Plumbing the Depths of the Dialectic

Queers for Palestine and Other Democrat Mysteries

When Karl Marx first wrote his massive Das Kapital, he conceived of a largely theoretical system that, unleashed on the world, would become the glorious system of communism. The evolution of a social system toward communism would occur according to Herr Marx because of the clash or two ideologies. A fellow traveler named Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called this synthesis and antithesis or the dialectic. At its core it meant that in order for communism to gain a foothold, people needed to hate each other. Marx, rather wrongly, conceived of this struggle as being between factory owners (those who owned the means of production, a.k.a. capitalists) and laborers (those who worked for a wage, the proletariat). Marx believed that this fundamental animosity between labor and management would first ignite ferocious hatred, then pave the way for the solution… communism. Marx even hoped this would finally transcend national boundaries to become a global system. It’s why he famously wrote that workers of the world had to unite. He viewed communism as a global enterprise.

What Marx got wrong is that working people in one country did not necessarily have any allegiances to working people in other countries. The poor schlubs working in London for starvation wages did not much care about the desperate working classes in Brazil. The Russian proletariat did not exactly inspire the Canadian working class.

Adolf Hitler corrected Marx’s vision. Hitler was a communist, at his core, but he reformed the system a bit. Hitler’s party (which he did not found) was the National Socialist Democratic Workers’ Party or NDSAP which was abbreviated in German as Nazi. (Germans tend to find short words rather than acronyms.) The Nazis liked a lot of what Marx advocated: government control of the means of production, authoritarian rules, propaganda, and social support programs for a servile working class. However, Hitler saw the dialectic—the baked-in animosity needed to usher in fundamental societal change—as being national rather than labor/management. Hitler made Germans, specifically Aryans, into one side of the coin and everyone who was not Aryan into the other side. In other words, Hitler drew a nationalist line. It’s why his National Socialist party was both socialist (communist) and nationalistic. Hitler was very imaginative in his way, so he added some mythology to this by maintaining that Aryans were superior beings, allegedly possessing near flawless genetics and no physical defects. History knows all too well that Hitler persecuted the Jews, who were non-Aryans residing in Germany and in other European countries. What we do not remember much was that Hitler also committed genocide against another non-Aryan minority—the Romani or gypsies. Hitler also waged social war on the disabled and handicapped who could not possibly embody the Aryan ideal of physical perfection. Overt homosexuals were forced to wear a pink star and were later rounded up for the gas chambers along with other undesirables. According to Hitler, Aryans could not be homosexuals any more than they could be Jewish.

Hitler shifted the dialectic that worked in Russia to a different dialectic and launched the Holocaust. Same premise. Get two large groups of people to despise each other and then take over the government. It’s like luring two people into a bar fight so you can steal one of their cars.

Meanwhile, China embraced the philosophy of Marx. At first, they tried to drum up animosity between the urban working class and the rest of society, but for reasons too complicated to go into here, that did not work. It was Mao who stepped into the nearly aborted Chinese communist revolution and turned it on its head by making the vast population of rural China into his heroes and the urban-dwellers, the intellectuals, and the rich and powerful into the villains. China had a lot of peasants who through the revolution sought to get control of the land. So in China the war was between farmers and intellectuals; the dialectic pitted country people against city slickers. It worked pretty well, too; China became and remains the world’s largest communist nation.

In any communist revolution, you need a dialectic. It reminds me of a biotech company where I once worked. It was a relatively small company (under 300 employees) with some seriously good products. As are many such enterprises, it was the brainchild of not one man but a group of men, who all contributed specifically to the invention, development, testing, and marketing of these products. The head money guy was the president and he was a major (but not only) contributor to the company’s incredible and rapid success. He had seven people who could all be considered a “right-hand” to him. These executives all had impressive titles and generous salaries and lots of recognition. There were many meetings and events that only these guys got to attend. But the group was always in turmoil. It was a difficult working atmosphere because there was always Sturm und Drang at the top and constant infighting. Alliances formed and faltered rapidly. I learned from some of my colleagues (not in the inner circle) what was going on. The president was very jealous of his position as the chief of the company and was fearful that the others might plot against him. He knew they had a good chance of depriving him of his office if they ever worked together. So he kept them off balance by an ongoing and deliberate campaign of “stirring the pot.” He would get one or two guys aside and quietly tell them how the others were plotting against them. He would ostracize one guy and encourage everyone else to do the same; however, his nasty list changed frequently so these top guys were often in and out of the dog house. He would deliberately exclude certain people from key meetings. He would elevate some to be the golden boy and then foment jealousy. He lied and had an elaborate network that allowed him to launch inner-office gossip. He did all this for one reason: if his seven underlings were always fighting each other and unsure of what their status and roles were, they would not come after him.

That’s the dialectic. You pit two groups against each other and let them fight each other while you steal their country.

The new world order communists at work around the world now have created an interesting dialectic: it’s “victims” against “victimizers.” It is a neat dialectic because many people are eager to see themselves as victims. Victims are never to blame for anything. If you are a total failure, you can explain it away by (a) recognizing your own flaws or (b) declaring yourself a victim. If you opt for the latter, you get forgiveness and lots of supports and accolades. Of course, victims do not have much power—they do not expect it. But they do want a lot of sympathy and deference. So the lefty side has created entire laundry lists of “victims.” These include people who would be considered minorities and sometimes it includes people like Liz Warren who are just wannabe minorities. It includes people who volunteer to become a sexual minority as in the LGBTQ etc. community. It includes people, even rich white people, who speak up for victims. Women are victims. Black people are victims. The disabled are victims. Indigenous people are victims. Being a victim is so seductive that even rich white elitists consider themselves victims because they are enlightened enough to understand victimization.

