This makes me angry. I encounter it online and in the wild all the time. People have a problem with billionaires and corporations owning everything. They don’t have a problem with mom-and-pop landlords living in the neighborhood (whatever’s left of it) and renting out a few AirBnBs. People feel this way because they can’t see a way out of capitalism except saving up some money and getting their own AirBnbs to exploit the land and proletariat, even though small landlords are neither happy nor interesting people, and they are still trapped inside capitalism.
People with an anti-corporate and anti-billionaire mindset are moving in the right direction, but they’re still beholden to capitalist individualism. It’s the same with local small businesses, even though these businesses are buying all their products from big businesses, selling them for a massive markup, and (in my experience) cheating their employees far more often than big business. Government jobs are the only ones I’ve had where I didn’t feel like I was going to be fired or screwed every single day I was there.
I saw a Sysco truck a few days ago outside the only restaurant in my very small town. This place was my first job (as a bus boy) a loooooong time ago. They stiffed me on my first paycheck (I had been working an unpaid training period without knowing it, I was also supposed to be a psychic at this place) and I walked out. In the second or third year of the pandemic I saw a girl who couldn’t have been more than eight years old working in an apron there (she was related to the family that owns the place). I’ve lived here off-and-on for decades and almost no one ever went to that restaurant; everyone knew you’d get sick if you ate their food. We suspected that it was a mafia money-laundering operation, since the owners drive red corvettes and seem to be rolling in dough. Tourists do eat there more regularly now even though the place has noticeably bad yelp reviews.
In a colonial context, big or small bourgeoisie can be revolutionary. In an imperialist context like in the USA, they are almost never revolutionary.
Also, the phrase “during the pandemic” makes me angry! A friend living overseas just told me yesterday that they had gotten sick and lost their sense of taste. Look up recent online reviews for scented candles.
Using “childish” as an insult. Bruh, have you talked with kids? Literally any kids. Easiest group of people on Earth to radicalize.
“Israel” is to blame for everything but somehow the USA is still good. This is thanks to Hollywood and the fact that the USA is a far bigger and more successful “Israel.” Very few people know that Columbus was a Zionist. People around the world still dream of living here and making it big because of Hollywood movies and friends or relatives who immigrated here and somehow made it work.
In my experience, Arabic speakers are ready for a revolution, as long as it excludes women’s liberation / queer liberation. Spanish speakers have profound levels of liberal brainworms. Portuguese speakers are typically pretty aligned with hexbear without knowing it. White leftists seem uninterested in returning the USA to indigenous sovereignty and paying full reparations to slaves / the descendants of slaves, and this is one major reason why their movements always go nowhere. (I hate the term “leftist” but I don’t know what else to call these people since they aren’t communists and yet they’re still a bit more radical than the average democrat.)
What are some of your left-ish peeves you regularly encounter online?
anti-veganism is the biggest one. so many of the most radical communists you’ve ever seen suddenly turn into fascists when their victims can’t speak english. because apparently screams of pain and horror aren’t universal enough.
the pig didn’t say “no, I don’t want you to stab me, that hurts” while I was stabbing it so its suffering doesn’t count. ughYep, as soon as you say “animals are comrades, and we should be working for their liberation too”, even many leftists will say “bacon tho”
When “working” at a “newspaper” I once got into an argument with my editor about whether lobsters could feel pain. AFAIK, there isn’t any scientific research showing that they are capable of feeling pain (although obviously they are), so we couldn’t mention their capacity for feeling things in some article we were publishing about them. (I only lasted at this job for three months and got fired for refusing to approve a transphobic article.)
AFAIK, there isn’t any scientific research showing that they are capable of feeling pain
They are capable of prefering one kind of stimuli to another and choosing to avoid stimuli associated with damage, and they interpret this stimuli through a nervous system containing nociceptors that respond to blockages of the COX reactions.
