RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - All Over Again

Oct. 11, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

27:06

All Over Again

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comThe gang discusses the atrocities of the past weekend in Israel; the illusion of a two-state solution; and the coming siege of the Gaza Strip.

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	I have a very strong feeling that we have returned to 2001 to 2007 era of political discourse and dynamics.
	And that in itself is interesting because I think from, let's say, 2015 through 2000 and...
	I think that was a kind of Trump era of discourse.
	People were becoming concerned with other matters.
	People were kind of maybe looking inward, becoming more nationalistic.
	The left was more concerned about internal dynamics and not terribly concerned with foreign policy dynamics or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
	Now, there were some exceptions to that rule.
	There was the attack on Soleimani, on Iran.
	We came very close in late 2018, early 2019 to a full-on war with Iran.
	And so things were still brewing.
	But I do think that matter is flipped.
	Now, I might have been engaging in some wishful thinking, but I...
	I had hoped in a way that a return to a lot of Cold War era thinking with the Ukraine conflict was was overall a positive thing.
	You know, there was a big, aggressive bad guy out there in the form of Putin and Russia, and it would inspire greater unity in the West.
	And it would maybe.
	It maybe also tests us to define what it means to be in the West.
	Now, according, you know, as we've talked about at length, according to the dissident right, to a very large degree, the meaning of the West, what it means to be a part of this coalition, what NATO means as an alliance is homosexuality, drag queens.
	Grooming of children and the worship of Satan.
	And in this respect, they agree more or less with Alexander Dugan and company and Vladimir Putin.
	So we had a very new and interesting dynamic emerge.
	And, you know, Cold War 2.0 wasn't all that I had hoped it might be.
	But I think it was interesting and brought up an interesting dynamic.
	And also, I didn't have many reservations when it came to thinking about Cold War 2.0.
	The invasion of Ukraine was not justified.
	I mean, it's understandable from the standpoint of Russia and Vladimir Putin.
	I did not find any sensible way of justifying it.
	And I was and am 100% behind Ukraine in that conflict.
	Now, it is like we're reliving the 20th century in many ways, but what were years or decades are now weeks and months.
	And I found it amazing the degree to which we have flipped back Immediately into the Bush era when it comes to conservatives and Israel.
	Now, there's no doubt.
	I mean, I understand the horror of what happened.
	I think there was something politically horrific about the attack on the music festival, which is where reportedly hundreds were slaughtered and raped.
	There was something weirdly poetic about that.
	It was a desert music festival, a kind of all-night rave that lasted into the morning.
	And there was an image of a statue of Buddha, and it was all for peace.
	But it was basically a Dionysian festival.
	Richard, I must interject.
	I've seen a video literally on the Telegram.
	They posted it.
	It wasn't that.
	IDF were there.
	There were literally 500 people.
	What is your point?
	IDF were there?
	I'm not terribly surprised.
	Police are at rock concerts all over.
	No, they were calling a confide.
	They were having a confide with the people in between.
	And I can literally show you that.
	What is your point?
	That's the kind of disinformation.
	As in, they didn't just come down and slaughter 300 people like that.
	Small things like that do make a difference.
	No, they don't, in fact.
	I mean, the IDF was protecting a rock concert and they engaged in a firefight.
	Even if the IDF, what are you suggesting?
	That if the IDF is there, you're justified in shooting civilians?
	No.
	Any conflict, people can get caught in between.
	But the thing is, it'll be moralized to one side.
	It'll be, oh, these are just civilians and they should never get caught.
	But the other side is collateral damage.
	And that kind of language, I get it.
	Okay, maybe you may sympathize with one side more, but make that apparent instead of saying, hey, they came there and they want to know.
	They came there to fight the IDF.
	And if there's a group in between them two, then that's a slight difference.
	Well, I was simply noting a kind of horrific poetry to the situation of these Images of the music festival and then what are, I guess, called power gliders that were coming in.
	So when I first heard about this, I thought that they were actually hang gliding from the hills.
	Not exactly.
	It was actually a much more of like a literal James Bond situation with power gliders, these big fans on vehicles.
	I mean, it was remarkable.
