1) Mao: The Untold Story, by Jung Chang and Holliday is not "the authoritative biography of Mao." It is, ironically, a Maoist style hit piece against Mao. Mao was a bad person. Mao did see the Chinese people as means for his own elevation. All of this is true. The problem with Mao the Untold Story is that, like a Maoist struggle session, it takes the conclusion: Mao was a horrible monster, and then fits every piece of his biography into that frame.
During the Cultural Revolution, cadres would take some random person, tell them they were a "capitalist roader" and then force them to recount their life story and point out how every part of it shows their political deviance.
Reading Mao the Untold Story gives the same feeling.
2) I love how you unironically write "Removed” here means “killed”, since the Nazis intended to take all of the land."
And yet can't understand why many people see the Israeli Right's plan to settle and take all of the West Bank and Gaza as .... genocidal. As you say, "wanting to take all the land" means death or removal for the locals.
"And yet can't understand why many people see the Israeli Right's plan to settle and take all of the West Bank and Gaza as .... genocidal." <-- It would be! But that plan has not been executed yet.
Also, FWIW, the Hamas plan -- which most Palestinians themselves seem to support -- is to do exactly the same thing to the Israelis that the Israeli Right wants to do to the Palestinians.
So, faced with an intractable conflict between two groups of people who want to expel and (probably) genocide each other, I think our best bet is to limit our involvement in the conflict.
There are 529,000 people in settlements in the West Bank. It seems like it is a genocide "in process," by some percentage.
Do we argue that the Holocaust and the German General Plan Ost wasn't genocidal until they got X percentage into Poland and killed Y thousands of people?
At what threshold of land theft and expulsion does the existing settler project go from "unexecuted to executed?"
Americans under the age of 30 have never lived in a world where a settler in the West Bank couldn't shoot a Palestinian in full view of Israeli troops and get away with it.
Hamas are bad people who want to do bad things. That doesn't change the Israeli right's and the Israeli government's culpability anymore than the existence of the Holodomor excused Operation Barbarossa.
I think you brush over the conquests of the USSR (you write: "What Stalin mostly didn’t do was conquer and expand the USSR’s territory."). Sure, compared to the already vast territory of the USSR, pre-WWII, that might be somewhat true but it certainly does not feel like that to Estonians, Latvians or Lithuanians whose independent countries were swallowed by Stalin or to Poland which saw its border move quite a bit westwards.
It took 46 years for the Baltics to regain their freedom but the eastern parts of Poland, pre-WWII, seem forever lost.
2 things:
1) Mao: The Untold Story, by Jung Chang and Holliday is not "the authoritative biography of Mao." It is, ironically, a Maoist style hit piece against Mao. Mao was a bad person. Mao did see the Chinese people as means for his own elevation. All of this is true. The problem with Mao the Untold Story is that, like a Maoist struggle session, it takes the conclusion: Mao was a horrible monster, and then fits every piece of his biography into that frame.
During the Cultural Revolution, cadres would take some random person, tell them they were a "capitalist roader" and then force them to recount their life story and point out how every part of it shows their political deviance.
Reading Mao the Untold Story gives the same feeling.
2) I love how you unironically write "Removed” here means “killed”, since the Nazis intended to take all of the land."
And yet can't understand why many people see the Israeli Right's plan to settle and take all of the West Bank and Gaza as .... genocidal. As you say, "wanting to take all the land" means death or removal for the locals.
"And yet can't understand why many people see the Israeli Right's plan to settle and take all of the West Bank and Gaza as .... genocidal." <-- It would be! But that plan has not been executed yet.
Also, FWIW, the Hamas plan -- which most Palestinians themselves seem to support -- is to do exactly the same thing to the Israelis that the Israeli Right wants to do to the Palestinians.
So, faced with an intractable conflict between two groups of people who want to expel and (probably) genocide each other, I think our best bet is to limit our involvement in the conflict.
"Has not been executed yet."
There are 529,000 people in settlements in the West Bank. It seems like it is a genocide "in process," by some percentage.
Do we argue that the Holocaust and the German General Plan Ost wasn't genocidal until they got X percentage into Poland and killed Y thousands of people?
At what threshold of land theft and expulsion does the existing settler project go from "unexecuted to executed?"
Americans under the age of 30 have never lived in a world where a settler in the West Bank couldn't shoot a Palestinian in full view of Israeli troops and get away with it.
Hamas are bad people who want to do bad things. That doesn't change the Israeli right's and the Israeli government's culpability anymore than the existence of the Holodomor excused Operation Barbarossa.
I think you brush over the conquests of the USSR (you write: "What Stalin mostly didn’t do was conquer and expand the USSR’s territory."). Sure, compared to the already vast territory of the USSR, pre-WWII, that might be somewhat true but it certainly does not feel like that to Estonians, Latvians or Lithuanians whose independent countries were swallowed by Stalin or to Poland which saw its border move quite a bit westwards.
It took 46 years for the Baltics to regain their freedom but the eastern parts of Poland, pre-WWII, seem forever lost.