Any claim that they are not capable of feeling pain is pure sophistry sniffing your own farts about the concept of “Emotions”.I only lasted at this job for three months and got fired for refusing to approve a transphobic article
ur my hero <3
Non-vegan communists should concede the moral correctness of veganism even if they aren’t there yet. Rooting out cognitive dissonance and latent prejudice is a fundamental aspect of being a communist. Inability or unwillingness to do that is very suspicious
You’re right, but I think I’d rather hang out with a non-vegan commie, than a non-commie vegan. I’m vegan myself but I find too many of them are insufferable libs who took to veganism as a shortcut to moral superiority.
biggest peeve for me is when people’s interest in socialist politics seems to stem more from a desire to be the smartest and/or most morally righteous guy/gal/enby in the room rather than out of a genuine desire for a better world. it’s a tendency that’s existed since the beginning of any kind of socialist movement, but it’s intensely heightened by the nature of the internet. it can also exist alongside a genuine desire for liberation and is a contradiction we all have the capacity to slip into, so is something to always stay vigilant against in ourselves.
tied to the above, but another peeve is lingering individualist idealist/moralistic puritan brainworms in people who have otherwise come to the correct conclusion.
and not exactly a peeve, but something to always keep in mind and which is tied to all of the above: coming to socialist politics on an intellectual level is not the same as coming to terms with how hegemonic all of these hierarchies are in our day-to-day lives, is not the same as coming to terms with all the ways they’ve shaped us, & is not the same as unlearning/decolonizing ourselves of these thoughts and behaviors. the latter is a lifelong process, which is something i have to remind myself of every time i encounter a new blindspot in myself, or a blindspot in a comrade/fellow traveler that surprises me and seems intuitive/obvious to where i’m at in my own political journey, but which isn’t obvious yet to them.
biggest peeve for me is when people’s interest in socialist politics seems to stem more from a desire to be the smartest and/or most morally righteous guy/gal/enby in the room
This is me. I still get corrected sometimes. I try my best to be humble and listen when people make a good point.
no shame, it’s been me as well and takes active effort to avoid/unlearn.
Body shaming against reactionaries, if a reactionary has 2 characters one that harms others and is shared by people who harm others and one doesn’t and is shared by people who don’t harm others, why shame the one that doesn’t harm others? like why care if for example Hitler got one ball? the nazi forces that he was an important part of committed a genocide, only people getting hurt are ones with genitalia not considered to be the norm. Same thing with beauty, balding, voice, birth-names and everything else.
Faux-progressive brain worms, happens with people who used to be rebels without a cause, liberals and most famously reddit atheists. talking about authoritarianism or chauvinism against the third world. liberal feminism liberal anti-racism liberal queer rights, which can be seen through tokenisation (Mamdani) or fetishization (Mamdani). There’s also the hazing stuff about somdier wives.
The lionization and glazing of American soldiers, because “uhm ecery revolution neede-” you fucking larpers need soldiers not colonial cops, they have as much experience as a police officer, most combat done was calling an airstrike on a farmer’s home in Afghanistan, fuck he gonna do? call an airstrike from the American revolutionary front’s f35 on an Amazon warehouse?
Ugliness is a social construct. Losurdo’s book on Nietzsche begins with a quote from Nietzsche speculating that Socrates was at least partly Jewish because race-mixing makes people ugly (in Nietzsche’s mind).
Beauty as a social construct is also a tool of white supramacy and colonialism since a lot of the beauty standards are entirely built being the opposite of black (thin straight hair doesn’t work) and being the opposite of trans (hairless and "feminine).
Speaking of ugliness there was a thing in the arab world where a man was considered too “ugly” to have children by “progressive arabs” that he’s ruining the lives of his children because he’s ugly and making their future lives difficult, instead of realising that maybe they’re lives won’t be difficult if you didn’t bully them for how they look. The conservative religious ones were the ones talking about “he’s created by Allah and therefore you can’t judge that he’s ugly”.
Also I dislike is body shaming disguised as body positivity, like saying “Fat women are pretty it’s actually the skinny ones that are ugly” like damn.
There are classist and misogynist elements of beauty standards also.
Class - because fair (untanned) skin, healthy delicate hair, unbroken nails, lack of scars, etc are indicators of a person’s social status and lack of manual labor.
Misogyny - because long hair, long nails, fair skin, and so on are often held as standards for women, precisely so that they can be confined to property status instead of active (laboring) members of the community
Knee-jerk kink negativity that involves armchair diagnosing people they barely know and calling for them to be locked up/institutionalized over private consensual sexual practices.
