What Nietzsche made me think…

Usually, during a philosophy lecture, I am drifting in and out of consciousness and am generally half asleep. But on one particular day I was lucky enough to be alert, and on that particular day, the lecture was on Nietzsche.

Now the lecture was only a quick summary, and I have not read any of his works as of yet, but I hope to read Thus spoke Zarathustra. Anyway, one part of his theory of morality really made me think.

Friedrich Nietzsche (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 He claims that the Judaeo-Christian tradition has dominated the Western world since its beginnings. Among the traditions is their theory of morality. He questions why the moral philosophers of the West seem to take this morality for granted. He accuses Kant and his “morality of reason” of using Christian morals and furnishing it with reason, without examining the content of morality itself, for example. For him, even Marx seems to have a Judaeo-Christian influence, now I was confused by this since Marx claims that all of religion is a means of control and an “opiate to the masses”. But there is one crucial element that influences him and all others. By Judaeo-Christian, Nietzsche doesn’t seem to simply mean Christianity or Judaism, but a way of thinking. 

The “slave mentality” of Judaeo-Christian thought

The judaeo-christian tradition is an example of slave mentality. The way of its thinking is tailored to support the weak and feeble. Christians, for example, preach ideas such as “the meek shall inherit the Earth”. Another well known example is the parable in which Jesus explains that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. The slave mentality typically hates the material pleasures, reflected by its hostility to adultery, gluttony and greed. And favours the immaterial, such as goodness of the soul, salvation and agape, a divine and non-sexual love.

The master mentality

Prior to the rise of Judaeo-Christian tradition, most of the world was, in a sense, paganistic or polytheistic. They had a very different way of thinking, a master mentality, that was the polar opposite. They favoured the material things of this world, such as honour and bravery in war, wealth and riches, the pleasures of the body itself, beauty and so on. They did not help the slave but used him to their advantage, and they, according to Nietzsche, achieved many glorious things.

Now the question that Nietzsche asks is, why do all the moral philosophers, from St Augustine to Karl Marx, take this slave mentality for granted. Why do they not look back in history and see “the other side of the story” as it were. A totally different spectrum and way of thought.

What it made me think…

Now the reason that “slave mentality” arose instead of “master mentality” was obvious to me. It was simply a reactionary force, just like Karl Marx’s theorized proletariat revolution is reactionary to industrial capitalism. But as I walked out of the lecture at the end, and went back to my room, I thought that this “reaction” of ideologies did not just happen between this so called “slave mentality” and “master mentality”. In fact, it happens all the time.

Just think of it, everything you see is a product of history and its motions. From the language you hear, the architecture, the attitudes, subcultures, music. This is not just in the Western world, but a universal thing amongst humans. Everything we have today is the culmination of thousands of years, of ideologies that produced reactions, and these reactions produced ideologies themselves. According to a lecturer, Hegel once said that “Africa has no history because it has not been written”, but I say no. The history of Africa is written within its faiths, political parties and tribes. It is written within their culture, traditions, borders and customs. It is written within their tongue with which they speak, just like any other part of the world.

Israel and Palestine; what next? A talk by OneVoice – part 2

Continued from part 1 

After Rami and Dari said what they had to say about their work in OneVoice, I and a few other listeners had a few questions. Here are the highlights:

I had heard during their introduction that they had offices in Gaza which had closed during Operation Cast Lead for obvious security reasons, and now they have just been reopened. The point of interest to me was how it was received by Hamas, the ruling party over there. I was curious because Hamas is, at best, a firm organization. If there is anything that they see as a threat they will try and take care of it swiftly.

Rami was the one to answer my question since he was obviously more aware of the situation there. To the surprise of the audience, they had allowed it to open. They were even allowed to hold two meetings in Universities there, a general meeting and one specifically for students that specifically support Hamas and those that supported parties from the PLO. Rami expressed his wishes that it would be just the start of things to come. But with the blockade still active, he as a West Bank resident, can’t visit his colleagues as of yet.

Another pressing issue was that of normalization. When I had put up the event on a social networking site, some people chose not to go because it encouraged normalization. Meaning that they saw that OneVoice made the Israeli-Palestinian conflict politically symmetrical, while in reality it is asymmetrical, with Israel doing the occupying, building the settlements, possessing more finances and a more powerful military. OneVoice responded by saying that they too did not deny that the situation was indeed asymmetrical, but that what is important is the end of the conflict. Rami himself said that there will be no justice or peace, no work towards an independent Palestinian state, until the military occupation ends, and it needs to be ended “urgently”. OneVoice was not forcing people from both sides into dialogue and presenting a symmetrical political situation, but making people on both sides to focus inwardly, both at the same time, to effect change. As Sharon, a representative and worker in OneVoice’s London office, said “if Israel is part of the problem, then it is part of the solution”.

