• purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    I’ve certainly encountered conspiracy leftists who are dogshit wrong about zionism, but this seems like kind of a weird fight to pick since that wasn’t the topic at hand.

    Am I following right that you are identifying yourself with conspiracy leftism and therefore, seeing a negative remark about it, are trying to tee up what you believe is an open-and-shut defense of it by pivoting to another topic?

    I don’t even know what you mean by “respectable left” unless you mean Chomsky types but then why is that a meaningful argument?

    • InexplicableLunchFiend [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      Firstly, I’m arab - we have long been smeared by Westerners as all conspiratorial and anti-semitic when we said anything bad about Israel. Including by Western Leftists. So there’s your starting context for why this is problematic and how it’s weaponized for Zionism, including by the very type of people who populate this website.

      I’ve been called a conspiracist by Liberal Zionists more times than I’ve been called an anti-semite, they are interchangable left-punching tactics. Calling socialists conspiracists for claiming factual actions of the CIA is another way this manifests. It’s a left-punching attitude with built in pro-Liberal normalcy bias.

      We now know for a fact that the CIA was heavily involved in Hungary and the “conspiracists” who claimed it all along, the “tankies” were correct the whole time.

      The respectable left (aka the Electoral Left and Synthetic Left) is everyone from Bernard to Mamdani to Chomsky to the DSA to Jacobin to Current Affairs to prominent journalists. Every single prominent and public leftist in the West basically. This site was run by ‘respectable left’ admins who had latent zionist biases, and there was a massive struggle session over it. The kind who call everything anti-semitic and conspiracy theories, while cleaving to the ‘normalcy’ of public opinion. For an overly online example, compare r/socialism to r/trueanon basically, which one has more correct opinions and organic growth/activity? It’s the “conspiracists” not the “respectables”.

      For a less online example, I stopped attending DSA when younger because I was called a conspiracist and anti-semite for bringing up criticism of Israel and the US involvement in Syria.

      Liberal Zionism among the left is heavily concentrated in the electoralist and squishy types. Principled anti-Zionism is heavily concentrated among the “tankies” and “conspiracist” wings.

      The “anti-semitic left” and the “conspiracy left” turned out to just be the actual left, who were correct about everything. Israel and the Epstein affair has proven this in the last 3 years.