It is genuinely frustrating to see people embracing right wing christian talking points in the year of our lord 2026 about sex but from the left. Like when we see people basically word for word quite the mormon campaigns against porn or talking points about how BDSM is the product of a deviant mind.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of it comes down to the widespread tendency for right-wingers to be creeps about their fetishes toward women online and taking up the attitude of “this is associated with my enemy so I hate it.” What that overlooks, of course, is that there’s no shortage of completely vanilla right-wing creeps.
And it also ignores the presence of left wing very overt perverts (Affectionate)
I think you have a point, but I also think some of it is just basic cultural conservatism sneaking its way into people’s ideology without being properly examined.
I wonder how many of those pushing those talking points either come from right-wing Christian backgrounds (who maybe haven’t gone back and examined those ideas) versus completely secular ones (who maybe aren’t aware of their source).
I think the second is more prominent than the first on websites like this. Cultural alienation to some extent is pretty common when you get to the political fringes like this website. But that idea is pulled entirely from the aether. Sprung from my brow like Athena.
Could be right. At the end of the day, I think it all comes down to buying into idealist morals either way.
Armchair generals.
Specifically talking about certain people I’ve seen who mock those who are actively fighting against the Zionist entity, and who are actively being harmed by them. I’m sure the resistance could use the advise of an online leftist with no experience fighting against a genocidal bandit clan whatsoever. In a way they come off as if they’re saying “You know, if it were up to me, the resistance would win 100% with no casualties whatsoever. I guess those Arabs just aren’t smart enough to fight for their own liberation the right way. Must be the Muslim brainpan.”
Don’t siege
LeningradTel Aviv, take it immediatelyI get the feeling Hexbear/The online left is going to have their own “Don’t siege x take it immediately” moment one of these days, if they haven’t already.
The lack of intersectionality among so-called leftists.
It’s like the most basic thing to understand. You are going to have blindspots on issues because you are not part of every oppressed group. Black men and Latino men are both going to experience racism differently, but they both still experience racism that’s often violent and/or deadly. The same is true with trans women and Asian women experiencing sexism that (again) is often violent and/or deadly.
But all of this seems to go out the window for some people, especially white people, even when they themselves are part of oppressed groups. I do not understand why this is so difficult for some to understand that racism is to PoC as misogyny is to women as ableism is to the disabled as queerphobia is to LGBTQ+ and so on. Instead of shutting the fuck up and listening, things devolve into taking systemic criticisms as personal attacks.
Speaking of which, I could go into another rant about “leftists” not rejecting Great Man of History or refusing to understand systemic problems are systemic.
People have a lot of trouble getting over their own egos, and I think white people struggle with this most because they have by and large gone through life being unchallenged by the system. It’s easy to fall for the lie that the US/the West is a just society or whatever when you’re not constantly confronted with evidence to the contrary. I also think the entire way our society is structured makes it hard for people to accept criticism generally. Whether that’s the US epidemic of child abuse, the way our schools are designed, or how precarious our jobs are - one’s nervous system becomes primed to view criticism as a direct threat. If one subconsciously identifies with the system (because it has not challenged one and one has not challenged one’s place within it) and then one encounters criticism of the same, one may find oneself taking it personally. But it should be on the majority to unpack and understand their biases and not on the minority to do the emotional labor.
I also think the entire way our society is structured makes it hard for people to accept criticism generally. Whether that’s the US epidemic of child abuse, the way our schools are designed, or how precarious our jobs are - one’s nervous system becomes primed to view criticism as a direct threat.
that’s incredibly insightful and i never thought about it exactly like that re: criticism. i think you’re very much onto something here.
Using “childish” as an insult. Bruh, have you talked with kids? Literally any kids. Easiest group of people on Earth to radicalize.
as with most denigration that consists of comparison with a lower hierarchical strata, it is not based in truth but in the universality of the discrimination itself. we say that being like a child is insulting largely on the grounds of an adult distaste for the notion of the rights of children. “you don’t have the right to protest your conditions: you are dependent on me for any survival at all.”
in other words, much like calling police “pigs” is an insult to pigs, calling people childish is most of the time not literally descriptive but first and foremost an insult to children.