The other group are people who are not victims and do not wish to be considered victims. This includes a lot of evangelical Christians. It also includes some Jews and Asians. It also includes random people of all races, creeds, professions, ethnicities, and walks of life.

Curiously, rich people can be victims (Meghan Markle is the only self-proclaimed victim of racial injustice who is entitled by law to wear a crown in public). Powerful people can be victims (Barack Obama comes to mind). White people in the United States are considered both powerful abusers of others and victims; many in the self-proclaimed victim class are white.

Jewish people straddle the fence here. Those who fail to paint themselves as victims default into the “victimizer” class. But many Jews, particularly secular Jews, perceive themselves as noble allies of victims and are thus victim-adjacent if not outright victims. Bernie Sanders is a good example; he is Jew who allies himself with victims. Jews who vote Democrat and march for Gaza are victims first.

When a communist takeover is in process, it works best if the dialectic is nice and clean. But the dialectic we are using—victim versus victimizer—is weird and nutty. If this current attempt at new world order fails it will be because the dialectic is so bizarre it shatters when exposed to reality. While communists can outlaw “misinformation” and control the press, they have not yet mastered altering reality.

The current dialectic is strange, because it is hard to know who is who. For instance, Black people are victims unless they are Conservative, in which case they are Uncle Toms and victimizers. So race does not work as neatly as a dividing line as communists might have preferred. Same with Hispanics. Hispanics who vote Democrat are victims, but those who are Conservative, such as freedom-loving Cuban immigrants, cannot be victims and are therefore victimizers and oppressors.

Trans people are automatically victims, with the possible exception of Caitlyn Jenner, who votes Republican. When Israel retaliated against the terrorist assault on its nation by Hamas, Hamas was the victim. (Israel is a very small nation but an intellectual and economic powerhouse; they don’t fit in the victim narrative as well as Gaza does.) So now in the Western dialectic of victim versus victimizer, Palestinians and the trans community are both victims and therefore, must be allies.

Yikes.

The dialectic forces all people to pick one side or the other. So this means trans people have to side with Palestine. This is the height of absurdity since no country in the Middle East affords the pride population greater freedom than Israel. In fact, homosexuality is illegal in many parts of the Middle East the same way murder is illegal here—that is, it can be a death penalty offense.

Right now the score is dialectic 1, logic 0.

The lefty love of intersectionalism and identity politics has created an incoherent class of people who promote gay rights and support the Palestine government. It also explains why communists sometimes throw around the term “useful idiots.” A useful idiot is a person who will support a cause that in no way benefits them. America is full of them.

Let’s get real about Palestine and the LGBTQ community. Gays and transgender people in Gaza and the West Bank can be imprisoned or even sentenced to death for their sexual identities. This isn’t hyperbole or conspiracy theory. Here’s one example. In 2016, Mahmoud Ishtiwi was executed because it was alleged he had sex with another man; Ishtiwi had been a major military leader but the crime of one errant sex act was sufficient to warrant his execution. Ishtiwi was executed by a firing squad, but before they shot him, he was tortured by a variety of methods. His death was incredibly cruel. Homosexual men and their allies should be outraged by this action, not marching in support of the perpetrators.

This is not the only such story. But it is alarming that the LGBTQ people fighting for proper pronouns in this country are marching in favor of murdering sexual minorities abroad.

There’s more. Palestine does not recognize same sex marriage. It does not recognize homosexuality as a legal practice, in fact there are laws on the books against it, which is why gay people can sometimes wind up in prison. The Palestinian Authority (the group that runs the West Bank but not Gaza) has said that LGBTQ events “go against and infringe upon the higher principles and values of Palestinian society.” In other words, the Gay Pride month celebrated here would go against Palestinian values. Yet many feel that LGBTQ values align neatly with Palestine. Useful idiots.

In Congress, Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib support both LGBTQ rights and Palestine and have even encouraged Americans to support Palestinian queers. The despicable part about what Omar and Tlaib are doing is that they know better. They know the real situation in Palestine, but they are milking the dialectic and stirring up hatred here, in the hopes that it will foment into enough animosity to gin up a revolution.

Here is a fun fact. There are currently 90 LGBTQ Palestinians who have sought political asylum in Israel because they claim they face discrimination and persecution living in Gaza or the West Bank. That means the real allies of American LGBTQ activists are trying to get out of Palestine and into Israel, while the American LGBTQ community is marching for Palestine against Israel.

Many other liberals support Palestine, including many women and progressives who support abortion. Abortion is illegal in Gaza and the West Bank. Palestine is absolutely anti-abortion, no exceptions. In fact, abortion is illegal in most of the Middle East, except Israel. So all of the leftists marching for Gaza have to know that they are promoting a government that is more rabidly and inflexibly pro-life than any state in the current United States.

If you are smart, you know the world is complicated and full of nuance. The dialectic is not good with nuance or gray areas or understanding the range of human experience. The world is not a simple place of victims and their oppressors.

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (Michigan, D) proudly displays the Palestinian flag within the U.S. Capitol, right outside her office. When she was first elected, she draped herself not in the Stars and Stripes but in the flag of Palestine. You don’t have to be Joseph Campbell and a master of esoteric symbolism to understand what symbolic message she is sharing. She supports Palestine. It eclipses her interests in the United States. And Tlaib also supports a pro-LGBTQ agenda and unrestricted abortion laws. She has to know this is screwy, but it serves her purpose to play both sides of the victim movement. Victims are LGBTQ people, abortion lovers, and Palestinians. Therefore, they have to all go together, except until they don’t.

When the dialectic breaks, the new world order will fall.