. There are certain books that should be required reading for the human race. One of them is Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman, also called 'Forever Flowing' in some translations. I've touted Grossman here before: I consider him the greatest writer of the Soviet Union I've ever read (there are a lot of great ones) and if anybody calls Life and Fate the greatest novel of the 20th century, I'm hardly an authority to judge but I'd venture no objection. It's the greatest 20th century novel I've ever read, and on a short list of the greatest novels I've ever read (anybody who cares can ask me and I'll give you a top ten. Many are 20c. Some are obvious, others might be new to you.)
But Life and Fate is 800 pages long. Everything Flows is a succinct 250. It is one-third novel, one-third essay, one-third journalistic account, and every minute shot through with horror, not only horror but explanation of horror. The greatest horror of the whole thing is an account of 'Holomodor', a name that should inflict a chill on the whole world: the 1932-33 famine Stalin inflicted on Ukraine, that killed something like 8 million people: men, women, children, loyal citizens and resisters, famine spared no one.
The horror of the experience is given its full due from the survivors. I'll spare you most accounts but the worst of all. There are accounts of children who cry themselves all the way to the grave alongside parents who can do nothing and sometimes kill their children out of what they can only deem mercy. There are even accounts... steel yourself please... of parents who went crazy with hunger enough to kill their children for the purpose of eating them.
Watching the whole thing were Ukraine's Soviet Bureaucrats, sitting in 1932 atop granaries full of Ukrainian wheat that the starving farmed themselves, then barred the Ukrainian people in 1933 from growing or harvesting their crops. If people left their towns, they were caught and shot. Trains would pass and the starving would beg passengers for handouts: what could the passengers do? They might be shot were they caught giving food away.
It is so easy to deem the Soviet apparatchiks pure evil, but view it from their position. if they disobeyed orders, their families might also starve. Every hour of every day they were fed fifteen years of propaganda about the worthiness of the Soviet project, instructed that every increasingly brutal and bloody deed was for the greater good of the Soviet Union, and every drastic action would bring the Soviets closer to the utopian paradise that Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin promised was just past the next round of murder.
There are many reasons propaganda exists, but if evil p eople did not want to convince good people to do evil things, propaganda would disappear forever. Propaganda reduces the drama of the world to a melodramatic play: it needs heroes, and villains, and a plot where villains have no motivation but to inflict outrages on the heroic peoples for whom they have contempt.
But the world is not as propaganda alleges, and there are as many reasons people fall for propaganda as there are people. Grossman goes into all sorts of explanations for why various peoples fall for it.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is beset on all sides by propaganda, and there is not a single person with an opinion on Israel/Palestine exempt from its influence. Trust nothing you hear, trust nothing you read: even the statistics have opinions.
But just as there are facts about the Soviet Union, there are facts about the Middle East. One of them is that famine is happening in Gaza. It is an unalterable, incontrovertible fact of the world. The rotting corpses smell all the way to the next world, and if the next world is not awash in propaganda, it will judge those responsible and hold them to account with the most extreme penitence, be they Likudnik or Hamas:
Were 1000 Palestinians murdered by the IDF in attempts to get food? I have no idea, but the chances that mass acts of murder happened in those circumstances approach 100%. Have UN workers sat atop food they were supposed to distribute to make Israel seem more culpable? Doubtless a few, maybe even whole cells of UN workers, the belief that no UN workers collaborate with Hamas is naive: but the chance that there is widespread collaboration between the UN and Hamas approaches 0. Did Hamas really not steal any aid to keep their population starving? I'd imagine there were a couple instances, no matter what the New York Times said today, but they were probably a few rogue actors not working a coordinated campaign from the top. All of these notions are spread like propaganda as vast exaggerations of the truth, and those predisposed to believe them believe them because humans see everything through the filter of what already justifies what they think.
This frankly explains the entire Middle East. It explains 22 countries in addition to Israel, almost all of whose citizens oppose Israel with every fibre of their ruh. But this month is not a time to call out the mendacity of billions of anti-Israel people, white as well as of color. The sins of this month are Israel's, and that includes the sins of everybody who believes Israel must get support without conditions. Propaganda is what justifies it in the mind of everyone who believes this Gaza operation still necessary: propaganda whose techniques were learned from the pre-revolution Communist party by the Russian, Polish and Ukrainian socialists who founded the State of Israel. And ironically, it is now the right-wingers who detested the Soviet Union who fall for it: rallies, demonstrations, volunteer work, social activities, songs and anthems, posters and simplistic memes, things that appeal not to the head but the heart to inspire feelings that make people feel as though they belong to something so much greater than themselves that any act at all would justify the holy cause.