You could be right but I always thought the idea of calling someone childish was the implication of them lacking the experience, maturity or education to have an informed opinion/discussion on the topic at hand.
You could always just say “You are inexperienced.” To associate being a child with the idea that, even having grown, you have not gained enough experience, it what makes it hierarchical.
“Pigs” is definitely an insult to pigs. Pigs don’t hurt people for pleasure or money.
Everybody repeats “death to ameriKKKa”… but when I spell out how people can regain power over their own lives, shrink the economy, and preclude the existence of imperialism in their own proportion of the economy, all of a sudden they start to sound like succdems.
Tell me how I can do these things.
Weaponizing Thrift
The first stage of my approach involves learning what the bare minimum you can live on is. That means splitting rent multiple ways, cooking all your meals in big batches, finding ways of entertaining yourself that don’t involve routinely spending money, so that you mostly just spend money on the absolute essentials of rent, groceries, medications, toilet paper, and dish detergent. It could be called a “third-world lifestyle”. Virtually nothing gets bought from gas stations or liquor stores or smoke shops (except maybe the equipment and raw materials to make things yourself), or even certain aisles of the grocery store. Nothing builds solidarity with the proletariat of overexploited countries the way feeding yourself on $3 a day does.
Location is a big part of this. There’s a presumption that the only places that are worth living in are metro areas of 1M+ people, but capital is invariably quite well-developed in these places, housing costs are inflated far above the baseline, and most working-class people are barely getting by to the point where the citythey’re in doesn’t matter all that much, unless there’s family there.
There are lots of places in the country where you can get your expenses down below $800 a month while still having conventional housing, and there is still economic diversification and cultural development and interesting people to be around (including socialists). In fact, political objectives are a lot more feasible in smaller cities, you can bike across them, and if there’s really something you need a larger metropolis for, you can take the train or bus there. There are lots of states where the minimum wage is high, while smaller cities away from the big metro areas have a much lower cost of living.
Every dollar that doesn’t go to a landlord or creditor, or to gasoline/alcohol/nicotine/meat/sugar, is a dollar that fuels your own liberation. The less you spend, the less you are propping up the bourgeois state. Teaming up with like-minded roommates, you can slow down the gears of the economy to less than $10k per person per year to start out with.
Gray Economy
With the time that you’re not working, build up your abilities to provide the means of your own existence, or at least the final stages of refining them. Basic skills in gardening, dumpster diving, sewing, bicycle maintenance, and carpentry are essential. Woodworking, auto repair, fiber arts, ceramics, refurbishing electronics, and lots of other skills are highly useful.
If you can turn some of these skills into something that can be exchanged, that gets you much further along.
Collectivized Housing
Even if you cut out everything but rent, that’s still a lot being sucked from you. A 3-bedroom house might rent for a year for 30k, while property taxes and DIY maintenance/repairs on that same house would cost about 7-12k. If you can fit 4 people into that house, that’s $2-3k per person per year in housing expenses (plus another 1.5k/p/y in utilities). It could even go lower.
3 committed people working full-time and saving as much as they can will secure a down payment on a house like that in as little as 2 years. Then they’ll be able to pay it all off in another 3-4 years. After that, they’ll be able to either be employed a lot less, or be a lot more comfortable, or start saving up for the down payment for the next few comrades, aiming for a domino effect that lifts all the closely aligned people around out of the rent/debt trap, and even allows you to invite people to come live near you to augment your organizing potential (watch this space).
Zeroing Out
The time may come where there is an imminent danger from the government, or from reactionary non-state entities. Being able to hide without a trace is the surest way to survive this condition. This involves having access to land (minimum 5 acres at $8-12k per acre), building structures without electric or water or sewer connections and ideally inconspicuously, sourcing as much as possible in the immediate vicinity, making extensive use of appropriate technology, and having designated vehicles and drivers to go on errands as needed.
