Saturday, May 24, 2025

A word for the watermelon mob…

Please stop comparing Israel to the Nazis. Everybody knows why you do it and it is thoroughly obnoxious and offensive and you cannot pretend otherwise.

Sensible, important, ethical people — like the Pope, say — seem able to refrain from doing it, and that has to tell you something. 

In fact, while you’re at it, stop comparing anybody with the Nazis (unless like Elon, they almost certainly appear to be self-Hitlerising.) 

Any point thus made is inherently trite and it comes with the cost of trivialising history that surely needs to be remembered and understood correctly.

When it comes to Gaza, there is one big fat blockade from WWII that you might just want to latch onto — Leningrad — but even there the scale is quite staggeringly different. (1m dead civilians). I’ve visited the mass graves outside the city and I know that if I had family connections there today, I would not want the experience of any immediate ancestors to be appropriated willy-nilly for someone’s contemporary demonisation project.

That leaves one potentially appropriate modern historical parallel for habitual users and abusers of historical parallels. 

Not Germans…but Brits, in Malaya in the 1950s, where starvation was used cynically, and appallingly, as an almost unconscionable counter-insurgency tactic.

But be warned. Unlike the Nazis, us Brits are not off-the-shelf avatars of cosmic evil — at least not all the time — and if you do adopt this chunk of our history as an alternative ‘never again’ mace to wield against the dastardly Jewish state you will need to look beyond the strategy to the consequences. Nasty it most definitely was, but on some levels it was successful. 

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