Fear of isolation is so much more powerful than any truth. These communities give you everything, and we all know little of the world but our own communities. How would any of us ever be accepted by the people we fought against? We would be shunned and mistrusted by both sides involved in the only situations we know. There are some things so true about the world that if we don't know them, it's because we don't want to know them. Often, it's leftist communities who believe the greater untruth, sometimes it's even garden variety American liberals, but in this instance, it's neither of them.
I am a Zionist, and will be for the rest of my life. I don't just believe it's indivisible from Judaism, I KNOW it. Yet I have a responsibility to ask myself, is that a misimpression? The majority of gentiles I know tell me so, and so do a terrifying minority of Jews.
Are Judaism and Zionism different from each other? The part of me that doubts it is over 99%. Yet when you look at the result of a Zionism that inflicts famine, you have to ask yourself: is this Zion's inevitable byproduct? And there is a part of me, a large part, that answers 'yes.'
But this part of me also knows that this horror is the inevitable byproduct of any movement unwatchful of itself. It is the same part of me that knows that moderate Democrat Boomers were so flush with prosperity that they grew unwatchful of Republicans as they grew year-by-year into an authoritarian organization, and a similar left wing unmindfulness may turn tomorrow's Democrats into the same. Prosperity curdles into decadence, decadence curdles into decline, and decline requires explanations. The explanation is almost always that the other side is being deceived by propaganda. Which side is right? Is one side? Is both? Are neither?
Decline is the price of relinquishing vigilance: vigilance of your country and vigilance in your own perceptions. A healthy country watches itself just as a healthy person does. A healthy country ensures prosperity both at home and abroad through active administration. A healthy country provides for its citizens at home with robust public options for education, regulation, healthcare, environmental protection, civic activism, and yes, policing and border patrol too. It ensures security abroad through multilateral collaboration, robust trade, international law, and yes, robust intelligence gathering and national defense. To get rid of any of these is to take another safety off, and inflict another national sickness to a country that could have nearly every reason to stay healthy. Once demagogues arise to exploit the decline, there's no coming back.
Just as America was unwatchful, so too was the Jewish community unwatchful. We conceded the other side had a point at every turn. Many Jews excused those who called for killing Rabin and we still said they were rational. Many Jews told us after 9/11 the Middle East could be remade overnight and we said they were rational. Many Jews told us that Obama was anti-American and anti-Israel and we said they were rational. Many Jews said that Trump and Netanyahu were preferable to anything that smacked of the smallest liberalism and we said they were rational. Now many Jews deny any sin in Gaza, and we still have to pretend they're not beset by propaganda and not unrecognizable from the decency they exhibited a minute ago. And to rub salt in the wound, they think the same of us.
All it takes is a couple demagogues to employ the most effective political tactic in world history: accuse the other side of doing everything which you're about to do, and the truth becomes something that people will never ascertain again in our lifetime, even as the demagogues provide an almost foolproof way for us to know exactly what's going on.
The only result of their unconcession to reality is to provoke the other side into similar unrealities. Every action demands an opposite reaction. Now Israel's former allies grow convinced that current actions are an inevitable byproduct of Zionism, and they grow convinced that the Israeli experiment is a rotten project to its core. We will pay for this in trillions of ways, and still they will say it's only the fault of the left.
Are reality deniers evil? Of course not. But they are crazy. Propaganda exists to make good people crazy just as propaganda made leftists of the 30s deny Holomodor and the Great Terror of 1936-38.
One day, sooner than we think, will come their Molotov-Ribbentrop moment that shakes up everything they know to be true. The moment will come when the American Right ditches their current support of Israel just as so much of the European right already wants to do. Right-wing antisemitism is everywhere on the internet, particularly among the younger generation, and it's only a matter of years before they get a share of the world's power. Will they come to their senses at that moment? I think they have to, but it will be too late, and Israel will know what it's like to truly be alone.
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