View source for BHoP 003 Colonial Semi-Shemitism and other Sordid Historical Anomalies

[https://abriefhistoryofpower.com/bhop003-colonial-semi-shemitism-and-other-sordid-historical-anomalies/ BHoP#003 Colonial Semi-Shemitism and other Sordid Historical Anomalies]

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[[Jonathan Fisk]] (JF) [[Adam Koontz]] (AK)

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=== Transcript ===

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[JF]: That's sometimes right.

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[JF]: Reverend Pastor Jonathan Fisk here with the good Dr. Reverend Adam Koontz.

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[JF]: Two white guys talking about a brief history of power, trying to figure out where we stand in the present age and what on earth to make of it.

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[JF]: We've already addressed the fact that the planet's run by lizard men.

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[JF]: We have addressed the fact that human civilization more or less lives from revolution to revolution, bloody waging of death from below to above, back and forth, all in the name of freedom for all that ends up in Caesar, Caesar, and then let's kill Caesar too.

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[JF]: So what else can we possibly talk about that could be more offensive than all of this today?

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[JF]: I think the question, when is a Jew not a Jew, might be about as offensive as we can get, especially—I mean, honestly, Adam, anti-Semitism is on the rise in New York particularly, in New York City particularly, against what I would otherwise call not the Jews who are running New York, right?

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[JF]: These are culturally

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[JF]: enclavish groups of people, right?

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[JF]: Whether they are wealthy or not, I don't know.

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[JF]: I don't care.

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[JF]: But there is a track record of violence escalated in the last two years or so within New York with that actual anti-Semitism, which is where I really want to go in this conversation.

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[JF]: So there's my opening lob.

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[JF]: I'm offensive.

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[JF]: What about you?

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[AK]: Well, and when you're talking about New York, I mean specifically Brooklyn, the issue there is that anti-Semitism is maybe not even specific to the fact, or it's at least intermixed with something that is not specifically ethnic.

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[AK]: So anti-Semitism doesn't generally involve all the sons of Shem, which would include Arabs and Middle Easterners to various degrees.

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[AK]: It's usually specifically about Jews, which is generally, although not always, which we're going to talk about, an ethnic issue.

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[AK]: I think in Brooklyn, it's also mixed with something that is distinct, but not entirely separate from ethnicity, which is race.

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[AK]: So when you're talking about development and gentrification in Brooklyn, or communal tension in Brooklyn between blacks, largely American blacks, that's an ethnic,

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[AK]: distinction, not necessarily African immigrant Blacks, but American Blacks and Jews, you also have another issue, which may or may not actually be recognized by those Jews as pertinent, which is that they are understood by the Blacks as white.

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[AK]: And so the strife there is racial, at least from one side, and also ethnic and also religious on top of that.

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[JF]: That gets to my favorite thing in all of this, is what does it even mean to be white?

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[JF]: And for me particularly, thinking about, again, so anti-Semitism comes from the belief that they're all descended from this guy named Shem at a certain point.

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[JF]: And I'm like, cool with that.

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[JF]: I'm like, okay, I agree with your heritage.

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[JF]: So in that heritage, there are some others involved.

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[JF]: There's some Hamites and there's some Japhethites.

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[JF]: And the thing is that the only one that would not be white would be the Hamites, basically.

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[JF]: You could then lump some, if you can find a pure Shemite today, and that's the question I have a little bit again, right, is where is Shemitism today?

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[JF]: Because you mentioned offhandedly that there are at least pockets of Judaism that are not perhaps ethnically Jewish, right?

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[AK]: Possibly.

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[AK]: So, okay, so let's separate this out.

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[JF]: Yeah, it's deep and weird.

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[AK]: Okay.

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[AK]: On one level, there's the way that the early chapters of Genesis, which we've discussed before, discuss the human family after the flood, right?

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[AK]: So the Bible teaches that everyone is basically human, and sometimes that's used rhetorically.

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[AK]: I think

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[AK]: to some extent unhelpfully, but I know why people say it, that there's only one race, the human race.

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[AK]: Okay, that's fine.

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[AK]: And they're getting that from the idea that everyone has some sort of unity and the Bible builds the fact that everyone should listen to the capital T truth on the basis of we're all human.

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[AK]: Okay, there's three different ways of dividing that up based on the three sons of Noah and then their descendants.

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[AK]: There's ways in which that's really helpful.

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[AK]: Like if you're trying to say, this is why you shouldn't just kill people randomly for their ethnic characteristics or where they're from or what language they speak, because they're all human and you can defend that easily from a Christian point of view.

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[justification]: And you're all family, effectively.

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[AK]: Yeah, you're all effectively, yes, right.

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[AK]: The, the issue of race I think is is different from that the way it's been discussed and I don't want to.

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[AK]: whether as a Christian or just a thinking person, ignore the fact that that discussion is something different from saying we're all human.

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[AK]: I would say that terms like white or black or yellow, not really used anymore, brown definitely used today.

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[AK]: These are all basically from coming into contact with each other.

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[AK]: And there are terms like those racial terms that have happened in the past

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[AK]: But the contact, the levels of human contact have increased massively in the past 500 years and especially in the past 200 years.

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[AK]: And so a term like white is generally simply a term for capturing somebody who is European.

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[AK]: It's a term that comes from contact between people that historically, because of limited travel and limited communication,

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[AK]: didn't know anything about each other.

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[JF]: Right.

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[JF]: So the word describes initially contact with a certain edge of what was what we would call Japhethite culture, you could call it Indo-European culture, not Indo, yeah, yeah, yeah, Eurasian culture.

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[AK]: Yeah, Indo-European.

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[JF]: Eurasian culture, right?

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[JF]: And I associate, in my mind, Japhethites with the Khans of Central Asia now.

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[JF]: So, you know, all the cultures that are around that, but the

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[JF]: they could all be seen as white by those who lived in Africa if they ran into each other.

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[JF]: But the place where it really happened was in this triangle of the slave trade, and that language of white then became applied to the white-black relationship.

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[JF]: And now what I think is so fascinating is that that language is finding its way back all the way through these different cultures into the Shemites, right?

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[JF]: Into a completely different people group, and being applied to them as if

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[JF]: as if there were this kind of universal ethnicity that we could divide each other with.

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[JF]: And there's not.

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[JF]: Even the Shammites, the Japhethites, and the Hammites are all sons of Noah, in my mind.

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[JF]: So we all are from the same primordial eve.

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[JF]: I don't know if you want to say it that way.

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[AK]: Right, so I would say race is only helpful, it's a very crude tool.

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[JF]: Yes.

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[AK]: So I would say that using race is sort of like you wanna dig a hole, race is like using a long stick.

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[AK]: It's gonna dig you a hole faster than using your hands, but it's not as good as a shovel.

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[AK]: And the shovel, I would say, as far as people groups and how do human beings think of one another and human differences, I would say that what we usually call ethnicity is much more helpful

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[AK]: and exact and clean than using race.

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[AK]: So an example would be if I'm classified as white, that's not really based on my ethnicity, which we've talked about before, that's not really like even ambiguous in the same sense that, you know, Arabs, Shemites, Middle Easterners, but not Jews, Arabs are usually classified, have been historically by the US census as white.

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[JF]: I didn't know that.

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[JF]: Wow.

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[JF]: So again, wow.

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[JF]: Keep going.

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[AK]: Because the US historically didn't need a bunch of different categories.

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[AK]: The whites were largely from Northwestern Europe.

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[AK]: The blacks were largely from West Africa.

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[AK]: Indians and Hispanics, Hispanic being a white term for Latin Americans, they have all their own classifications, were statistically negligible historically for the census.

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[AK]: Arabs just get kind of lumped under white.

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[AK]: So the difference between, say, Jews and Arabs, which is really, really important in Israel, doesn't matter for the U.S.

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[AK]: Census historically.

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[AK]: And that's actually because race is a very crude way of classifying.

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[AK]: Ethnicity is more helpful.

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[AK]: It's more helpful to know, for instance, that the U.S.

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[AK]: was largely Northwestern European, and that's why Arab and difference between Jew and Arab didn't matter.

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[JF]: See, that's where I like the word lineage for this a lot.

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[JF]: Ethnicity, I still think it's tied to the race word, although I'm going to advocate for a second that if you are a Christian, you cannot escape this because the word ethnicity, ethne, is in the scriptures.

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[JF]: It's not quite the same.

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[JF]: It means everyone is not a Jew.

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[JF]: Like, literally, everyone is not a Jew.

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[AK]: It's the meaning of the word, and it's the Jewish word for that.

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[AK]: So it's their pejorative against us, but it is the word ethne in Greek that then comes down to us to describe distinctions between peoples, basically.

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[AK]: I mean, so you know what it is.

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[AK]: Yeah.

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[AK]: And from the perspective of the people who largely write the Bible, who are ethnically largely homogenous, they're Jews.

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[AK]: Although that's not their word for themselves, which I'm going to talk about later.

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[AK]: they're Jews, it gets the job done.

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[AK]: That's the point.

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[AK]: I mean, a lot of things that feel pejorative if you're not from that group are simply crude tools because you don't need anything better.

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[AK]: So if a stick gets the job done, you don't need to invent a shovel.

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[AK]: If, for instance, if you grow up in a small town, you know when people aren't from your small town.

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[AK]: It doesn't really matter where they're actually from.

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[AK]: It only matters that they're not from there.

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[AK]: And the term like Jew versus Gentile or Greek versus barbarian, which the Greeks really need when they start expanding outward, gets the job done.

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[JF]: We should use that one.

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[JF]: A civilized versus a barbarian is one I'm going to be using a lot these days.

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[JF]: You can't argue with a barbarian.

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[JF]: You cannot argue with a barbarian.

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[JF]: That is a fact.

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[JF]: And so when someone is just going to shout at you, that's what they're deciding they're going to be.

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[JF]: You had another good one there too.

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[JF]: So let's take this toward the more, well, it's the direction you kind of just brought up.

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[JF]: So when is a Jew really not a Jew in the sense of the Bible?

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[JF]: And what the Bible says, when did the Jews become the Jews in the sense of the Bible?

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[JF]: And then eventually where we're going a little bit is what does that have to do with the Quakers?

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[JF]: But we'll see if we can fit that in later.

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[AK]: Let me do the Quakers first because I think the Quakers are much harder to talk about ethnically because they are much less ethnically self-aware than Jews, either in the past or today.

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[AK]: Quakers, if you read a really interesting book about early America called Albion Seed, seed being a very biblical word to talk about things like lineage, Albion Seed, David Hackett Fisher, who's just a historian of early America, talks about the different streams of British ethnicity that predominate in early America.