	But coming in from the horizon, it actually reminded me quite a bit of this novel that I was revisiting last night called Platform by Michel Houbeck.
	It's kind of, it's not one of his most...
	Celebrated works.
	I actually think it's quite amazing.
	But it's about these decadent Western Frenchmen, and they decide to create a sex tourism company.
	And in the end, a situation like that actually occurs.
	You know, involved in various debaucheries and Islamic terrorism rears its head and in a kind of tragic way, but almost in a way in which there are these decadent Westerners who don't even kind of believe in themselves and, you know, in the narrators.
	Michel, I believe, is the narrator's name.
	In his own comments, he's like, civilization can't exist with people like me in it.
	I don't want anything.
	I can't reproduce.
	All I can do is, you know, chug Red Bull and Viagra and engage in these cheap sexual adventures and watch porn and kind of fall in love with a woman who's never going to be a mother.
	And there's an almost a kind of like, it's an end of history book.
	It was written actually just before 9-11, but there's an almost a kind of like secret desire for Islamism.
	Which I think is implied in the novel.
	It's very, very good and very powerful.
	And I think I was reminded of that with these scenes of these kind of silly, decadent e-girls, you know, dancing away at a party and reality, like the real, intrudes onto their life.
	And there is, again, it's horrific, but I think there is a poetic irony to it.
	Now, where are we in this situation?
	Now, as many people who are more sympathetic towards the Palestinians have correctly pointed out, there have been thousands of deaths of Palestinians over the decades.
	Including children.
	I mean, the Gaza Strip is a unique place.
	So the Gaza Strip is a seaside community, also bordering Egypt.
	It was land taken after the 1967 war.
	It's interestingly, if we rewind to 2005 with George W. Bush's quest for global democracy, and he's going to solve all problems by making people democratic because democratic countries don't fight each other.
	There was this promotion of democracy, and it was a kind of land for peace deal.
	We're going to allow more administration of Gaza.
	You know, because you're going to become a democratic country.
	Again, it's this irony of that whole period.
	And the kind of Democrats dilemma is what do you do when the guy you don't like actually wins?
	And, you know, Hitler was, you know, more or less and more and more than less.
	A legal chancellor of the Weimar Parliament.
	He did not come in and shoot things up and assassinate a leader.
	He was actually elected chancellor through the parliamentary democratic means.
	So what do you do in this situation?
	What do you do when someone who's intolerant uses the...
	Well, we had that on display in a very open and unequivocal way with Hamas.
	They overwhelmingly won the elections.
	I have heard different statistics.
	I think you should probably take all of these with a grain of salt, but they are...
	Hamas is wildly popular and legitimate in Gaza.
	80, 90% of the population.
	Supports them.
	So this, again, brings up this question of, you know, do you understand terrorism as, you know, what are we defining?
	Are we defining a bunch of crazed lone wolves, like a school shooter or crazed Islamic, you know, assassin or something like that?
	Or actually, are you declaring something as a terrorist that is...
	An entity that is wildly popular among a population and that engages in many non-terroristic acts, like hospitals feeding the poor, maintaining order.
	I mean, can a terrorist entity actually administer something?
	And irony upon irony, of course, is that Hamas was backed, if not created, by The Likud faction within Israel as a countervailing force to the Palestinian Authority, which was an exile.
	It's long thought to be the kind of legitimate government.
	And it styles itself as a left-wing, anti-colonial effort and so on.
	It's not really...
	They're Muslim, but they're not really, they don't define themselves as Islamist or so on.
	Hamas does.
	Hamas is willing to engage in things like this.
	They're also willing to administer hospitals.
	I mean, it's a very weird situation, and there's no easy solution to it.
	So, you know, yes, there's no doubt that if there's just a pure death toll, that More Palestinians, and including more Palestinian children, have died in this conflict over this past year and over the last decade, and you can even go back further than that.
	The difference is that the Palestinians engaged in a flamboyant, outrageous action of attacking, sure, military targets in some way, but also just attacking.
	Civilians.
	There has recently been a suggestion that babies were beheaded.
	Now, that was reported, and I don't want to say that that's been confirmed.
	There's no real evidence has been provided for that.