You will eat the (bean) pods and live in the (civilizational) bugYou will cook on a rocket stove with wood, you will poop in a composting toilet, you will get all your water from a slow sand filter, you will get all your electricity from a few solar panels, and you will have an enjoyable existence as long as you have people and books and plants and a purpose. With 20+ people living in an arrangement like this, you can have a kind of communal luxury, where you are living better than the average American, for a sliver of the cost.Even without needing to flee and disappear, you can benefit from this in the near term. Renting costs 10k of economic activity per person per year, owning and inhabiting collectively can cost 4k, living on the land can be done with 2k or less.
Make a 501©3, or even a church out of it, and anyone can make tax-free donations to the collective homestead. These get used for ecological preservation, charity, education, et cetera; the important thing is that you can benefit from them. Conceivably, a comrade living and working in town could have gross earnings of 100k, but donate 60k to the nonprofit, have only 40k of taxable income, spend the weekend at the collective homestead, you see where this is going.
I have a further section on distributed proletarian economic espionage, but this is large and may have identifying information. Without going into too many details, it is possible to gain experience in a sector (especially a niche sector and/or small business), learn how that business is run, and with any luck, go into that business for yourself as a worker’s co-op. This does strengthen the official economy but can also be the way that you build a kind of prosperity, have the wherewithal to support a party and communes and unions and self-defence initiatives, and maybe even make the arithmetic unfavorable to raiding and deposing you. If you control a part of the local economy, especially something that makes tangible goods and services, anyone who is reliant on the economy (practically everyone) ends up hurting themselves if they try to destroy you.
In general, “just barely getting by” is a result of medical/material disaster, or social isolation, or broad strategic missteps- these may include simply not being aware of the options that exist.
The good outcome in this lifetime does not come from holding out for the unions or a political party or the emergent class consciousness of the Western masses (lol) or some unforeseen good fortune to rescue us from our material conditions. It comes from recognizing that capitalism is not optimized and never can be, it needs incentives to operate, it needs a carrot to entice the proles, and that means it necessarily must have slack that can be pulled on, and that it never reaches the asymptote of maximal exploitation and economic coercion of everyone. It then follows from identifying and leveraging that slack for our own ends, building an economic counterpower bit by bit.
This is all pretty interesting. My only question is: where do you think it might work, specifically?
I also despair of finding anyone who could join a project like this (I have a lib spouse and multiple kids).
I am fortunate enough to have made a bunch of radical contacts in the place where I landed over a decade ago, and these have led me to all kinds of further connections. I don’t have a high-paying job but I still put about half my income in savings.
One of my current most active projects is identifying places most like this, and I expect for there to be several dozen throughout the country.
Columbus was a Zionist
I guess if you squint a little, but unless we’re getting rid of the term settler-colonial…
For sure, he was into settler-colonialism too. His lifelong obsession was “liberating” Jerusalem from the Turks, something very strangely never mentioned in any of my history classes. Plenty of good history books about him also won’t bring it up.
Christian conquest of “the holy lands” is not Zionism, Peter the Hermit was not a Zionist, Richard the Lionheart was not a Zionist, Imperator Caesar Flavius Heraclius Augustus was not a Zionist. You are not using the term Zionist correctly. Zionism is specifically a Jewish ethnonationalist project, and neither the concept of Judaism or ethnonationalism are appropriate to apply to this.
Edit: If we are to apply the label “Zionism” to a desire for conquest of Palestine for revanchist or religious purposes, then we have to conclude that Saladin and Rameses III were Zionist.
On the face of it, Zionism is the idea that Jews should colonize and control Palestine. By this definition, Columbus was not a Zionist. But the concept doesn’t just randomly appear in 19th century Europe. It has deep roots, and not all of these are Jewish. Zionism is a kind of realization among the capitalist ruling class that Jews can be used for something other than slave labor in concentration camps, that they can instead be used to create a kind of postmodern colony / military base / crusader state meant to control the most important region on Earth.
“Controlling Palestine” is not Zionism, because if I believed this, it would mean that I believe that Hamas is Zionist. I’m talking about using the Bible to justify dispossessing indigenous people of their land, usually (but not always) in Palestine, and often in the name of fulfilling prophecy to bring about the return of Jesus and end the world. European colonists constantly used the Bible to justify colonization, genocide, and slavery, and often acted in this way (in Columbus’s time) because they were deeply concerned about the Ottoman Empire advancing in the east.
