Comment by eli_gottlieb

4 days ago

Of course, by Mamdani's logic here we're fully justified in mobilizing force on the scale of the Allied war in Europe during WW2 against any and every nation-state for the crime of being a nation-state. Go ahead and bomb Dresden again out of nowhere, because the nation-state is genocide!

3 comments

eli_gottlieb

ignoramous 4 days ago

> Go ahead and bomb Dresden again out of nowhere, because the nation-state is genocide!

This is the 2nd time "[bomb] Dresden" at me in this thread. Interesting.

> by Mamdani's logic here we're fully justified ...

Well, if you're curious about where his "logic" (his political hypothesis) leads, Mamdani wrote an entire book on it (which is in fact the subject of the interview): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neither_Settler_nor_Native

(from the book's Introduction):

  ... Nuremberg effectively depoliticized Nazism, saddling responsibility for Nazi violence with particular men and ignoring the fact that these men were engaged in the project of political modernity on behalf of a constituency: the nation, the volk. The Allies who prosecuted individual Nazis at Nuremberg were invested in ignoring Nazism's political roots ... After the war, the Allies engaged in many atrocities similar to those the Germans had ... Germans were loaded onto the same cattle cars the Nazis used to transport Jews to concentration, labor, and death camps ... Some half a million Germans died amid the ethnic cleansing.

  ... If Nazism had been understood not as a crime but as a political project of the nation-state, there may yet have been a place for Jews in Europe, in denationalized states committed to the equal protection of every citizen. However, because the response to Nazism took the nation-state for granted, the solution for the Jews turned out to be the nation-state, again.

 ... South Africans didn't give up their cultural identities and reject diversity. They rejected the politicization of diversity. Decolonizing the political through the recognition of a shared survivor identity does not require that we all pretend we are the same; far from it. It requires that we stop accepting that our differences should define who benefits from the state and who is marginalized by it.

eli_gottlieb 4 days ago
Right, now I'm not South African so I can't speak to that angle of what he's writing. I can speak to the angle of Jews in post-WW2 Europe. Mamdani's thesis here has the problem of rather dramatically, in fact insultingly, ignoring the most basic fact: almost nobody in the displaced-persons camps for Jews after the war wanted to go back into post-war European societies, and most of those who tried were murdered or faced state repression (eg: from the Soviet Union) for their trouble. After surviving the Holocaust and/or the war, everyone was much more interested in getting the hell away from people they perceived as their murderers than in a theoretical project of "denationalization" that wouldn't be invented for several decades more anyway.
> After the war, the Allies engaged in many atrocities similar to those the Germans had ... Germans were loaded onto the same cattle cars the Nazis used to transport Jews to concentration, labor, and death camps ... Some half a million Germans died amid the ethnic cleansing.
And this is, de facto, Nazi apologia on Mamdani's part, because he willfully refuses to see significant differences between alternative regimes within the paradigm of the nation-state, as against the post-national ideal he wants to realize in post-colonial Uganda (but which, of course, post-colonial Uganda has never actually implemented).
>It requires that we stop accepting that our differences should define who benefits from the state and who is marginalized by it.
I would also say Mamdani is an entire paradigm behind the times here. Whether you define it via educational credentials, income, or relation to the means of production, politics has been repolarizing around class, not identitarian belonging. "Who benefits from the state" is a deepity concealing Mamdani's social-democratic imaginary in which nation-states rule nations, rather than network-states administrating international markets in labor, capital, and goods.
- MPSFounder 4 hours ago
  
  Why is an Israeli visitor to the US commenting on our politics? You are welcome to return to Israel and genocide innocent civilians. Can we report this SOB to ensure his visitor pass is cancelled? He is a hate filled propagandist for the greatest evil of this generation (I-L)