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[AK]: Early America is like 90% British,

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[AK]: European, Caucasian, Japhethite, whatever word you want to use.

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[AK]: I find Caucasian to be probably the most useless.

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[AK]: But anyway.

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[JF]: I like Hussar.

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[JF]: Can we just call ourselves Hussars while we're at it?

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[JF]: IF we're going to talk about Caucasians.

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[AK]: Well, I would prefer, based on their kind of awesome reputation among ancient peoples, I would prefer Scythian.

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[JF]: Oh, there you go.

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[JF]: I'm with you.

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[JF]: I'm fully with you.

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[JF]: Yes, absolutely.

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[AK]: Everyone's scared of them.

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[AK]: And when the Greeks want to feel free, they leave the claustrophobia of the city-state and they'll go to live for six months with the Scythians who ride horses and drink raw milk, right?

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[justification]: Yes.

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[JF]: And eat the blood of their horses and are also known in other places as the Uman Manda, which is absolutely awesome.

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[AK]: It's good.

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[JF]: Yeah.

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[JF]: Yeah, the cons, it's the cons.

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[JF]: The Japhethites are the cons, and there's no reason not to be happy that that happened.

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[JF]: Then again, it explains so much of history in such evil ways, though.

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[JF]: It's kind of scary, Adam, but let's not go that way.

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[JF]: Let's go back to the Quakers.

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[JF]: It's easy to pick on them.

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[AK]: So the Quakers are one of the four streams that Fisher says are really important in early America.

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[AK]: The other three being Virginia planters, who are from southern England, the Scots-Irish, who form Appalachia, and then a lot of the South.

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[AK]: and then also New England Puritans.

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[AK]: The Quakers are basically entirely from northern England, specifically northwestern England, an area with very heavy Viking influence genetically, something we can now know, and they have always had a different approach to religion, to attachment to the rest of England, and that gets transferred here.

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[AK]: the really difficult thing about Quakers is that ideologically they can't really admit that because of this really kind of flat understanding of being human that says everyone has light inside him and he just needs to wake up to it.

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[JF]: Let's flip that for a second, let's dwell on that for just a second.

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[JF]: So what you're saying, this is where the Quakers are just like the Jews and it's really really weird.

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[JF]: They have a

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[JF]: race and ethnicity, a lineage that is also a religion.

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[JF]: There's not a lot of these.

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[JF]: There really aren't that many of these.

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[JF]: I mean, caste Hinduism, I suppose, right?

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[JF]: And then Judaism very much.

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[JF]: So that fact, and that they don't maybe know this,

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[JF]: That's your point, right?

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[AK]: I mean, yeah, in a way it's kind of like early Islam, where it's very definitely Arab, but it can't really admit to itself that it is, right?

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[AK]: Christianity, like Orthodox Christianity, by virtue of being a religion that translates incessantly in order to communicate, can admit that there are components to living that are ethnically, culturally, linguistically specific.

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[AK]: Quakerism can't do that.

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[AK]: So for instance, they'll send a woman to preach to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

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[AK]: She doesn't know Turkish.

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[AK]: She doesn't know Arabic.

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[AK]: She's a woman.

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[AK]: And she's going to go preach to this guy.

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[AK]: Obviously, it doesn't work.

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[AK]: They also send women to preach in early New England.

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[AK]: Those women, bad things happen to them.

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[JF]: That's not among the native peoples, or the indigenous peoples?

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[AK]: No, among the Puritans.

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[JF]: Oh, the Quakers are going to the Puritans.

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[AK]: The Quakers are going to the Puritans.

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[AK]: Yes, exactly.

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[JF]: Yeah.

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[JF]: Awesome.

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[AK]: Yeah.

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[AK]: Well, this is why Samuel Johnson in the 18th century makes this remark about a woman preaching is like seeing a dog walking.

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[AK]: You're amazed that it's even happening.

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[AK]: And the reason that he says that is because of Quakers.

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[JF]: Huh.

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[JF]: Right, right.

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[JF]: Which again, let's back up.

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[JF]: So you're quoting someone who is very pejoratively rude in the way he described women, the way we would talk today.

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[JF]: But he was writing long, long ago about something that we—

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[JF]: If we transport it back, then you would never find this anywhere except among the Quakers.

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[JF]: And it has to do with this central belief of theirs that all people are good.

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[JF]: And it's not just a little bit of a belief.

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[JF]: It's so deep into the center of what they believe that it is everything that they do, pacifism,

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[JF]: Is it pacifism to the absolute nth degree of it?

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[JF]: And yet somehow then that is a major influence on the Americana right now too, right?

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[JF]: Because that's part of why we're talking about this.

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[JF]: It's the streams of America.

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[AK]: Right, because what is kind of strange if you follow American history is that things that Quakers are professing in like the 17th century end up being normal in the modern world.

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[AK]: So women being preachers.

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[JF]: Yes.

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[AK]: Everyone being thought of as essentially the same in basically every way that matters.

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[AK]: Every culture being sort of flat and everyone being essentially the same and wanting the same things in life.

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[AK]: Pacifism being obviously the best thing.

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[AK]: Violence never, ever, ever, ever being good or even... 

[JF] And all of these are tenets of the Quaker religion that did not exist... 

[AK] From the first.

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[JF]: What's that?

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[AK]: Yeah, from the first.

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[JF]: Yeah.

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[JF]: And they did not exist as normative in any place in the world except for among the Quakers.

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[JF]: But now they are normative in Western spreading conglomerate American civilization, which doesn't necessarily believe all these things all the time.

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[JF]: But it certainly is a major, I mean, all the things that you just said, we hear people say all the time, and they're assumed to be true.

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[JF]: And if you would question them, you'd almost be suspect.

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[AK]: Well, we kind of like, for instance, I mean, lots of Christians assume that complete religious freedom is normal and natural and even what the Bible teaches.

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[AK]: And in the 17th century, basically only the Quakers think that.

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[AK]: So they are in many ways the architects of the modern West.

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[JF]: But then they have this interaction with those northeastern Puritans, which we've talked about before, how so much of America is explained by the Puritan city on a hill mentality and then the southern British, the actual colonized – colonies for the trade, right?
 
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[JF]: I'd be interested to hear at some point in the future how that ties in, how the Scotch-Irish tie in.

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[JF]: I mean, let's see if we can move from the Quakers a little bit into the similarities between them and colonial Israel for the sake of, again, brief history of power.

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[JF]: If you want to understand what's going on in the world today, you have to understand the USA.

17:26.509 --> 17:28.229
[JF]: You have to understand the nation state of Israel.

17:28.249 --> 17:30.691
[JF]: And then from there, you got to understand everybody that doesn't like that.

17:31.571 --> 17:32.572
[JF]: Right.

17:32.612 --> 17:33.493
[JF]: So this is where we're going.

17:33.553 --> 17:33.733
[JF]: Yeah.

17:34.414 --> 17:40.779
[AK]: I mean, a lot of people will say, oh, you know, and Ronald Reagan is doing this as late as the 1980s.

17:41.180 --> 17:42.501
[AK]: America is a city on a hill.

17:42.821 --> 17:45.083
[AK]: Puritans say that about themselves in early New England.

17:45.684 --> 17:51.128
[AK]: There are many ways in which early America tries to resemble biblical Israel.

17:51.869 --> 17:56.992
[AK]: I would say that the Quakers are important because they resemble the Jews as they actually are in the modern world.

17:57.073 --> 18:00.495
[AK]: That is, they're not terribly open to conversion.

18:00.915 --> 18:12.163
[AK]: They are a relatively small group of people in almost every society, but because of their success in many ways, especially in business, both Quakers and Jews, they're tremendously influential on what that society comes to look like.

18:12.703 --> 18:19.367
[AK]: The big difference is that the Quakers are not ethnically self-aware or when they are, it's not really that big of a deal.

18:19.528 --> 18:21.629
[AK]: So they tend to go out of existence.

18:22.109 --> 18:27.952
[AK]: I attended an undergraduate institution that was founded for Quakers, by Quakers, for Quakers to meet each other.

18:27.993 --> 18:30.074
[AK]: It still calls itself the Quaker Matchbox.

18:30.534 --> 18:32.715
[AK]: That's where Quakers get matched up and have Quaker babies.

18:32.755 --> 18:34.336
[AK]: That basically doesn't happen anymore.

18:34.496 --> 18:35.237
[AK]: They don't exist.

18:35.797 --> 18:39.159
[AK]: There will be like one to two Quakers in every class of 300 some kids.

18:39.539 --> 18:40.259
[AK]: They don't exist.

18:41.360 --> 18:44.622
[JF]: But they do exist as a people group out on the farm still, correct?

18:45.602 --> 18:45.763
[AK]: Nope.

18:46.383 --> 18:46.563
[JF]: Nope?

18:46.603 --> 18:47.964
[JF]: Because I'd heard that they've been expanding.

18:48.978 --> 18:50.759
[AK]: No, I mean the Amish, not the Quakers.

18:50.779 --> 18:51.239
[JF]: Oh, you're right.

18:51.279 --> 18:51.979
[JF]: The Amish, not the Quakers.

18:51.999 --> 18:53.119
[JF]: You're right.

18:53.139 --> 18:54.119
[JF]: But their ideology went on.

18:54.159 --> 19:08.182
[JF]: So this is the question for both, in my mind, for both the city-on-the-hill mentality of the Puritans as Protestants, and I would say as heretics a little bit, really on the edge of it, and the Quakers definitely heretics in the Christian sense.

19:08.202 --> 19:14.364
[JF]: So this is not a Christian movement, but it's language from the Bible that was infused into their vision of the future civilization on this rock.

19:14.904 --> 19:15.244
[JF]: Right.

19:15.665 --> 19:22.331
[JF]: And that reality continues to be something that impacts us today with religious fervor in this country.

19:22.431 --> 19:27.657
[JF]: So did the Quakers really go away or did they just become what we are?

19:27.717 --> 19:28.377
[JF]: We just.

19:29.520 --> 19:34.401
[JF]: Puritanical Quakers that are really protecting the slave trade.

19:34.542 --> 19:36.822
[JF]: Oh, that's a scary question, Adam.

19:37.182 --> 19:39.123
[JF]: That's a very scary—did I ask that?

19:39.143 --> 19:40.243
[JF]: Are we going to publish this?

19:40.903 --> 19:41.784
[JF]: Is this deep state?

19:41.864 --> 19:42.884
[JF]: I'm not going deep state.

