I hate been asked to comment on the current unpleasantness which is going on between Palestine and Israel. The simple fact of the matter is that whatever you think of the relative causes of the two sides of the conflict, whatever was noble, whatever was just, and whatever was kind, has been obliterated. All that is left are two sets of murderous governments who are both packs of complete bastards, and a lot of very scared civilians.
The government of Palestine which has been captured by Hamas, has as its long term objective, the obliteration of Israel. The current government of Israel with Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister, appears to have taken the stance that it intends bomb Gaza to the point of evacuation, including the destruction of any and all people who happen to be there as irrelevant.
The unsaid truth here is that war is not hell. War is war, hell is hell, and of those two war is worse. Hell at least has a citizenry which is formed by an admittance of sinners. There are no innocent bystanders in hell. War on the other hand, is absolutely full of innocent bystanders. All of the children, people injured who were going about their business, the old people, even most of the soldiers who under any other circumstance would have no reason at all to point a gun at someone else, are all innocent bystanders. The people who are not innocent bystanders, are the generals and politicians who conveniently manage things from offices far away and then decorate themselves after the fact in shiny bits of metal as a reward for all of the innocent bystanders that they were able to mangle to death.
One quote which always gets dragged back up in circumstances like this, is from philosopher George Santayana's 1906 work, The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress. It is thus:
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
- George Santayana, Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense. The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1906)
Placing this back into context, the misquoted bit at the end that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is not a statement about learning from history but rather a statement of fact. Remember, this was written in 1906; which was actually before two bouts of massive unpleasantness across the world.
Experience only comes by actually being somewhere and witnessing it first hand. Remembering in this context, is not studying the past and trying to learn its lessons but rather, actually remembering something by virtue of having lived it. The scope of human memory is no more than 120 years. It is entirely possible that there could have been some people in 1906 who would have had a birth date in the 1700s. That means that human memory extended as far back as the War of 1812, Napoleon cutting his was across Europe in 1814, the complete disarray of 1848, and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.
At the time of writing this in 2023, there are no veterans of World War 1 in the world. There are a few veterans of World War 2. The percentages go up for wars after those dates. When it comes to the modern states of Palestine and Israel, quite literally no-one can actually remember the promises and agreements made and the immediately broken, which created the British Mandate for Palestine; so anyone who wants to claim that one or the other of the current states but not their preferred token in this fight is illegitimate, then they are blowing smoke into a fug of falsehoods.
One of the slogans which became popular after the First World War and was then formally picked up by people like Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper after the Second World War, as they tried to unpick the human psyche to explain the absolutely insanity and bastard savagery which saw Jewish people sent to death in gas chambers, and ethnic cleansing across eastern Europe (particularly Armenians) thirty years' earlier is "Never Again".
The problem with "Never Again" that George Santayana realised, even before the world kicked off twice with bouts of unpleasantness, is that "Never Again" is a lesson which only lasts exactly as long as the last person who can remember a thing is still alive. Even if you were 18 years old when the modern state of Israel was declared open, then that would make you 93 years old now. We can practically assume that nobody born in the post-war Baby Boom and beyond can remember a world where the current set of hostilities didn't exist. This is not because they can not study the past but because they physically can not do so.
The consequence of all of this is that the horrors of the past, must revisit us in the eyes of George Santayana because as we rapidly approach the end of memory of the two bouts of unpleasantness, we stare full into the abyss once more. What do we find? We find ourselves. We find perpetual infantile savages.
Yet again we come back to the beast that shouts "I" at the heart of the world. The centre of the universe is 19mm behind the front of people's corneas. Nobody on the face of the planet can see the world from any other perspective other than their own and this constant feedback loop creates people who are the heroes of their own stories and obsessed with themselves. The problem with a world populated with perpetual infantile savages is that as they are obsessed with themselves, they very very often come to the conclusion that they are right and will fashion morality around themselves to prove by force, that asserted fact.
I think that it probably can be taken as fact that obsession with one's self in is a dead end. Why? Because focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on other people and the kosmos at large. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores other people and ignores the kosmos at large, and they end up thinking more about themself than anything else. People whose minds are governed by their own animal instincts for fame, money, power, sex, et cetera, end up being hostile to anything which impedes those ends. Eventually they will not submit to common sense, logic and reason and arguably, they can not even do so. Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life.
This is what lies at the heart of every single person including the people who are currently in charge of Palestine and Israel. They are utterly convinced of the moral rightness and fitness of their actions but in the end, it leads to death en masse.
How anyone can take any side on this, other than calling for the immediate dissolution of both Palestine and Israel is beyond me. Anyone calling for a free Palestine by default would return the place back to Hamas. Anyone calling for a free Israel by default would return the place back to the Netanyahu Government. The only winners out of this are Death, Hades, Gehenna, Sheol and Abaddon. Feeding time is all the time and these empires are more than willing to accept new arrivals.
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