Throughout the talk, I noticed that Dari kept on mentioning that if the conflict does not end then her future will be, in essence, ruined or ripped apart. Some pro-Palestinians might think that she is doing nothing but playing victim, but I kept an open mind and asked her what she explicitly meant by that. Her answer was nothing to do with the possibility of increased terrorist attacks, but the very moral integrity of Israeli society. She had mentioned earlier on, during an informal chat, how long it took Israelis to “wake up”, and now she was envisioning a world fifty years from now where Palestine eventually disappears. She imagined that all her fellow Israelis would be asking themselves “where were we when this happened?”.

That last part was admittedly touching. Many who follow Palestine’s political affairs have witnessed the crimes committed by the Israeli government and I.D.F. I have always wondered how the soldiers who have taken part in these crimes deal with it. How must they react or whether they realize at all that their own morals are crumbling. Yet here was Dari, a soldier who had served in the second Intifada, left frustrated and saw the importance of moral integrity to herself and the country she was born in. An importance greater than any amount of wealth or land that one can gain.

These were essentially the main points of the talk. Hopefully I will stay in touch with the organization and their progress. I don’t want to raise my hopes too high, and I don’t know if this is because I am wise or because it is just a knee-jerk reaction. Something tells me things will either be slow to change, or it will be too late…

 

Hannah Arendt and the Zionist movements – part 2

(note: this work is attributed to Dr. Eric Jacobson)

Hannah Arendt’s position. (reflected from 1940-1948)

Hannah Arendt thought that the reason that political Zionism over took hold over cultural Zionism was because of antisemitism that had existed in Europe since the medieval times. Being closed off communities, the Jewish people did not really participate in politics and worked under who ever ruled the nation they were in, they always happened to be at the mercy of their rulers. This new political Zionism, which flew in the face of religious tradition and waiting for a messiah to establish Israel once more, gave the intellectual non-religious Jews a way to be self determined as minorities in the countries of Europe.

She was not, to my surprise, a cultural or a political Zionist. Here are her beliefs:
1. The establishment of an independent Jewish army that would fight Hitler and the Nazis, no one else.
2. A bi-national state; a single political entity with two national bodies.
3. Expressed no personal interest in cultural Zionism itself and never learned Hebrew

What Hannah Arendt envisioned was not just a confederacy between Palestinians and Israelis, but a whole Middle Eastern Union which she hoped would grow alongside a possible European Union (very ahead of her time), where Jews have their own autonomy. She was very anti-colonialist, disliking the presence of the British and French in the Levant/Middle East/West Asia.

The idea of an independent Jewish army was, unfortunately for her, taken up by the extreme right wing political Zionist movement, forming the terrorist groups of the Stern Gang, Irgun and Haganah. These were responsible for the King David Hotel bombing, killing Arabs, Jews and British men as well as the attacks on Deir Yasin, Tantura and Qibya. A leader of the Stern Gang came for a visit to New York during Hannah Arendt’s time there, and she called him a terrorist, chauvinist and a fascist. He was Menachim Begin, a future prime minister of Israel. This goes to show the divide between Zionist aspirations, and the variety of their goals.

The famous Balfour declaration of 1917 seemed to have sealed the fate of Palestine and completely handed it over the the Zionist Jews, but what people don’t know is the attempt to “fix the situation” with the White Paper of 1939. This addressed both the Jews and Arabs as having equal rights within Palestine, and recognizing both of the group’s self determination. The Biltmore programme of 1942 was a response by the extreme Zionists to the White Paper and re invigorated their desire to establish a single Jewish commonwealth in Palestine.

The response to that decision, which not all of the Zionists and certainly not all of the Jewish community agreed with, was expressed through Brit Shalom (now defunct) and Ihud or “unity” which tried to renounce political Zionism and encourage cooperation with the Arabs.

Hannah Arendt ended up advocating for these peace groups, but with the establishment of the state of Israel, her dreams lay dormant.

The talk itself gave me a whole new range of knowledge concerning Zionism as a political spectrum and not a single movement. It also gave me a sense of what could have been, and what actually happened…