19:42.904 --> 19:54.728
[AK]: I would say that the modern West, including America, but not limited to America, has Puritan self-confidence in its own righteousness with Quaker beliefs.

19:55.648 --> 19:57.068
[AK]: It doesn't have Puritan beliefs.

19:57.128 --> 19:58.189
[AK]: It has Quaker beliefs.

19:58.309 --> 19:58.709
[JF]: Interesting.

19:59.864 --> 20:02.626
[JF]: And so that is run by the money.

20:02.646 --> 20:03.426
[JF]: That's my final.

20:03.566 --> 20:05.488
[JF]: There's three is run by the money, right?

20:06.208 --> 20:06.788
[AK]: OK, it is.

20:07.109 --> 20:18.255
[AK]: It's run by money because one of the things that is sort of a lie about the thoroughgoing egalitarianism of Quakers in the past and today is that somehow we will all be the same.

20:19.176 --> 20:28.742
[AK]: There's really no way to do that, which is why pushes for equality start with equality of opportunity, but always become about equality of outcome.

20:29.704 --> 20:33.168
[AK]: Right, so it always starts with well, we're all the same by nature.

20:33.328 --> 20:33.948
[AK]: Okay, fine.

20:33.988 --> 20:36.851
[AK]: I can admit that abstractly. 40 years later.

20:37.071 --> 20:38.433
[AK]: Why aren't we all the same?

20:38.573 --> 20:39.994
[AK]: Why don't we all have the same income?

20:40.014 --> 20:41.896
[AK]: Why don't we why don't we all have the same life?

20:42.496 --> 20:54.027
[AK]: Oh, that must be because we have to fix not only what goes in but also how it comes out the quality of outcome a really interesting book by Christopher Caldwell about this recent book the age of entitlement and

20:54.187 --> 20:57.531
[AK]: tracks that story in late 20th century America.

20:57.831 --> 21:00.614
[AK]: We started with, we're all going to be the same starting out.

21:00.975 --> 21:04.218
[AK]: Now, why are we, we're always debating, why aren't we all the same?

21:04.479 --> 21:05.240
[AK]: We have to fix that.

21:05.280 --> 21:08.904
[JF]: I'm going to maintain this is such a religious fervor thing because from every point of view,

21:09.104 --> 21:11.605
[JF]: Scientifically and mathematically, it's nonsense.

21:11.925 --> 21:14.626
[JF]: It is utter, total nonsense.

21:14.666 --> 21:17.706
[JF]: And I can point you to guys like Talib, and I can point you to stuff like physics.

21:17.726 --> 21:21.487
[JF]: You can go really deep on how chaos is what we see.

21:21.507 --> 21:26.929
[JF]: And if you try to impose order on chaos, you will create more chaos.

21:27.389 --> 21:34.252
[JF]: But out of the chaos, we can observe order does arise, but that system – I mean math arises, right?

21:34.452 --> 21:36.593
[JF]: And then physics, rules and laws arise.

21:36.833 --> 21:39.775
[JF]: But that system, they're trying to actually stop the chaos.

21:40.355 --> 21:45.417
[JF]: They don't want diversity actually, and in doing that, what they create is more chaos because the – what is it?

21:45.898 --> 21:49.019
[JF]: The anger of man does not bring about the righteousness of God is what I'd say there on that one.

21:49.019 --> 21:54.000
[JF]: You know, whoever, whatever you think, mankind looks out for himself first.

21:54.180 --> 21:57.941
[JF]: And when he starts trying to make a level playing field, he's always on the highest part of it.

21:58.381 --> 21:58.581
[AK]: Right.

21:59.301 --> 22:08.884
[AK]: And this the kind of incessant revolution that we talked about in the last episode occurs, especially because equality never actually delivers what it promises.

22:08.984 --> 22:14.145
[AK]: And that's why we want to talk about modern Israel today, because if you think about it, it is

22:15.345 --> 22:17.326
[AK]: it is a very strange sort of a place.

22:17.766 --> 22:27.331
[AK]: It is a kind of settler, European settler state that is still openly and honestly, simply for the benefit of that settler group, right?

22:27.611 --> 22:40.897
[AK]: So it would be as if America had all the same legal structure that it did in say the 1920s, where whites and especially Northwestern European whites in immigration law are favored over all other groups, right?

22:40.917 --> 22:43.919
[AK]: So in modern Israel, you still have Jews,

22:44.929 --> 22:46.830
[AK]: Now we'll talk about how complicated that gets.

22:47.110 --> 22:52.631
[AK]: You still have Jews given supremacy over Arabs.

22:53.112 --> 22:55.352
[AK]: Israel exists as a Jewish state.

22:55.492 --> 22:56.773
[AK]: It is for Jews.

22:57.153 --> 23:08.176
[AK]: And that has recently been re-enshrined in law by virtue of Benjamin Netanyahu's long tenure as prime minister and his success in getting that enshrined.

23:08.296 --> 23:09.377
[AK]: It is a state for Jews.

23:09.457 --> 23:12.478
[AK]: It is a Jewish nation and it shall always be so as long as it exists.

23:13.038 --> 23:14.319
[AK]: There's a long story to that.

23:14.359 --> 23:16.562
[AK]: Let's start with the idea of what is it?

23:16.602 --> 23:17.262
[JF]: Let me just ask.

23:17.803 --> 23:18.704
[JF]: I'm going to throw word.

23:18.744 --> 23:20.666
[JF]: I actually don't want you to to respond.

23:20.686 --> 23:21.927
[JF]: I want you to go on with what you're doing.

23:22.348 --> 23:25.931
[JF]: I just want to say what said so often in our culture, racism.

23:25.951 --> 23:29.535
[JF]: OK, like by definition, that would be.

23:30.515 --> 23:34.300
[JF]: Racism now is it I I don't care about that word at this point.

23:34.340 --> 23:38.305
[JF]: It's lost its meaning a little bit But what is interesting is it is a country?

23:38.846 --> 23:47.477
[JF]: With an ideology and that ideology will have consequences because whatever you think is going to have a consequence in an action So that's why I want you to continue with what you're planning to say

23:47.938 --> 23:48.418
[AK]: Yeah, yeah.

23:48.498 --> 23:56.324
[AK]: Well, because it's a country enshrined around equality for Jews, and that should benefit all Jews.

23:56.524 --> 23:57.645
[AK]: We'll see how it doesn't.

23:57.705 --> 24:02.568
[AK]: But the issue of what is a Jew is one that's contested both in the past and in the present.

24:03.048 --> 24:10.494
[AK]: In the past, you'll notice if you look at the Bible, that the word Jew doesn't occur until Jew is sort of like the term white.

24:10.814 --> 24:13.516
[AK]: It doesn't need to exist until you encounter people who aren't.

24:14.837 --> 24:18.959
[AK]: And then it becomes a term that both the in-group and the out-group use for you.

24:20.060 --> 24:28.365
[AK]: So Jew is a term from after the people that call themselves Israelites, Israel, get kicked out of their land.

24:30.505 --> 24:33.628
[AK]: We can go into why the Bible says that happens another time.

24:34.349 --> 24:45.760
[AK]: When they get kicked out, they begin to be identified by this term that really is only attached to one tribe, but it's the predominant tribe among the exiles, Judah.

24:46.735 --> 24:54.777
[AK]: they begin to be identified by the Babylonians and the Persians, the people among whom they're exiled, as Jews, Yehudim.

24:55.798 --> 25:04.881
[AK]: And so when they come back, the place they come back to is called by the Persians who are in charge of it at the time, Yehud, or beyond the river, Yehud.

25:05.421 --> 25:08.982
[AK]: So from that time, Jew is a kind of outside word,

25:09.847 --> 25:10.668
[AK]: for this group.

25:11.308 --> 25:22.116
[AK]: The group, when they're talking to each other, and you see this even in the New Testament, especially in the Gospels, when Jesus is talking about his own people to his own people, he talks about Israel or Israelites.

25:22.956 --> 25:29.381
[AK]: But when they're talking about themselves to outsiders, or when outsiders are talking about them, they're called Jews.

25:29.441 --> 25:30.722
[AK]: So Jesus is crucified.

25:30.982 --> 25:34.604
[AK]: The writing above his head says, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.

25:35.285 --> 25:36.266
[JF]: Keep going, keep going, keep going.

25:37.046 --> 25:42.232
[AK]: So that question of what is a Jew is one that's going to persist down to today.

25:42.993 --> 25:56.768
[AK]: And if you learn about Israel, this is why the questions of race and ethnicity never stop being difficult, even when they're seemingly a group and the entire state is organized in their favor.

25:57.048 --> 25:57.228
[AK]: Right?

25:57.469 --> 26:06.980
[AK]: So think about this when we talk, usually racially, but I'd say a lot of our racial discussions have ethnic components in modern America, because there's a history, there's a language, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

26:07.981 --> 26:10.984
[AK]: When we talk about, let's say we talk about reparations.

26:11.044 --> 26:13.646
[AK]: So the law is gonna work in favor of this group.

26:13.666 --> 26:14.707
[AK]: This group is gonna get money.

26:14.747 --> 26:17.169
[AK]: This group is gonna get jobs, whatever it is we're fighting about.

26:17.650 --> 26:22.534
[AK]: When you look at modern Israel, that group always has subgroups, okay?

26:22.774 --> 26:27.899
[AK]: So in ancient times, the group of Jews had 12 subgroups called tribes.

26:28.839 --> 26:31.442
[AK]: Today, to some extent, that's been preserved.

26:31.462 --> 26:34.485
[AK]: There are people who say, yeah, I'm a priest, right?

26:34.525 --> 26:39.829
[AK]: If you meet somebody who's Jewish named Cohen, right, they probably have some sort of priestly descent.

26:40.170 --> 26:46.415
[AK]: But a lot of that is organized around the history that's happened since ancient times.

26:47.276 --> 27:02.682
[AK]: So in Israel and in world Jewry, all Jews across the world, the vast majority of people are what are called Ashkenazim, which is originally the Bible word for what we think of as maybe like Germany or Central Europe, Ashkenaz.

27:03.642 --> 27:09.364
[AK]: So prior to World War II, probably 90% of Jews across the world were Ashkenazim.

27:09.924 --> 27:10.965
[AK]: Now it's probably more like 70 to 80.

27:13.120 --> 27:33.424
[AK]: when Jews began to come back to what was then Ottoman Palestine in the late 19th century in big numbers, because they always sort of remained, but the area was largely ethnically Arab, still Shemite, but Arab, not Jewish, and was maybe equally Muslim and Christian.