	It's simply a kind of hearsay of a reporter was saying, you know, these IDF troops, reservists were here.
	They're beheading babies.
	Now, what do we make of this?
	But there has been.
	Evidence of hostage taking.
	There has been evidence of slaughtered families.
	It was, you know, that this girl who's become a kind of negative celebrity, a kind of celebrity of horror, this dual citizen from...
	Germany and Israel who was taken and brutally raped and then paraded around town.
	Elderly women were taken and taken as hostages.
	I imagine that many of these hostages are already dead after what has taken place with the bombardment of Gaza.
	I mean, looking forward, and I'll let some other people jump in here, there's always been a few different ways that the Palestinian question can be settled.
	And this goes back even to the days of the British mandate.
	Palestinians, I mean, I was rereading before I came, I was rereading this morning Ilhan Pape's book on 10 myths about Israel.
	I mean, he is a very good historian.
	You know, it's a left-wing book published by Verso, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.
	It's actually probably far more accurate than any right-wing book written on the subject.
	But there was an assumption, an assumption that...
	Population transfers had to take place, even if we go back to the 1930s and 40s.
	And that the Palestinians were there and that something needs to be done with them.
	Now, you can take this in a different way.
	What is Israel going to be?
	Is it going to be a Jewish state and almost like a Jewish state-led?
	That is bordering a Arab-Palestinian Muslim state, and they share Jerusalem.
	So Jerusalem's in the, you know, it's shared between the West Bank and Israel proper.
	Are they going to share the holy city of Jerusalem and live in peace with their neighbors?
	Are they going to live in, you know, one of the kind of compromise solutions, are they going to create a demilitarized, defanged?
	Totally neutered Palestinian state that they can live beside?
	Or are they just going to engage in full-on ethnic cleansing and push the Palestinians out and send them to Jordan or Iraq, etc.?
	This was, as Popeye points out, a clear assumption of early Zionists, even the left-wing Zionists, of, well, we're creating this project, so what do we do with these people who are here?
	And the assumption was not to kill them all or anything, but a population transfer, which no doubt, you know, is dubiously moral and would involve death at some level, I'm sure, but was a population transfer that would send them to Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, etc.
	And Bibi Netanyahu has been engaging this on a slow motion level.
	In the West Bank.
	So again, Gaza is run by Hamas.
	Gaza is responsible for these attacks.
	Gaza is being bombarded.
	There's a West Bank, a much larger area that is landlocked, unlike Gaza, and includes Jerusalem.
	And the settlements, I put some of these up in the scratch pad.
	There is an interesting article on Vox.
	In terms of just the number of settlements and maps, I'll just share the screen just so you can kind of take a look at this.
	But you can see this, I think this was published in 2016.
	I'm sure there's actually better work on this.
	But you can see the number of Israeli outposts and then Israeli settlements all over the place.
	They're not even centralized.
	This right here shows a graphical progress or a map progress of settlements and outposts from 1970 to 2016.
	As you can see, they are everywhere.
	And here are just basically numbers of the population of settlers.
	So, I mean, in 1980, we're talking about a tiny amount of people.
	I don't know if there's 10,000 or so are engaged in settlements.
	As of 2016, when this was published, it's 350,000.
	I mean, these have grown under Netanyahu's leadership.
	I would assume that there's half a million settlers there.
	So it's a slow motion form of ethnic cleansing or terraforming, if you will.
	It's a slow motion way of simply bringing all of these people into the West Bank and thus...
	Making it a fait accompli.
	You will never have that territory.
	What are you going to do with the million and strong Jews who live there?
	It becomes a slow motion ethnic cleansing that has taken place.
	Many of the criticisms of Bibi Netanyahu and the obvious intelligence failure That occurred, allowing this to happen, is that Bibi's eyes were fixated on the West Bank.
	He wants to use the IDF, use the intelligence force to defend settlements because this is the project.
	So we can't just kill them all.
	We don't want to have a two-state solution.
	Bibi, whatever you might say.
	He has never wanted a two-state solution.
	He wants an occupation that will last indefinitely.
	So what do we do?
	We just do it slowly.
	It might take another 40 years, but...
	In another 30 to 40 years, there might be 2 million settlers in the West Bank, and it gets to a point where nothing can be done.
