The article <a href="https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/settler-madness" author="Cara MariAnna" source="The Floutist">“Settler madness.”</a> writes of how a society teaches its young to hate. The example comes from observing Israeli settlers in the West Bank. <bq>The following three images are screenshots from a video of another incident in which settlers harassed the same family. The boy with the side curls holds a stick. He’s the same boy who was wearing a sweatshirt with a hood in the previous video. I’m showing you these pictures because <b>settlers use their boys as attack dogs. The armed man stands back and tells the boy what to do.</b><div> <img src="{att_link}children_bullying_children.webp" href="{att_link}children_bullying_children.webp" align="none" caption="Children bullying children (from the article)" scale="40%"></div>This is called rage-baiting. <b>The settlers are trying to provoke a reaction so they can call the I.O.F. and escalate the violence.</b> Here the Jewish boy is focusing his aggression on the smaller Palestinian boy. This is sociopathic behavior. <b>This boy’s mind has been damaged if not destroyed.</b> He’s been force-marched into a state of complete irrationality. <b>He’s been taught to hate Palestinians and to take pleasure in tormenting and bullying them.</b> In a few years he’ll go into the army. As a civilian he’ll carry an assault rifle. How will he raise his children? <b>How will peace be possible when each generation of Israeli Jews has been taught to fear and hate Palestinians and to see them as animals?</b></bq> I think it's silly to dispute that this is happening. Of course it's happening. Brainwashing and indoctrination is absolutely necessary for any violent project such as the colonization of Palestine. So has it always been, and so will it always be. The idea is to train people to think that they're the good guys, even when they're doing very bad things. You train them to think that doing bad things is good when they are done to bad people, to <i>the enemy</i>, to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_(philosophy)#Imperialism_and_colonialism">the other</a>. <h>Plunder</h> Colonization is just <i>plunder</i>: you want something that someone else has and you think you can take it from them without compensating them for its value and without being punished more than you are willing to accept. The easiest way to do this is to take advantage of an existing inequality. Your group will not only not punish you for plundering a group of lower value, it will <i>reward you</i>. This is the easiest and best way. If there's no convenient group of others around, it's a bit more work to <i>generate</i> an inequality against a group of <i>others</i>. Once you have a group of others, though, it becomes perfectly legal, approved, and rewarded to plunder them. No so-called civilized society today exists without this dynamic. If you can "other" someone, you can take what they have. If you can "other" them so hard that society agrees with you that they <i>aren't even human</i>, then you can even <i>kill</i> them and take away <i>everything</i> they have---and get away with it. That's the dream. <h>Gentrification</h> Every society with colonial ambitions trains its people to do this. Countries without ambitions outside of their own borders can do this too because, remember, <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=5716">gentrification is a euphemism for colonization</a>. Declaring a war on immigrants, preventing more from entering the country and trying to get rid of the ones you have---as many European nations are doing<fn>---requires indoctrination of hatred of the <i>other</i> just as much as outright colonization. <h>The Poor</h> Declaring a war on the poor is an age-old standard. Imagine being so bereft of morality and principle that you consider plundering those who have nothing to plunder. It makes sense, though; plunder seeks soft targets. And the poor are incapable of defending themselves. Though the reward is lower, the effort and risk are negligible. The reward for plundering an oligarch would be immense but the effort and risk are high. We avoid effort and risk; we have been taught to seek rent. "Farming" the poor is more lucrative. The logic of plunder is inexorable. <h>The U.S.</h> It was no different in the U.S. during its own official apartheid, and it continues now through the relatively long period of "soft apartheid" that has followed and which has been going on my whole life. Instead of being officially racist, the U.S. now officially hates the poor---which is easier to get people to support than outright racism---and society is adjusted to ensure that much higher proportions of black people are poor than other races. And then you can send them to prison for being poor ... and rent them out as slaves from prison. Voila. The balance has been restored.<fn> While the specific targets change---current public sentiment is most strongly against South- and Central-American immigrants and Middle-easterners, especially Muslims<fn>---but the project and its goal do not. And we're talking about where the <i>focus</i> is: Black people aren't suddenly living as equals, they are just not the <i>main target</i> right now. The war on trans people continues as well, even though most people don't know anyone whom they would deem "obviously trans" or they have no idea what the term even means. There are people in Central New York lustily and heartily cheering on Trump's war at the southern border even though they've neither seen a swarthy immigrant nor heard anyone speaking Spanish. It is embarrassing how easy it is to move this type of project forward. <h>Europe</h> Most societies (at least in the west) teach virulent hate. People in Europe and Switzerland hate Russians with a burning passion. Perhaps Israel takes it farther.<fn> Perhaps we see it more now, now that the Hasbara dam seems to have broken. But it doesn't absolve European racism and hatred. After all, Europe continues its unswerving official support for Israel, just as the U.S. does. The Israeli indoctrination programs are perhaps more thorough, more brutal, more virulent---but Europe wouldn't mind getting there. They could easily find a way to justify it to themselves. The important first step has been taken: there is no principle---no moral compunction against hating the <i>other</i>---standing in their way. <hr> <ft>I'm just taking examples from place with which I'm more familiar, either personally or from the literature. I'm sure that many other countries do this but I don't have any examples to hand that wouldn't put me on shaky ground. I'm quite sure that many of the conflicts in African countries that take the lives of millions work along these lines as well. I'm sure that China, Russia, Indonesia, Japan, etc. all have similar policies, distributed along the bandwidth from banal immigration policies to outright persecution and pogroms.</ft> <ft>if you're doubting this line of reasoning---or if you're intrigued by it---I highly recommend <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=3429">The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (2012)</a>.</ft> <ft>The media is not only far from innocent in all of this, they are an <i>essential part of the project.</i> That's what indoctrination <i>means</i>. People can keep up their hatred on their own, after a while---after they've been well-trained, i.e. well-<i>indoctrinated</i>---but they really need the media to overwhelm their senses and basic morality for a while before the plunderer mindset sticks.</ft> <ft>They're living the plunderer's dream because Palestinians aren't considered human, certainly not by large swaths of society, and barely even by the legal system. Palestinians are just there to farm for their land, to be exterminated like prairie dogs so that you can grow something good there, for yourself.</ft>