27:33.764 --> 27:41.565
[AK]: We're talking like the late 19th century, so this is the time of European colonialism across the world, kind of just like unabashedly, like no problem, right?

27:42.365 --> 27:44.027
[AK]: Lots of places are founded at this time.

27:44.067 --> 27:45.748
[JF]: The sun never set on the British Empire.

27:45.768 --> 27:47.529
[JF]: I mean history of power, you got to know it's there.

27:47.569 --> 27:52.033
[JF]: We'll talk about it more eventually, but it's – they conquered the planet, the planet.

27:52.053 --> 28:00.880
[AK]: So at the time that there are lots of European settler states across the world, including the United States, Canada, Australia, blah, blah, blah, blah, Rhodesia, South Africa.

28:01.520 --> 28:09.750
[AK]: At the same time, Jews from Europe begin to resettle in large numbers, and there's different waves of this.

28:09.790 --> 28:12.153
[AK]: They're called the Yeshuvim, the settlements.

28:12.474 --> 28:14.196
[AK]: There's the first Yeshuv, second Yeshuv.

28:14.656 --> 28:16.158
[AK]: They begin to go back to Israel.

28:16.238 --> 28:18.121
[AK]: Some of them do this for religious reasons.

28:18.461 --> 28:20.423
[AK]: The vast majority that actually resettle

28:21.451 --> 28:24.774
[AK]: are doing it for purely, we would say, ethnic reasons.

28:25.154 --> 28:38.445
[AK]: That is, they say, and the father of Zionism, which is what the ideology around it comes to be called, Theodor Herzl says, look, the Jews can't live in Europe because we'll never be a normal people and we'll always have problems.

28:38.785 --> 28:43.109
[AK]: And it's interesting, Herzl says, some of that is the fault of the European Christians,

28:43.809 --> 28:53.982
[AK]: Germans French, whatever some of that is the fault of the Jews because we become worse people when we don't have our own land So I'm explaining their ideology.

28:54.042 --> 29:01.913
[AK]: They say if we move back to Israel we Wow Palestine at the time we will become better people.

29:02.773 --> 29:04.214
[AK]: because we will have land.

29:04.554 --> 29:06.895
[AK]: So we'll farm like normal people do.

29:07.075 --> 29:08.275
[AK]: We'll have a military.

29:08.475 --> 29:10.336
[AK]: We will be normal.

29:10.496 --> 29:11.816
[JF]: That's some agrarian stuff there.

29:11.856 --> 29:12.716
[JF]: I get that.

29:12.756 --> 29:13.177
[AK]: Yeah.

29:13.217 --> 29:14.237
[AK]: Well, it's very agrarian.

29:14.277 --> 29:22.299
[AK]: That's why when they come, they largely settle in groups, communal farms called kibbutzim, a kibbutz.

29:23.400 --> 29:26.861
[AK]: They're called the kibbutzniks and they want to resettle the land.

29:27.742 --> 29:34.593
[AK]: They want to leave the cramped village life, the city life of Eastern and Central Europe especially, and resettle the land.

29:37.116 --> 29:38.237
[JF]: Where by the way they were what? What is it reparations?

29:38.257 --> 29:48.267
[JF]: They were exiled against their will, not the people today per se, but many, many, many, many, many, many moons ago, forcibly by the sword taken from their property.

29:48.808 --> 29:51.150
[JF]: Wife and child killed or raped and all this kind of stuff.

29:51.170 --> 29:52.311
[JF]: And the whole civilization, right?

29:52.331 --> 29:53.532
[JF]: The Assyrians were no joke.

29:53.572 --> 29:54.634
[JF]: Another bit of the history power.

29:54.654 --> 29:55.574
[JF]: We'll talk about them.

29:56.596 --> 29:57.536
[JF]: So it's not like.

29:58.769 --> 30:11.481
[JF]: They kept their ethnic identity, they kept their lineage through all of that because of their religion, and because of the religious tie that it has to their ethnicity, which is about their beliefs about who a messiah shall be, and ours as well.

30:12.822 --> 30:21.250
[JF]: What's interesting then is to see how that without that religion as the driving factor, they're doing what that religion would have them do as the driving factor,

30:21.590 --> 30:25.012
[JF]: Minus the part that there are some, I believe, that would affirm this.

30:25.612 --> 30:29.634
[JF]: They were kicked out of their own land again by their God, and it's up to him to bring them back.

30:29.754 --> 30:31.334
[JF]: And that's a different debate.

30:31.394 --> 30:38.918
[JF]: But they're still trying to live the Old Testament religion, which is this land is for you from God to be a people who are good, right?

30:39.058 --> 30:44.080
[JF]: And it's weird to hear him as like in a materialist way, secular way, confessing that anyway.

30:44.620 --> 30:45.420
[JF]: Go back to the land.

30:45.461 --> 30:46.061
[JF]: It'll make us good.

30:46.741 --> 30:46.961
[AK]: Right.

30:47.161 --> 30:55.126
[AK]: And so that is all mixed with elements of 19th century European, you could say, white culture.

30:56.587 --> 31:04.351
[AK]: And the Ashkenazim are going to be understood when they come to America, also in Israel itself when it becomes a state as white.

31:04.952 --> 31:11.075
[AK]: Israel, from its founding, has always had things like a symphony orchestra and archaeological museums.

31:11.615 --> 31:13.937
[JF]: Now, can we call that Western?

31:14.727 --> 31:16.629
[JF]: Or is it just white?

31:16.929 --> 31:28.920
[AK]: Those things and the ways that they are just sort of cultural practices are brought with them from the 19th century, including things that people don't even think about, but like hiking in groups.

31:29.581 --> 31:35.426
[AK]: This is a big deal for European nationalists in the 19th century, Germans, Bohemians, lots of folks.

31:36.260 --> 31:41.183
[AK]: Why, just coincidentally, does that only happen in the Middle East today in Israel?

31:41.624 --> 31:46.307
[AK]: It's because the people that founded Israel were 19th century European nationalists.

31:47.688 --> 31:52.271
[AK]: So there's a hiking trail, Shevi Yisrael, that you can go on.

31:52.651 --> 31:53.652
[AK]: It's a network of trails.

31:53.692 --> 32:05.660
[AK]: And the reason you do that is because from the first, and every Israeli schoolchild does this, Jewish, not Arab, the reason that they do this is because it was found, it was a way to get in touch with the land.

32:06.260 --> 32:09.502
[AK]: just like French nationalists and German nationalists and so on.

32:09.582 --> 32:12.364
[AK]: You know, so they bring all of this stuff from Europe.

32:12.744 --> 32:14.365
[AK]: It's not an accident that it exists.

32:14.925 --> 32:18.367
[JF]: And just like hippies, by the way, they just don't have a national tie to it.

32:18.387 --> 32:20.568
[JF]: But they actually maybe I think maybe they do.

32:20.588 --> 32:21.509
[JF]: And they also have a religious tie.

32:21.529 --> 32:22.269
[JF]: So it's very similar.

32:22.329 --> 32:26.932
[JF]: The need of man for land is is we could talk about that just as epistemologically a thing.

32:27.532 --> 32:28.593
[JF]: But I wanted I wanted to shift it.

32:28.793 --> 32:31.975
[JF]: And well, here's our first break, I suppose, where I'm going to lose my train of thought.

32:32.515 --> 32:36.356
[AK]: Was it about intra-Jewish differences or… 

[JF] Oh no, it's devil's advocate.

32:36.396 --> 32:36.976
[JF]: It's devil's advocate.

32:37.016 --> 32:37.596
[JF]: OK, go ahead.

32:37.696 --> 32:43.438
[JF]: All right, so I've given you a lot of lead here because we're establishing the idea to understand lineage.

32:43.558 --> 32:51.320
[JF]: That's really what we're talking about, lineage and its perspective on our tribalism that we all embrace one way or the other within a history of power so we can understand where we stand today.

32:51.960 --> 32:57.348
[JF]: But then I've given you all that lead and now you just sound like you're pro-Palestinian, right?

32:57.368 --> 33:05.960
[JF]: You're just a Palestinian advocate and apparently Fisk is a Palestinian – pro-Palestinian hack and he's anti-Semitic and he said so earlier kind of because he talked about when he's a Jew and Jew and all this kind of stuff.

33:05.980 --> 33:07.523
[JF]: So clearly we're just a bunch of anti-Semites.

33:08.504 --> 33:09.224
[JF]: Well, hold on here.

33:09.284 --> 33:09.464
[JF]: Right.

33:09.504 --> 33:14.125
[JF]: Let's let's let's at least give opportunity for the other other case.

33:14.185 --> 33:19.927
[JF]: I mean, are you saying that all the violence of Hamas is acceptable, Pastor Koontz?

33:19.987 --> 33:22.087
[JF]: Are you saying that's what we should be supporting right now?

33:23.007 --> 33:23.688
[AK]: No, not at all.

33:23.928 --> 33:24.128
[JF]: Good.

33:24.868 --> 33:27.629
[AK]: One of the I mean, I mean, I think it's it's an index.

33:27.909 --> 33:37.451
[AK]: If so far you've been hearing me as pro-Palestinian, it's an index of people not actually knowing what goes on inside Israel.

33:39.076 --> 33:49.104
[AK]: that what I'm saying sounded pro-Palestinian, because I could take every single word that I already said about the history of Israel, and I could position myself as pro-Mizrahi, okay?

33:49.464 --> 33:50.805
[AK]: And people don't even know what that is.

33:51.906 --> 34:02.535
[AK]: Because everything that I've said has really been about one subgroup where you could look at, it's often read as a racial group among Israeli Jews,

34:03.919 --> 34:20.911
[AK]: who used to be the vast majority of the population of Israel, the Jewish population, are now a minority of the Jewish population, but are still pretty much the only people who run anything in modern day Israel, and that is European Jews.

34:21.052 --> 34:24.454
[JF]: And it feels an awful lot like the United States of America when you talk about it that way.

34:24.994 --> 34:31.920
[JF]: As I look at, you know, certain candidates with certain classes and lineages and heritage and how you, I mean, you can make your way up there, but like,

34:32.580 --> 34:43.646
[JF]: There's so much of what you're saying there with us, and in some ways that's what's being fostered by the BLM stuff, and that's where the BLM stuff is not so far away from this colonial Judaism and the Quaker ideas.

34:43.666 --> 34:46.488
[JF]: I actually wrote it down in response to it, because it's some of the same ideas, right?