	There is no possible way that you can have a Palestinian state in the West Bank with this many Israeli Jews in it.
	And not just Israeli Jews, but this many right-wing, highly religious Israeli Jews who vote for the Likud party.
	So that is the plan.
	Now, Gaza's a different story.
	Again, it's a much smaller area.
	As you've probably heard on many of these reports, I mean, we're in those densely populated places on Earth, and it's administered by Hamas.
	You know, I think Bibby's solution to this might be just destroy it and massive bombardment.
	The hostages be damned.
	They're martyrs for the cause.
	And we'll just eliminate this problem.
	And I don't know.
	I mean, I'm not in Israel.
	I don't know what the feeling is.
	All I can do is look at...
	You know, American news sources.
	I can look at speeches by Bebanyahu.
	I can look at news events.
	And my sense is that there definitely is a liberal faction that is going to push back on Netanyahu in any sort of destruction of Gaza and the continued ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
	This attack was so dramatic, so just insane on some level.
	And again, through social media, through television, etc., it's just, it has refocused everyone's eyes onto Israel.
	And it has gained the support of the United States, Joe Biden.
	The Western world, the NATO alliance, I mean, Germany is projecting the Israeli flag onto the Brandenburg Tour.
	I mean, it has become Ukraine two years on, basically, or something close to it.
	I think there actually is more ambivalence and criticism among the people who are supporting Israel right now, but it is a lot like Ukraine 2.0.
	And they have this opportunity to do it, at least for the coming months.
	There is going to be a lot of apologies that are going to be put out by Western sources for any sort of bombardment and destruction of Gaza.
	Joe Biden has unequivocally said, we've got your back.
	The American people stand with Israel.
	That, you know, again, you can interpret it however you want.
	That strikes me as just a green light.
	I think consciousness has changed over the past three days.
	I think we've returned to a kind of 9-11 feeling on the right and in the media writ large.
	I think how this is going to affect...
	Yeah, Dark Day for Dark Brandon.
	Yeah, I agree because he, you know...
	There have been all of these reports of his criticism about Bibi Netanyahu.
	He thinks he's a bad prime minister.
	He's corrupt.
	He's been indicted as a corrupt actor.
	We need to move to something else.
	I mean, whatever you want to say about the United States and its support of Zionism, Jewish leadership within the State Department, etc., the mass media, etc., etc.
	The United States has had a two-state solution as a policy.
	And the Oslo Accords, etc., are about that.
	Now, you can question this.
	You can have all sorts of criticism.
	But that has been the policy of the United States for some time.
	I just feel that is now ridiculous and impossible.
	I mean, if there is...
	And again, Biden, I think, genuinely saw and accurately saw Bibi Netanyahu as a real problematic actor in this regard.
	He is opposing this solution that we've come up with, where two little statelets, nation states living side by side, not at war with one another.
	And we can just solve this and be done with it.
	That is over.
	There is no two-state solution ever.
	People talk about this and wring their hands and speak wistfully of one day we're going to have a two-state solution.
	This is just nonsense.
	It could have happened in the 90s.
	Could have happened maybe even in 2005.
	There was an almost opening as a silver lining of George Bush's terrible war in Iraq.
	All of these things were kind of sort of possible, but I just think they are totally impossible at this point.
	And so, yeah, a one-state solution is also possible.
	I mean, I don't think Bibi Netanyahu wants this.
	A one-state solution of greater Israel in which Jews are going to increasingly be outnumbered and, to be brutal about it, outbred by Arabs.
	And so the identity of Israel as a Jewish state is going to slowly, slowly dissipate.
	That is still a possibility.
	That can be done.
	But in my view, that was really the only possibility.
	This just construction of two states that have different agendas, et cetera, side by side, done much like the creation of Israel, done by the United Nations of the United States.
	It just it always struck me as unworkable.
	I thought this was kind of always a pipe dream, but a one state solution is very much possible.
	I don't see it now.
	And maybe I am becoming I'm cynical and I'm exaggerating these things, but I do think that we're going to see obviously a kind of continued ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
	But I absolutely think we are going to see a destruction of the Gaza Strip.

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