restore its deterrence by proving that it can outcrazy Hamas’s latest craziness.

Israel will apply Hama Rules — a term I coined years ago to describe the strategy deployed in 1982 by Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, when Hamas’s political forefathers, the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria, tried to topple Assad’s secular regime by starting a rebellion in the city of Hama.

Assad pounded the Brotherhood’s neighborhoods in Hama relentlessly for days, letting no one out, and brought in bulldozers and leveled it as flat as a parking lot, killing some 20,000 of his own people in the process. I walked on that rubble weeks later. An Arab leader I know told me privately how, afterward, Assad laconically shrugged when he was asked about it: “People live. People die.”

Welcome to the Middle East. This is not like a border dispute between Norway and Sweden or a heated debate in Harvard Yard. Lord, how I wish that it were, but it’s not.

In real current news, I'm watching the Chomsky Foucault debate. Here it is summarized

🤓 v

Been unable to be near a pc or tv today I bet I've missed a lot...

150 more to go! KEEP POSTING LADS!

Interview (mostly prior to the breakout from Gaza, but some was added about it prior to publication) with an anarchist from Jaffa on the escalation in Palestine and Israeli repression: https://crimethinc.com/2023/10/08/a-nuclear-superpower-and-a-dispossessed-people-an-anarchist-from-jaffa-on-the-violence-in-palestine-and-israeli-repression

A couple of notable excerpts:

The central point of contention within Israeli society, and the one getting most attention internationally, is the government’s assault on the judiciary—but that is an aesthetic rift, veiled as a struggle for democracy. In truth, this is an internal dispute over how to best manage and maintain Jewish supremacy, which enjoys near wall-to-wall support within Israeli society, also among so-called liberals.

The specific changes that the current coalition seeks to enforce will probably render the courts weaker and slightly less liberal, but the courts have never been defenders of our rights, let alone Palestinian rights, nor inhibiters of government policies. Not even a little. The Israeli judiciary is and always has been a fundamental cornerstone of Israeli colonialism between the river and the sea; it has been essential in enabling Zionist policies and providing the system around it with a reputable liberal legal guise. Israel depends on its ability to portray and market itself as a so-called vibrant democracy. A weaker judiciary might carry some harm, but I believe the prospect of a perceived victory by the protest movement against it poses an even greater danger to the overall struggle against colonialism and apartheid.

The protest movement is dominated by an amalgamation of military reservists, former senior members of Israel’s notorious secret police, the Shin Bet [Israel’s internal security service], economic liberals, and various other Zionist and nationalistic groups. There are some more radical elements involved, but their role and influence are abysmal. The Israeli flag is made up of Jewish symbols, and is an emblem of Jewish exclusiveness and supremacy, and it is no coincidence that it is the protest movement’s most prominent symbol. These groups are wedded to the idea of Israel being a democracy, and to the idea that Jewish supremacy does not contradict this. By and large, this is also the most prevalent sentiment among the masses participating in the protests. Any victory of that movement will be used to strengthen the misguided and dangerous notion that Israeli democracy has prevailed, wrongly suggesting that there was an Israeli democracy to begin with.

I feel that in a settler-colonial situation like the one in Palestine, our role is not, and should not be, that of moderates within the settler society. We must reject this society, its point of view, its internal politics altogether. We must understand that the power disparity means that change cannot come from within Israeli society. Our role is to weaken it, to create splits, to sow division, to resist outright. In a time of contention, we must not try to find our way into Israeli society, but away from it and into the struggle against it.

Free brought up the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion as an example of how hope or the prospect of success isn’t a criterion for struggle and resistance. That hit home back then, and still does now.

The moral of the story is to organize and build movements of resistance even when everything seems lost. My view of anarchism isn’t utopian. In my eyes, every victory, every success, must be immediately perceived as a failure, as a power structure to struggle against and take down. They say perfect is the enemy of good, but that’s only because they lack any imagination and good is never good enough. Imperfection is a constant, but we just keep on fighting, turning victory into defeat into struggle at every turn.

My response to the charges and facts described in the indictment is irrelevant. Since the very manner in which this trial is conducted is an expression of Israeli apartheid, cooperation would be complacency. For over twenty years I have devoted my time to fight Israel’s colonial rule, and I am unwilling and unable to cooperate with it now, even if my decision means being put behind bars again.

Therefore, despite having no intention to admit to something I did not do, I will not question the state’s witnesses, call any on my behalf or testify myself; I will not challenge the prosecution’s so-called evidence, nor will I provide any disproving evidence of my own. Israeli colonialism and its apartheid regime are illegitimate at their core. This court is illegitimate. The proceedings in this case, which supplement other proceedings taking place in the parallel and illegitimate military court, whose raison d’être is the suppression of resistance, are all illegitimate. The only reasonable response to this indictment, to this reality, is the struggle for liberty and liberation. No voice is louder than the voice of the uprising!