34:46.508 --> 34:58.075
[AK]: Yeah, because what's going on and the thing that I appreciate, and I taught myself modern Hebrew in order to start reading scholarship on the Bible, but I also use it to read

34:59.150 --> 35:08.437
[AK]: Israelis talking to each other because they're much more forthright generally than Americans are about issues that we would describe in America as racial, they're usually ethnic.

35:09.403 --> 35:28.814
[AK]: in Israel, when they talk about things like, well, why doesn't this benefit Mizrahi, that is Jews of Middle Eastern origin, or Sephardim, that is Jews of Iberian originally, but that's, you know, don't worry about what happened after Iberia, they went all kinds of places, of different lineages.

35:29.194 --> 35:31.635
[AK]: Why are things so different?

35:32.075 --> 35:36.478
[AK]: Why are so many university students Ashkenazi and not enough are Sephardim or Mizrahi?

35:36.778 --> 35:41.262
[JF]: Can you put that can you give us like an example of what that would be like here again, using the Northeast?

35:41.602 --> 35:50.010
[JF]: If I'm if I'm off and it sounds like the Northeast, I mean,

[AK] an example of that, these sorts of things happen very openly in the United States, like within the Catholic Church.

35:50.750 --> 35:54.614
[AK]: So within the Catholic Church, an example would be this is Chicago.

35:55.134 --> 35:57.857
[AK]: Why is the archbishop of Chicago not a pole?

35:58.557 --> 36:00.218
[AK]: Poles are the biggest ethnicity, right?

36:01.179 --> 36:09.003
[AK]: Because what has usually happened in the United States, especially in the past 50 years, is that everything that is European is just white.

36:09.743 --> 36:12.205
[AK]: And we tend to ignore white ethnicity.

36:13.005 --> 36:19.409
[AK]: But like in the history of the Catholic Church in America, this would be attention to why is everyone who runs anything Irish?

36:19.729 --> 36:20.749
[AK]: Why does that always have to be?

36:21.049 --> 36:23.491
[AK]: Why can't an Italian be Archbishop of Boston?

36:24.031 --> 36:25.372
[AK]: Why does it have to be an Irishman?

36:25.592 --> 36:27.754
[AK]: Why can't it be a Pole in Chicago?

36:27.914 --> 36:30.896
[AK]: Why can't it be a quote white Hispanic in New Mexico?

36:31.877 --> 36:36.520
[AK]: But usually in America, the level of discussion is purely racial.

36:36.901 --> 36:38.062
[AK]: It's fairly crude.

36:38.642 --> 36:42.005
[JF]: And what it comes down to is that prejudice is an equal opportunity employer.

36:42.705 --> 36:42.965
[JF]: Right.

36:43.045 --> 36:55.729
[AK]: It'll seize it'll seize on whatever it needs, because if you go into OK, if you go into Israel, you say, OK, well, we only have three Ashkenazi guys that are up to become head of the Israeli Defense Forces.

36:56.269 --> 37:00.451
[AK]: OK, but who whose father was born in Israel?

37:00.951 --> 37:01.151
[JF]: Hmm.

37:01.511 --> 37:04.013
[AK]: Okay, well, two of the guys, their father was born in Israel.

37:04.193 --> 37:06.235
[AK]: Well, whose grandfather was born in Israel?

37:06.555 --> 37:07.496
[AK]: Oh, only one of them.

37:07.756 --> 37:08.637
[AK]: He gets the job.

37:08.897 --> 37:19.345
[AK]: You see, even when you have homogeneity from the outside, on the inside, there are always more groups, more tribes, more resentments that can be formed.

37:20.166 --> 37:23.749
[JF]: It sounds like, I believe it's an Aramaic word, Pharisee.

37:23.989 --> 37:24.590
[JF]: Is that right?

37:24.670 --> 37:25.470
[JF]: Is that a Hebrew word?

37:25.751 --> 37:29.654
[JF]: Like literally, that is precisely their religion still.

37:30.580 --> 37:37.706
[JF]: without God in it at all, and still trying to get the land God gave them, is precisely the religion of the nation-state of Israel.

37:37.906 --> 37:39.127
[JF]: And when I say this, be careful here.

37:39.567 --> 37:40.388
[JF]: Don't take me the wrong way.

37:40.648 --> 37:42.990
[JF]: It's the same religion that killed Jesus.

37:43.010 --> 37:47.733
[JF]: I actually believe there's only two at the end of the day, and it's Christianity and others, so don't lump me in with a bunch.

37:47.753 --> 37:50.856
[JF]: And I'm not saying go kill Jews because they killed Jesus like people in the Middle Ages wrote.

37:50.876 --> 37:51.757
[JF]: That's nonsense.

37:52.197 --> 37:59.403
[JF]: But the fact is that the pharisaical mindset, which could not hear the words of Jesus, is the one that's running this

38:00.123 --> 38:01.485
[JF]: this nation now, right?

38:01.765 --> 38:03.387
[JF]: Now again, am I anti-Semite?

38:03.427 --> 38:04.648
[JF]: Not necessarily, right?

38:04.688 --> 38:05.910
[JF]: I want to understand this.

38:06.310 --> 38:07.511
[JF]: I want to understand this.

38:07.652 --> 38:10.295
[JF]: And I can't apart from religion because that's part of who they are.

38:10.675 --> 38:12.437
[JF]: And that's kind of my case I'm making here, yeah?

38:13.527 --> 38:27.255
[AK]: Yeah, and you have to understand, not just how does the group present itself to the outside world, because usually if it wants to achieve something, it will be smart and present itself as united and for certain political goals, it will remain united.

38:27.775 --> 38:36.781
[AK]: The reason that they will always continue fighting even once they achieve whatever they were going for is because there are always more divisions within the group

38:37.461 --> 38:38.402
[AK]: that you can fight over.

38:38.742 --> 38:43.464
[AK]: There's always more divisions that power can be kind of slotted into.

38:43.605 --> 38:44.645
[JF]: It can be only one.

38:45.185 --> 38:45.426
[AK]: Right.

38:45.546 --> 38:51.529
[AK]: So give you just step back from Israel for a second to something more directly controversial.

38:51.809 --> 38:57.553
[AK]: Let's say that we do we do reparations in the United States as as has gone on in, let's say, South Africa.

38:57.853 --> 38:57.993
[AK]: Right.

38:58.573 --> 39:01.934
[AK]: So in South Africa, it gets divided up tribally.

39:02.354 --> 39:08.356
[AK]: Okay, in America, do we give reparations to everyone who can prove African descent?

39:08.836 --> 39:10.717
[AK]: So there's going to be fights over that.

39:11.197 --> 39:15.178
[AK]: If you emigrated from Ghana in 1973, do you get reparations?

39:15.198 --> 39:24.401
[AK]: Because you really, you might have actually, your ancestors might have helped enslave the people who actually have been here since before America existed, who are Black.

39:24.861 --> 39:26.062
[AK]: Do you still get reparations?

39:26.542 --> 39:32.446
[AK]: So there's always fights that can occur within the group, even once the group achieves its objectives.

39:33.467 --> 39:41.853
[JF]: But the large bludgeon that is used, I don't know if this is too much of a tangent, but the language is a bludgeoning object.

39:42.693 --> 39:51.560
[JF]: Earlier you used a pole and a shovel, but I think more of like a giant Warhammer mace versus a scalpel.

39:52.060 --> 39:54.202
[JF]: for doing some precise surgery, right?

39:54.422 --> 40:03.989
[JF]: And what we need is the scalpel, because when you're dealing with men versus men and women versus women, whatever, when you're dealing with people versus people, you're dealing with self-interested people versus self-interested people.

40:04.029 --> 40:06.611
[JF]: And that leads to conflict unless there's a real

40:07.572 --> 40:11.494
[JF]: awareness that it can lead to conflict, and we don't want it to, because it's worse that way.

40:12.995 --> 40:15.277
[JF]: But then part of this gets back to what you were saying.

40:15.677 --> 40:26.403
[JF]: So the unity of groups, the unity of lineages, along with we were born, as you were talking about, the only other one that tends to unite is those other guys are going to get us if we don't get them.

40:26.903 --> 40:32.767
[JF]: And so we talked about this before, the tribe is a group of people who see that they are vulnerable in the same way.

40:33.607 --> 40:36.149
[JF]: And that definitely describes the nation-state of Israel.

40:36.449 --> 40:38.611
[JF]: That definitely describes Black Lives Matter.

40:39.111 --> 40:46.156
[JF]: That definitely describes white men right now in America, honestly, because we also feel very vulnerable based on the rhetoric of the day.

40:47.417 --> 40:50.999
[JF]: But this tribalism that unites us against each other is not a path to peace.

40:51.940 --> 41:08.933
[JF]: Again, unless the tribes learn what individuals need to learn within the tribe, which is that self-interest is governing both sides, and if we're not careful and don't worry about the interests of all sides, even though they're going to have different outcomes, we're going to end up in war again, which I want to say this too.

41:09.113 --> 41:09.814
[JF]: I think it's inevitable.

41:09.834 --> 41:13.677
[JF]: I think wars are inevitable among men because we're just not going to stop, but it doesn't mean we have to.

41:14.197 --> 41:16.199
[JF]: We don't have to, but someone's going to.

41:18.542 --> 41:24.124
[AK]: And people will say that things like race or ethnicity are completely a social construct.

41:24.164 --> 41:26.746
[AK]: That is, we make it up and we can unmake it.

41:27.166 --> 41:28.726
[AK]: I agree to a certain extent.

41:28.746 --> 41:31.928
[AK]: There are genetic components to things like race and ethnicity.

41:31.968 --> 41:35.769
[AK]: For instance, we admit this in cases of genetic disease.

41:36.169 --> 41:43.693
[AK]: We admit that there are certain things that you're more or less susceptible to because of my genetic, because of my lineage, because of my genetic makeup.

41:44.113 --> 41:46.274
[JF]: Men can get ovarian cancer too.

41:47.734 --> 41:48.374
[AK]: They can.

41:48.434 --> 41:48.875
[AK]: Well, right.

41:48.955 --> 41:53.436
[AK]: And those are the levels of absurdity that we're at when we pretend like biology doesn't exist.

41:53.496 --> 42:05.779
[AK]: I mean, if I move, if I personally, Adam Koontz, move to somewhere that malaria is prevalent without anti-malarial drugs, I have a much better chance of dying than somebody of West African heritage.

42:06.119 --> 42:06.379
[JF]: Right.

42:06.399 --> 42:07.660
[JF]: You're just open to it.

