On Freddie deBoer
As a rule, I shun online beefs. They’re so asinine. But I did get involved in this. It was a note in this thread. I think the note is self-explanatory.
Freddie, I deleted a snarky comment directed to you. I hope you didn’t read that, and that you do read this because I have something to tell you about your flippant stance on the Israel/Palestine dispute.
I don’t read you consistently. I had thought you were an agnostic on the subject of Israel. That’s OK. I glanced at the article about Palestinian pottery and agreed with you about the main subject. Anyone who was uncomfortable about looking at pottery pieces made by Palestinian kids needs to be told “no.” I like the pottery, by the way.
Because I only gave the article a glance (or perhaps because it was behind a paywall, dunno) I missed the bit about “Palestinian liberation.”1
Look: you don’t need to tell me to fuck off. When I read stuff like that, that’s what I do. I don’t put comments on someone’s ‘Stack, I don’t even bother to put a snarky note about it anymore. I just fuck off. That’s my enemy, I say to myself, bye bye.
Because, Freddie, since October 7, “Palestinian liberation” is no longer an abstraction to me. Whatever my issues about Israel are, and I’ve got ‘em, I don’t have issues about my physical survival, or the physical survival of Israel.
I also have no issues about what “Palestinian liberation” would mean. It would mean a thousand October 7ths, endless October 7ths, never-ending October 7ths. I say this because they tell me this. I’m not going to bother looking up the videos and the URLs. They’re all over YT, TikTok, and X.
I never paid much attention to your self-professed Marxism. That’s another thing October 7th did. I’m paying renewed attention to this garbage creed, and what I see horrifies me anew.
I suggest you take a look at the first episode of a Netflix series, “3 Body Problem.” 2 It begins with a struggle session in Communist China, in which a physics professor is publicly humiliated and stomped to death for teaching the fundamentals of physics.
I noted that one of his accusers shames him because “Einstein went to the American imperialists!” (to make “the bomb”)
Oh. “the bomb” that was used to defeat Japan, which during WW2 subjected her own ancestors in China, to sickening brutality.
That’s what Marxism does to the brain, and the soul (I believe in the human soul) Freddie. It rots and corrupts both.
All of your efforts to achieve peace and stability will be for naught if you continue to believe in this rotten creed, which has caused so much suffering.
A man who who is in thrall to Marxism can’t trusted on “liberation.” Or anything else.
Screenshot from Mr. deBoer’s Substack. LINK.
The entire passage is so silly I haven’t the energy to unpack it.
Anyone who shares DNA with these bastards cannot be trusted on the subject of “liberation.”
They beat the physics professor to death. The Cultural Revolution is October 7th. October 7th is The Cultural Revolution. This is what angry men like Freddie deBoer support.
They are thrilled by this.
The only time the Palestinian “movement” has been anything other than religiously grounded in Islamic supremacist ideology was when the Soviet Union rewrote the “narrative” to appeal to Western intellectuals in the faddish anti-colonial, anti-imperial liberationist language then current.
That being the history, it should surprise no one that, good Marxist that he is, DeBoer continues to follow the party line - long after the Party itself has ceased to exist. It’s zombie politics at its best.
Indeed. I used to follow Freddie, simply because I am trying to stay open to ALL kinds of opinions, and currents, and directions, and he seemed intelligent enough not to adopt an extremist stance on ... anything, basically. Even his self-professed marxism was rather a washed-down intellectual opinion, something we like to talk about over a glass of wine, instead of a revolutionary cause for which one is ready to die. Nevertheless, he started to become more and more unpalatable, especially when talking about "trans" issues or Israel. Anybody who's telling you that a man can, in fact, become a woman, cannot be trusted. The Palestine-Israel was the nail in the coffin. Look: I was born in a Communist country, and brainwashed accordingly during childhood. I can tell when somebody is pushing narratives that are either complete fabrications ("trans women are women") or ideological smokescreens that hide something else (antisemitism, in this case). I have no regrets having stopped reading his bullshit about these issues.