Zionism is not purely a Jewish phenomenon. Most Zionists on Earth right now are not Jews (although a majority of Jews are Zionists). Jews in the diaspora likewise spent thousands of years only speaking of Zion in a metaphorical sense, or even lived peacefully in Palestine before the 19th century. Their descendants, Arab Jews, Jewish Arabs, Palestinian Jews, are anti-zionist.
Modern Zionism is a mix of European bourgeois nationalism and Biblical literalism. Any Christian who believes that the Bible is the literal word of God likewise believes that every inch of Palestine belongs to Jews. Just to take one example, the Book of Joshua states that Jews should not only control [the Biblical] Israel, but slaughter every living thing there (people, animals, whatever) in order to do so. Christians and Jews today will point to this text as proof that they should support “Israel.” But between the Roman destruction of the second temple and the nineteenth century, few if any Jews took the Book of Joshua seriously, while Christians were exterminating indigenous people and seizing their land while making allusions to the “city on a hill,” i.e., Jerusalem.
I don’t know. I just find it extremely suspicious that you’ll never know that Columbus was obsessed with Jerusalem unless you do a little digging.
Reconquering the holy land was a bugbear for many, many Christians in the early modern period. Columbus was not unique in this regard, but even if it were unique to him it still would not make him Zionist. Christian Zionism is not when Christians want Jerusalem, it is when Christians support Zionism (a Jewish ethnonationalist project). A Christian Zionist still supports “Israel” rather than a Christian crusader state or something, because they believe that a Jewish presence in Palestine is necessary for their eschatology or just because they hate brown people.
Calling Columbus a Zionist is just wrong.
What else am I supposed to call colonialism and imperialism backed by the Bible? There’s something qualitatively and quantitatively different about the Crusades and the European colonization of islands in the Mediterranean, then the Canary Islands, cities on the coast of northwest Africa, and then the Americas and many other parts of the world. Isn’t the Bible a crucial part?
What’s so bizarre is that Crusaders were genocidal toward Jews for centuries. The Bible said that the Holy Land belonged to them, but the Crusaders didn’t care. Maybe it also has something to do with the Reformation, when both Catholics and Protestants began paying a lot more attention to the Bible in an effort to one-up the other. In the 19th century, the first Jewish Zionists came up with the idea of settling in Palestine as a reaction to European nationalism and anti-semitism. But plenty of non-Jewish members of the Western ruling class thought this could be useful (not just the British but also the Nazis and others, even, sadly, the Soviets), for religious and geopolitical purposes, possibly as an early reaction to decolonization, the idea that European Jews are actually indigenous to Palestine because the Bible says so.
What else am I supposed to call colonialism and imperialism backed by the Bible?
That. The colonialist and imperialist projects of Europe were all backed by clergy citing the Bible. Do you call the colonial empires in India and Africa Zionism? What about the non columbus conquistadors? What about the puritans? Fuck it dude the confederates were justifying the civil war with the Bible, was that Zionism?
What’s so bizarre is that Crusaders were genocidal toward Jews for centuries
That’s only bizarre because you are conflating them with modern Zionists. To a medieval crusader a Jew was a Christ killer who refused the word of the Lord when they heard it, and possibly someone currently in possession of valuable stuff that would be theirs if they stabbed them a little bit, an action they were pre-forgiven for. Crusaders did not want a Jewish ethnostate, they didn’t want an Israel, they wanted their own fiefdoms in the levant, religious salvation, and the inclusion of Jerusalem in Christendom.
What about the puritans?
Just to hone in on this example, they called America the promised land, the city on a hill, the land of milk and honey, even the New Jerusalem. Zionism is when Jews want to colonize Palestine using the Bible as justification, but it’s not Zionism when gentiles use the Bible to justify colonizing other parts of the world. (The parts of the Bible they use are also usually the Old Testament parts.) It just seems so similar to me, and arbitrary to say, well, Jews aren’t involved here and we’re in a different part of the world, so although the process is basically the same (use the Bible to justify genocide), the differing locales and lack of direct Jewish involvement makes it different.