42:08.527 --> 42:20.096
[AK]: But there are elements of race and ethnicity and tribe and any kind of group that you can think of that do have to do with the stories people tell themselves or are told about themselves, right?

42:20.557 --> 42:27.922
[AK]: So if you are told that your group would be amazing if this other group just stopped existing,

42:28.763 --> 42:32.185
[AK]: you're going to not like that other group, right?

42:32.405 --> 42:35.327
[JF]: If you really believe that that is the way to your self-interest, right?

42:35.527 --> 42:48.154
[JF]: If that is the path to my freedom and my slavery is hard enough, whatever I define that to be for me, well, then I will believe the preacher who tells me, and I use the word preacher, you know, pejoratively here a little bit, the prophet who tells me, go get them.
 
42:48.454 --> 42:49.615
[JF]: And then I say, that's my myth.

42:49.675 --> 42:50.215
[JF]: Here I go.

42:50.235 --> 42:55.198
[JF]: You know, I pursue symbol and power for myself and I end up, what, Cain versus Abel.

42:55.238 --> 42:57.159
[JF]: It's like the same old story and you don't have to

42:57.159 --> 42:59.382
[JF]: to believe it's a religion to get the point, 

[AK] right?

42:59.783 --> 43:12.161
[AK]: Yeah, because the reason that when we talked about revolutions in the last episodes, the reason in the last episode, the reason those those things end up eating themselves, they're not working on the basis of race or ethnicity.

43:12.261 --> 43:15.023
[AK]: Human groups don't all have to be organized in the same way.

43:15.423 --> 43:20.926
[AK]: They could be organized around how much money you make, or how you make your money, or almost anything.

43:21.386 --> 43:30.791
[AK]: In feminism, they're organized around your sexual biology, which we believe actually is real, and not just a social construct.

43:31.192 --> 43:38.796
[AK]: So when human groups are organized that way, and they're organized for certain political goals, whatever, they can achieve those things.

43:39.944 --> 43:45.226
[AK]: Once those things have been achieved, now there's power not to be grabbed, but to be distributed.

43:46.287 --> 43:48.908
[AK]: And the way that it's distributed is going to matter.

43:48.928 --> 43:58.332
[AK]: And it may be distributed, in fact, along lines or groupings that you didn't realize were there until you had the power.

43:58.472 --> 44:03.274
[AK]: And then you figure out, oh, it just so happens that seven out of eight people in charge of us

44:03.914 --> 44:05.135
[AK]: have something in common.

44:05.435 --> 44:09.819
[AK]: We didn't pay attention to it because all 50 of us had something in common.

44:10.080 --> 44:16.986
[AK]: But now we see that the people in power, seven out of eight of them have something in common that everybody else doesn't have.

44:17.992 --> 44:20.593
[AK]: And so there's really no end to this process.

44:21.093 --> 44:23.914
[JF]: But can you see how that would be good or evil?

44:24.795 --> 44:29.656
[JF]: So seven of the eight people in power all have in common deep wisdom.

44:30.257 --> 44:32.717
[JF]: That's pretty awesome, right?

44:32.797 --> 44:38.600
[JF]: If they all happen to have in common, we're brothers and you're not us.

44:39.920 --> 44:40.660
[JF]: That's a different thing.

44:41.361 --> 44:44.782
[JF]: Although if they're brothers because of the wisdom, then that's a good thing again.

44:45.810 --> 44:52.093
[JF]: So it's – I don't mean to be Buddhist on this thing, but it is sort of a – how are you looking at the law?

44:52.773 --> 44:54.734
[JF]: The law is that there is an over-under.

44:54.754 --> 44:56.234
[JF]: The law is that there is an inside-outside.

44:56.255 --> 44:57.455
[JF]: You cannot make those things go away.

44:57.495 --> 44:58.295
[JF]: We live in space and time.

44:59.196 --> 45:03.918
[JF]: And then what do evil men or broken men or selfish men do with that?

45:04.098 --> 45:06.579
[JF]: And then what do we do, wanting to be better men?

45:07.239 --> 45:08.241
[JF]: in the present age, right?

45:08.261 --> 45:10.065
[JF]: And we still got another 15 minutes at least here.

45:10.125 --> 45:18.280
[JF]: How do we tie this in some way back to our revolting lizard men and the new Caesar of the future and all that?

45:19.028 --> 45:45.837
[AK]: OK, I would say that if you want to govern people who are very, very different from each other, which is almost every Western modern state, also including Israel to some extent, what you're going to do is you're going to leave the groups fighting with each other perpetually, and there are lots of ways to achieve that, while you yourself do not have to really deal with the consequences of that.

45:46.477 --> 45:50.978
[AK]: So this pertains to something that we've talked about before, and I'm sure we will again, which is skin in the game.

45:52.859 --> 46:08.503
[AK]: So if you look at an American politician who's pushing for more racial integration in a specific suburb, that's totally fine if that person wants to advocate for that, as long as that person lives in a racially integrated place.

46:09.723 --> 46:11.084
[AK]: But a lot of times they don't.

46:11.344 --> 46:15.865
[AK]: So they won't have to deal with the mixing of groups and the conflicts that come with that.

46:16.385 --> 46:18.866
[AK]: So let's just make it not racial.

46:18.886 --> 46:22.348
[AK]: Let's say it's just ethnic, because this feels totally hypothetical these days.

46:22.788 --> 46:26.810
[AK]: They're going to mix an Italian neighborhood with a Polish neighborhood in Chicago in 1910.

46:27.010 --> 46:29.711
[AK]: There are going to be real consequences to that.

46:30.011 --> 46:35.614
[JF]: When you're a jet, you're a jet all the way from your first cigarette to your last dying day.

46:36.536 --> 46:40.537
[AK]: Yeah, and uh, so, you know

[JF]Do you know the reference?

46:40.557 --> 46:47.679
[JF]: I know you know so many things, you know so many things, but you don't know entertainment So

[AK] I don't know entertainment, but I I had to watch west side story in middle school music class.

46:47.699 --> 46:51.241
[AK]: There you go And of course, I know romeo and juliet, so I get it.

46:51.381 --> 46:52.121
[JF]: But I mean, what is that?

46:52.141 --> 46:54.942
[JF]: That's the puerto ricans and Who are the white guys?

46:55.242 --> 46:58.263
[JF]: It's the white guys the judge of the white guys new york white guys italian the italian

46:59.623 --> 47:00.524
[AK]: I don't know.

47:00.684 --> 47:07.527
[AK]: They should be some specific ethnicity or the sort of like modern Long Island, half Irish, half Italian.

47:07.547 --> 47:07.947
[JF]: There you go.

47:08.287 --> 47:08.707
[JF]: There you go.

47:08.787 --> 47:09.107
[AK]: Everywhere.

47:09.488 --> 47:09.668
[AK]: Yeah.

47:09.928 --> 47:10.408
[AK]: But anyway.

47:12.049 --> 47:14.510
[JF]: It just it makes the point, though, that this story is so universal.

47:15.030 --> 47:16.491
[JF]: Yeah, it is such a universal thing.

47:16.511 --> 47:20.873
[AK]: It's totally it's totally universal because human groupings occur everywhere.

47:20.933 --> 47:25.155
[AK]: So to go back to your like example of brothers, seven out of eight people running a group are brothers.

47:26.670 --> 47:37.355
[AK]: There is a certain level at which, even if they're just purely brothers and they're not really that bright, I'm not gonna push because they get to have their family group.

47:37.755 --> 47:38.235
[JF]: It's good.

47:38.535 --> 47:39.736
[JF]: There's a point at which it's good.

47:40.620 --> 47:42.162
[AK]: It's their family group.

47:43.063 --> 47:49.271
[AK]: So I'm not going to move to Texas and demand that everyone start having the same accent that I do.

47:49.892 --> 47:57.922
[AK]: I'm not going to move to Ghana and demand that everyone start having the same genetics that I do, or move to Israel and demand that everyone become a Lutheran Christian.

48:02.927 --> 48:04.068
[AK]: You see what I'm saying, right?

48:04.408 --> 48:26.364
[AK]: So what is happening is that when we are forced by just the conditions of modernity, especially modern communication and travel technology, to be together, it is to the benefit of people who want to control you to set you constantly at odds with each other by any means possible.

48:27.674 --> 48:33.452
[AK]: This doesn't mean that you have every interest in common and you just have to wake up to the fact that you're all totally the same.

48:33.833 --> 48:34.876
[AK]: That's not the case.

48:35.714 --> 48:47.162
[AK]: but when you are set against each other incessantly, either with or against your will, that is to the benefit of people who can sell you some semblance of life.

48:47.222 --> 49:02.232
[AK]: So what you can see in modern America is that the average income of someone who works eight hours a day, their wages are stagnant since the 1970s, but income inequality, especially in our wealthiest states, California, New York, et cetera,

49:02.992 --> 49:06.474
[AK]: I mean, some people are vastly more wealthy than they were in the 70s.

49:06.635 --> 49:11.238
[JF]: Have you heard that out West they're panning for gold in California, like runs in the streams.

49:11.818 --> 49:13.119
[JF]: And look, there's all these pamphlets.

49:13.139 --> 49:14.520
[JF]: They printed them right here.

49:14.580 --> 49:15.821
[JF]: Check this out.

49:15.881 --> 49:17.242
[JF]: They're practically giving it away.

49:17.602 --> 49:18.743
[JF]: You're going to need a cart and a horse.

49:18.883 --> 49:20.184
[JF]: I got food for you right here.

49:20.284 --> 49:21.565
[JF]: And you want to buy a shovel before you go.

49:23.194 --> 49:27.376
[JF]: I mean, it's not easy and that's how it's still working that way the whole BLM protests right now.

49:27.616 --> 49:29.537
[JF]: They're throwing on peanuts It's the circus.

49:29.557 --> 49:31.177
[JF]: We're back in Rome with the Colosseum.

49:31.417 --> 49:46.683
[JF]: They're letting the the the plebeians Riot just enough to satiate them and then they're gonna they're gonna shove them back down into the same complete and probably worse less policed less cared for less taking care of neighborhoods than they were in before and

49:47.003 --> 49:48.544
[JF]: And that's why it bothers me.

49:48.804 --> 49:50.405
[JF]: That's my skin in the game.

49:50.425 --> 49:51.126
[JF]: He dropped the book.

49:51.166 --> 49:53.207
[JF]: I'm going to just drop the name, Nassim Tlaib.

49:53.227 --> 49:58.150
[JF]: He's got a number of books that are all worth reading, a new one about being an idiot coming out in October, I think.

