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> Ah, Joel, but are you being radicalized in all the right ways?
> Surely, we all ought to have modesty about our respective ways.
Good point, Yoshie. Having lived through five middle eastern wars in my lifetime, this conflict changes little for me ideologically. I've always respected the right of any population in any state to defend themselves. And I've never rationalized the necessity of using violence against civilians to do so.
Clearly you have a dialectical understanding of what would happen in the Middle East if Hezbollah does not win this conflict. My position is that its immaterial whether its a US/Israeli victory or a Hezbollah/Iran victory.
Both outcomes will be bad, because of how they will further impact the region's civilian populations (as is occurring now in Iraq, Palestine, Israel and Lebanon) and lead to endless future conflicts justifying all the warring parties' reactionary raison d'etres indefinitely. The war simply should not have happened. Israel, Hezbollah, the US and Iran are all to blame for pushing it forward.
I have no interest in stressing equality of blame here for any purpose other than to emphasize what an utterly nihilistic conflict this is, and how easy its been for all the warring factions to automatically subscribe to its inhumane logic. There are no revolutionary impulses animating any of the participants behavior here, even though it remains ripe for materialist analysis in every possible sense.
This further obscures the war's victims, and sets ever higher bars for the left to get its head straight. That, in my view, is what's been missing in the way many of us have been evaluating this conflict. myself, included.
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