Currently “Israel” is attempting to build what it calls a “Greater Israel” which has nothing to do with anything written in the Bible—not just by grabbing territory from Syria or Lebanon, but by dominating as many governments as possible (Turkey, European governments, the USA, etc.). Their goal is basically to turn the entire planet into Syria. The Old Testament is integral to “Israeli” claims to Palestine, but it never mentions countries like the USA, since they didn’t exist when the Old Testament was written. Does this then mean that the “Israelis” are no longer doing Zionism, that they’re just back to regular European colonialism and imperialism? The result may not even be control of Palestine—after “Israel” collapses, “Israelis” could retreat to places like Cyprus, although obviously they would just be waiting for a chance to return to Palestine, which is their primary goal.
That’s only bizarre because you are conflating them with modern Zionists.
Do you follow Laith Marouf? He’s called “Israel” a modern Crusader state. I also just found it bizarre that no Jews are even mentioned in a movie like Kingdom of Heaven, which was a pretty major attempt on Hollywood’s part to address the “Israeli/Palestinian Conflict.” Apparently not many Jews were living in Palestine at the time in which the film takes place, since the Crusaders had expelled or killed most of them, but Saladin allowed them to return once he took back Jerusalem. There are just so many contradictions here, it’s difficult to untangle them.
Even if we assume that Zionism is a purely Jewish phenomenon, OP isn’t completely off-base here. While there is debate among scholars, some do support the theory that Columbus was a crypto-Jew.
For historical context, 1492 marked the end of the Reconquista, at which point Spain had conquered the last remaining Muslim kingdom on the Iberian peninsula. At this point, the Spanish crown began evicting Muslims and Jews (sans their valuables). Given the choice to convert or flee penniless, some chose to convert outwardly and continue their religious traditions in secret. (As an aside, while the Spanish Inquisition gets conflated with witch hunts in other parts of Europe, it was in fact focused on rooting out these “false conversions.” Refusing to eat pork and lighting candles on Friday nights are just a couple examples of activities that would get you dragged before the Inquisition.)
I’m not going to seek out every point of information given in support of the theory, but one I do remember off the top of my head is the fact that Columbus wrote letters to his son in Hebrew.
but one I do remember off the top of my head is the fact that Columbus wrote letters to his son in Hebrew.
You are remembering wrong. If the theory of Columbus being a crypto Sephardic Jew was correct, he would have spoken Ladino and written in Ladino. Which he also didn’t. Now the fact that he didn’t write letters in either Hebrew or Ladino does not mean he wasn’t a Jew. Writing in Ladino would have been evidence of a crime and handing direct evidence to a messenger is probably unwise when you are already under suspicion for your many, many other crimes.
The thing you are referring is the insignia he used supposedly looking similar to the Hebrew letters Bet and Hei, which supposedly is a secret reference to the phrase Be’ezrat Hashem (With God’s help).
Edit: Now Spanish crypto Jews (Marrano) did do stuff like that, this idea doesn’t come out of nowhere. entirely But your misremembering has resulted in severely overstating the evidence.Even if we assume that Zionism is a purely Jewish phenomenon, OP isn’t completely off-base here. While there is debate among scholars, some do support the theory that Columbus was a crypto-Jew.
Out of some actual weird Sephardic nationalist sentiment and weird Spanish antisemitism. The evidence for him being a practising jew is his use of the phrase “Second house” about Jerusalem and a doodle.
All the other arguments is stuff like Simon Wiesenthal arguing that Columbus went west as a sort of proto-zionist project to save the Jews of Spain by making a new homeland in the “new world” (A theory with approximately zero evidence) and Salvador de Madariaga believing he had the racial characteristics of a Jew like looking Jewish and lacking loyalty to Genoa and Spain (Which is just naked antisemitism)This is not my area of study, and was something that was mentioned as an aside during my studies that I did not look into myself. I should have researched it further before repeating it, and I appreciate the correction. Columbus was certainly not a good guy regardless of his motivations or background, and I think we can agree on that.
We’re on a shitposting site, you can fire from the hip.
And yes, we can agree that Columbus regardless of whether he was Genoese, Marrano or from space, was an incredibly awful person.
Not being able to hold two truths (I feel like everyone is guilty of this to some degree)