49:58.551 --> 50:02.833
[JF]: But OK, so I got at least two questions here, and they're kind of going to connect with each other.

50:02.873 --> 50:09.418
[JF]: But I want to ask you first, so what is your skin in the game regarding the existence of the nation-state of Israel?

50:09.458 --> 50:11.119
[JF]: Why do you even want to talk about that?

50:11.806 --> 50:34.427
[AK]: My skin in the game is because I find Israel, like the medieval Prince Bishop that we talked about in the last episode, I find Israel to be, at least inside itself, when they talk to each other, much more forthright about what is going on and what people's interests are from all sides than we usually are in the United States.

50:34.787 --> 50:39.831
[AK]: So I said in the last episode, part of the reason that whites are ideologically divided in the U.S.

50:40.031 --> 50:43.473
[AK]: is because they are not really allowed to have their own interests.

50:43.953 --> 50:49.517
[AK]: So white conservatives will say, no, this isn't necessarily good for white people, but it's great for black people.

50:50.037 --> 50:55.561
[AK]: And white liberals will actually say the same thing, but they'll just maybe be happier that it's not good for white people.

50:55.961 --> 50:59.004
[AK]: I find Israeli politics refreshing in that

50:59.824 --> 51:06.026
[AK]: like Lebanon, where Nassim Taleb is from, people are relatively forthright about what their group's interests are.

51:06.126 --> 51:20.191
[AK]: And I find that generally, it's not that it necessarily works better, but it is at least more honest than societies where a group is identified, but it only has negative characteristics.

51:20.371 --> 51:24.373
[AK]: It's not even allowed to express positive interests for itself.

51:25.216 --> 51:33.220
[JF]: I think the connection between the prince-bishop from Munzer, the story from last time, episode two, and distinction between that and, say, the fanatical prophet.

51:33.240 --> 51:53.771
[JF]: And so you're advocating a forthright tribalism based upon just real lineage and honesty that were diverse, as opposed to a pretended non-tribalism that has everybody equal, but in fact is suppressing everybody through any number of deceptions.

51:55.172 --> 52:00.095
[AK]: And that can have as many layers to it as are necessary for a particular political discussion.

52:00.195 --> 52:12.425
[AK]: So on the layer of affirmative action, just the fact that I'm white and my wife and children are white legally means that I have certain skin in the game there that a black American doesn't have.

52:12.965 --> 52:27.672
[AK]: If you're talking about taxation inside a state like, say, Pennsylvania, where I'm from, but I don't live now, the fact that I'm from central Pennsylvania is what matters, not the fact that I'm white, so I don't want to pay for Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, even though other white people live there.

52:28.132 --> 52:40.378
[AK]: So if we can be forthright about things, and also that any given group has both positive and negative interests, most likely because it's human, I just find that more honest and refreshing

52:40.938 --> 52:44.719
[AK]: And that's why I like to read Israelis talking about Israel.

52:44.739 --> 52:54.401
[JF]: So if you're having to deal with a shared amount of land that's not big enough for two people, honesty is the best way to come to terms with it and deal with it so you don't kill each other now or hate each other.

52:55.362 --> 52:55.522
[AK]: Right.

52:55.562 --> 52:58.742
[AK]: And it doesn't mean that you're going to end up actually being a better human being.

52:58.762 --> 53:07.505
[AK]: Like I'm not saying the Prince Bishop of Munster was a better human being, or I'm not really making a decision on what the Israelis should have done in 1948 or today.

53:09.525 --> 53:16.390
[AK]: I'm just saying that it's a better start politically when talking about power, which is, I think, what politics is really about.

53:16.430 --> 53:19.612
[AK]: It's about the division of power and the benefits that accrue to it.

53:20.312 --> 53:29.758
[AK]: It's better to start with honesty rather than cloaking certain things or pretending that certain things that are there really aren't.

53:30.959 --> 53:32.180
[JF]: Better the devil you know.

53:33.121 --> 53:33.301
[AK]: Right.

53:34.802 --> 53:35.922
[JF]: I got one for everything.

53:36.463 --> 53:37.904
[JF]: So the other question is,

53:39.124 --> 53:40.024
[JF]: I don't know if we've done this yet.

53:40.064 --> 53:40.825
[JF]: I want to make sure we do.

53:40.885 --> 53:41.725
[JF]: And I think you can.

53:42.085 --> 53:50.329
[JF]: So what is the Palestinian case against the nation state of Israel and its merits and your opinion of its merits, but only after you've made the best case you can for it?

53:50.429 --> 53:50.649
[AK]: Okay.

53:50.869 --> 53:51.009
[AK]: Yeah.

53:51.029 --> 53:51.770
[AK]: Let me make the case.

53:52.210 --> 54:01.254
[AK]: I mean, the historical cases, it's sort of cynical for people who don't even necessarily believe the things in the, in the old Testament, the Hebrew Bible happened.

54:01.794 --> 54:05.396
[AK]: It's pretty cynical for them to say, actually, this is our land.

54:05.496 --> 54:07.977
[AK]: We just haven't lived here for a thousand plus years.

54:08.857 --> 54:15.200
[AK]: So the claim is historically tenuous to Israel-Palestine by Jews.

54:15.980 --> 54:18.802
[AK]: In addition to that, the way that it was taken was unjust.

54:19.482 --> 54:28.206
[AK]: Arab villages were depopulated by any means necessary because they knew that with a UN mandate they could get away with it and they had the backing of the Western powers.

54:29.146 --> 54:48.300
[AK]: from the First World War onward, they had the backing of the Western powers, and especially after World War II, when Israel was coming into being against the will of the British largely, and what they wanted to happen there, the Jews had the backing of America, which was the world's vastly preeminent power at that time.

54:48.460 --> 54:53.043
[AK]: So it's both untrue and unjust for the Jewish state to exist.

54:53.083 --> 54:54.384
[AK]: That would be the Palestinian case.

54:55.638 --> 55:05.881
[AK]: I have skin in the game as a Christian because the Christians in Israel and Gaza and the West Bank, the Christians are vastly predominantly Arabs.

55:08.002 --> 55:12.943
[AK]: It has definitely been to the detriment of Christianity for there to be a specifically Jewish state.

55:13.603 --> 55:18.285
[AK]: I think that there were better visions of what could have existed even with the levels of

55:19.286 --> 55:48.821
[AK]: explicitly illegal Jewish immigration in the 30s and 40s, 20s, 30s, and 40s, against the will of everyone in charge, even with those levels, even after World War II, there were better solutions than to say there will be a state, it will be officially pro-Jewish, just the way that I think that there were better solutions than what America came up with to the issue of racial groups living next to each other in the South after the Civil War.

55:49.262 --> 55:50.568
[JF]: Is there a solution outside of war?

55:52.176 --> 55:52.880
[JF]: Like extermination?

55:54.087 --> 55:54.467
[JF]: World War?

55:55.228 --> 55:55.648
[AK]: There was.

55:56.308 --> 55:56.688
[AK]: There was.

55:57.048 --> 56:00.970
[AK]: At this point, I don't know whether Israel will ever accept that.

56:01.751 --> 56:13.797
[AK]: And since the 1970s, the rise, both demographically and politically, of something that really didn't matter when Israel came into being, which was a Jewish religion, it didn't matter.

56:14.837 --> 56:16.618
[AK]: It was statistically negligible.

56:16.698 --> 56:19.800
[AK]: The political power was exercised for Israel's first

56:21.311 --> 56:30.593
[AK]: Before it existed as a state, let's include really its entire existence up to the 1970s, Israel was a secular leftist nationalist state.

56:30.693 --> 56:41.195
[AK]: It was much more similar to Sweden politically and the Swedish concept of a folks home, a home for a specific ethnic group that would be socialistic and fair.

56:41.675 --> 56:42.715
[AK]: That's what Israel was.

56:43.095 --> 56:47.096
[AK]: Israel is now demographically, the Jews are majority Middle Eastern.

56:47.536 --> 56:50.637
[AK]: They are much more religious than they have ever been before.

56:51.397 --> 56:57.956
[AK]: and the right has largely been in control and the right in Israel is fairly openly racially

56:59.184 --> 57:02.286
[AK]: or maybe ethnically against Arabs.

57:03.386 --> 57:04.507
[AK]: It is anti-Christian.

57:04.987 --> 57:06.748
[JF]: Can I say they kind of are?

57:07.089 --> 57:12.432
[JF]: They are the image that is wanted to be projected upon the right in America by liberal media.

57:12.452 --> 57:12.772
[AK]: Totally.

57:12.912 --> 57:13.392
[JF]: Is that right?

57:13.612 --> 57:23.618
[AK]: I mean, the way that a lot of Democrats talk about Republicans is actually true of Likud and its assorted parties and its coalition in Israel.

57:23.818 --> 57:28.261
[JF]: So then do Republicans, by supporting them, justly deserve the accusation?

57:29.645 --> 57:34.127
[AK]: No, not at all.

57:34.347 --> 57:43.271
[AK]: Republicans would have to put forward Trump not as happening to be a white male.

57:43.831 --> 57:49.694
[AK]: They would have to put forward Trump and say, look, if you want to further the future of white people in the United States,

57:50.154 --> 57:51.475
[AK]: you must vote for Donald Trump.

57:51.495 --> 57:52.355
[AK]: That would be the equivalent.

57:52.395 --> 57:56.077
[JF]: I'm talking about on the global, does Israel exist without the US?

57:56.157 --> 57:59.219
[JF]: The US is still the military backing of Israel.

57:59.259 --> 58:00.099
[JF]: You could make that case.

58:00.159 --> 58:04.442
[JF]: It's the Republican platform that maintains promotion of the nation state of Israel.

58:04.882 --> 58:14.947
[JF]: And so as a result, the accusation doesn't apply to us and our actual politics here, but the fact that Republicanism maybe exists only to keep the nation state of Israel going.

58:15.168 --> 58:19.450
[JF]: As a voting Republican, I'm probably going to vote Trump after all, right?

58:19.830 --> 58:23.833
[JF]: But yet my party never, until Trump, never actually did anything it said it was going to do.

58:23.873 --> 58:26.855
[JF]: And what Trump is so interesting about is he's actually doing Republican policy.

58:26.915 --> 58:29.777
[JF]: It's kind of refreshing, even though he can't get any credit for it.

58:29.837 --> 58:30.557
[JF]: Anyway, anyway.

58:30.898 --> 58:31.678
[AK]: Yeah.

58:31.758 --> 58:38.983
[AK]: I would say that Israel could exist without the United States, but it would be very imperiled without the United States.

58:39.003 --> 58:39.163
[JF]: Yeah.

58:39.403 --> 58:40.664
[JF]: I mean, World War IV again, right?

58:40.924 --> 58:41.625
[JF]: War is there.

58:42.751 --> 58:50.617
[AK]: Specifically, without the American Jewish community, Israel would be in very bad shape.

58:50.937 --> 58:56.641
[AK]: I think that America is tremendously important to Israel as a place for political and financial power.

58:57.362 --> 59:03.166
[AK]: And without America, it would be in great danger, even though it does almost undoubtedly

59:03.726 --> 59:06.169
[AK]: have nuclear weapons, it would still be in great danger.

59:06.369 --> 59:19.122
[JF]: Hence, my question still then, though, is the accusation against republicanism rightly levied if we do not or if we if we don't even say anything about that kind of that kind of Zionism?

59:19.742 --> 59:22.164
[JF]: Not that there would be any place for Jews to be safe.

59:22.344 --> 59:23.425
[JF]: I'm not against that at all.

59:23.625 --> 59:24.766
[JF]: I want to be safe myself.

59:25.967 --> 59:36.395
[JF]: But the kind of militantly non-religious yet ethnically driven Zionism, if we support that openly, I mean, what's—so let's just go the other way.

59:36.775 --> 59:42.440
[JF]: How about you make the best case for why America should continue to support the nation-state of Israel in a political sphere?

59:42.540 --> 59:42.980
[JF]: Or should we?

59:43.320 --> 59:43.621
[JF]: I don't know.

59:44.261 --> 59:52.130
[AK]: I think we should be far more neutral about it than we are, because it involves issues that are really not in the interest of hardly any Americans.

59:52.170 --> 59:54.052
[JF]: Well, Wilsonianism comes home to roost.

59:54.656 --> 59:59.880
[AK]: Yeah, even American Jews who are not, by any majority, religious Zionists.

01:00:00.360 --> 01:00:07.966
[AK]: It's not really in our interest to militarily defend a small nation state in a very highly contested part of the world.

01:00:08.246 --> 01:00:08.446
[JF]: All right.

01:00:08.486 --> 01:00:09.967
[JF]: So we just lost internet for a second.

01:00:10.248 --> 01:00:13.750
[JF]: And our editor, Yamabe, he's cut it off somewhere that hopefully made sense.

01:00:13.770 --> 01:00:15.512
[JF]: We're going to try to pick up hopefully where it made sense.

01:00:15.552 --> 01:00:17.893
[JF]: What I know is I had dropped the word Wilsonianism.

01:00:18.134 --> 01:00:20.035
[JF]: I said Wilsonianism comes home to roost.

01:00:20.275 --> 01:00:23.998
[JF]: And what I should have said is the marriage of Wilsonianism and the Monroe Doctrine.

01:00:24.258 --> 01:00:25.139
[JF]: coming home to roost.

01:00:25.379 --> 01:00:37.227
[JF]: When you put those two things together, you get us supporting places like Israel historically that then put us way out there globally in maybe unique ways that aren't as beneficial to the country?

01:00:37.328 --> 01:00:37.808
[JF]: I don't know.

01:00:38.368 --> 01:00:38.749
[JF]: Talk about it.

01:00:39.758 --> 01:00:50.582
[AK]: The idea that Wilson says the reason that we're going to go into World War I, which he promised us in both his election campaigns he wouldn't do, when he takes us in, he says we're going to make the world safe for democracy.

01:00:51.062 --> 01:00:57.324
[AK]: The issue with democracy is that it becomes, like Marxism, an ideology which can be applied anywhere.

01:00:59.045 --> 01:01:00.045
[AK]: There are lots of ideologies.

01:01:00.085 --> 01:01:07.148
[AK]: You could say my ideology is I'm against white settler states, therefore I'm against the United States and Israel and Australia.

01:01:08.348 --> 01:01:12.292
[AK]: These sorts of ideologies can get you into any power struggle.

01:01:12.793 --> 01:01:26.947
[AK]: And what I'm saying is, when you think about Rwanda, the fact that we don't probably have any strong feelings about Tutsis or Hutus is because we don't necessarily have any ideology attached to those definitely existing ethnic groups.

01:01:27.822 --> 01:01:38.095
[AK]: When you have an ideology that can potentially go anywhere, you're going to end up in power conflicts that you can neither fix nor sometimes even understand, right?

01:01:38.515 --> 01:01:43.581
[AK]: Why do certain Americans have really strong feelings about whether or not Kurds should have their own nation state?

01:01:44.182 --> 01:01:46.685
[AK]: Let the Kurds fight with the Arabs and the Turks over it.

01:01:47.466 --> 01:01:49.829
[AK]: But no, lots of us have strong feelings about that.

01:01:49.849 --> 01:01:56.175
[AK]: There are even Americans that went to fight for Kurdish, for a Kurdish nation state, at least in northern Iraq, let alone southeastern Turkey.

01:01:56.796 --> 01:02:04.063
[AK]: So there are certain ideologies and usually they become their own sort of word carrying all kinds of emotional connotations.

01:02:04.804 --> 01:02:07.566
[AK]: a worker's paradise, democracy, whatever it is.

01:02:08.046 --> 01:02:24.679
[AK]: And those words function as power terms, both to indicate how power should operate, but also to get you to do something that you probably never thought about doing before, like having really strong feelings about and maybe even firing a gun in favor of

01:02:25.239 --> 01:02:28.504
[AK]: Kurdish independence.

[JF] Doing things you never thought you would do before.

01:02:28.584 --> 01:02:33.512
[JF]: That's what religions are for, is they tell you and convince you to do things you've never done before.

01:02:33.532 --> 01:02:37.539
[JF]: And I'm going to make this case here again that I don't care how secularist you are.

01:02:38.732 --> 01:02:48.794
[JF]: Ideology does exist, and if you just go back and read the whole Bible and substitute idolatry with the word ideology, you'll find they're just not so far apart.

01:02:49.114 --> 01:02:54.395
[JF]: The image which is worshiped is about an idea that is to be pursued and desired.

01:02:54.835 --> 01:03:02.157
[JF]: And to think that, say, in some ways what you're saying is that these names—Marxism, democracy—they're jargon now.

01:03:02.757 --> 01:03:07.060
[JF]: They don't mean anything, but they've become likened to the names of false gods.

01:03:07.581 --> 01:03:14.085
[JF]: And I call them false gods because I don't think they're really gods, but people certainly worship them and chase them as if they were gods.

01:03:14.806 --> 01:03:18.208
[JF]: And that can be everything from, again, Marxism, democracy, make the world safe.

01:03:18.389 --> 01:03:19.730
[JF]: Everyone's going to live.

01:03:19.750 --> 01:03:20.730
[JF]: Black lives matter.

01:03:20.770 --> 01:03:20.870
[JF]: It is

01:03:23.152 --> 01:03:24.833
[JF]: You cannot like religion all you want.

01:03:24.853 --> 01:03:27.035
[JF]: You cannot take the religion out of the animal that is man.

01:03:27.675 --> 01:03:32.278
[JF]: And it is a way to explain his role in relationship with power, because we talked about this last time, too.

01:03:32.318 --> 01:03:34.480
[JF]: There's two ways you're controlled, by the sword and by the conscience.

01:03:35.460 --> 01:03:36.481
[JF]: By the sword and by the conscience.

01:03:37.242 --> 01:03:38.302
[JF]: By a story and by a spear.

01:03:38.362 --> 01:03:41.325
[JF]: Do you want to have a final word and then we'll close this thing up?

01:03:41.345 --> 01:03:45.707
[JF]: We're over time, but the point today was colonial semi-shemitism, right?

01:03:45.728 --> 01:03:46.708
[JF]: Because what are we even talking about?

01:03:47.108 --> 01:03:49.170
[JF]: And other sordid historical anomalies.

01:03:49.210 --> 01:03:51.471
[JF]: I mean, we're all over the map, but the idea is colonialism

01:03:52.573 --> 01:03:55.258
[JF]: and tribe in the idea of empire a little bit.

01:03:55.278 --> 01:03:56.260
[JF]: I don't know.

01:03:56.280 --> 01:03:57.222
[JF]: What are we really trying to do?

01:03:57.282 --> 01:03:58.685
[JF]: Can you gist this episode at all?

01:03:59.810 --> 01:04:05.194
[AK]: Well, what's happening is that power is infinitely divisible along different human lines.

01:04:06.135 --> 01:04:07.536
[AK]: And you don't know.

01:04:07.556 --> 01:04:19.946
[AK]: The reason that revolutions happen, not according to the way the revolutionaries thought, but according to the way that power begins to be desired in practice, is because you don't know what the future is going to be.

01:04:20.146 --> 01:04:22.808
[AK]: But ideology is always promised to you that you do.

01:04:23.729 --> 01:04:29.852
[AK]: Marx promises you that if you just implement his scientific analysis of economics, here's what the future will look like.

01:04:30.333 --> 01:04:34.995
[AK]: Wilson promises that if the Americans go to Europe, this is what the future will look like.

01:04:35.755 --> 01:04:39.097
[AK]: Early Zionism promises that the world will work in this certain way.

01:04:39.497 --> 01:04:44.080
[AK]: Well, it didn't work out that way, and they're not even the Zionists that get to have the say these days.

01:04:44.645 --> 01:04:55.948
[AK]: So what happens with ideology is that it co-ops these human differences, some of which are socially constructed and some of which are genetic, maybe economic, maybe whatever.

01:04:56.508 --> 01:05:04.411
[AK]: And ideology takes you places you never thought you'd be, again, fighting for things that you never thought you'd have to care about a lot of the time.

01:05:04.451 --> 01:05:11.573
[AK]: Because you don't have the control over what you love and what you're told to care about that you think you do.

01:05:12.637 --> 01:05:17.218
[AK]: Power usually has a much stronger grasp on you than it will admit to you.

01:05:17.638 --> 01:05:21.739
[JF]: They won't need thought police when they're telling you what to think from the start.

01:05:22.079 --> 01:05:28.620
[JF]: Power is the prestige that rules the mob, and there is no power like a mythology with a great eschatology.

01:05:28.840 --> 01:05:30.681
[JF]: And if you don't know what I mean, you should.

01:05:30.901 --> 01:05:33.942
[JF]: Otherwise, you're going to have a lot of trouble understanding your life on this planet.

01:05:33.982 --> 01:05:35.402
[JF]: It's a Brief History of Power with two white guys.