This makes me angry. I encounter it online and in the wild all the time. People have a problem with billionaires and corporations owning everything. They don't have a problem with mom-and-pop landlords living in the neighborhood (whatever's left of it) and renting out a few AirBnBs. People feel this way because they can't see a way out of capitalism except saving up some money and getting their own AirBnbs to exploit the land and proletariat, even though small landlords are neither happy nor interesting people, and they are still trapped inside capitalism.
People with an anti-corporate and anti-billionaire mindset are moving in the right direction, but they're still beholden to capitalist individualism. It's the same with local small businesses, even though these businesses are buying all their products from big businesses, selling them for a massive markup, and (in my experience) cheating their employees far more often than big business. Government jobs are the only ones I've had where I didn't feel like I was going to be fired or screwed every single day I was there.
I saw a Sysco truck a few days ago outside the only restaurant in my very small town. This place was my first job (as a bus boy) a loooooong time ago. They stiffed me on my first paycheck (I had been working an unpaid training period without knowing it, I was also supposed to be a psychic at this place) and I walked out. In the second or third year of the pandemic I saw a girl who couldn't have been more than eight years old working in an apron there (she was related to the family that owns the place). I've lived here off-and-on for decades and almost no one ever went to that restaurant; everyone knew you'd get sick if you ate their food. We suspected that it was a mafia money-laundering operation, since the owners drive red corvettes and seem to be rolling in dough. Tourists do eat there more regularly now even though the place has noticeably bad yelp reviews.
In a colonial context, big or small bourgeoisie can be revolutionary. In an imperialist context like in the USA, they are almost never revolutionary.
Also, the phrase "during the pandemic" makes me angry! A friend living overseas just told me yesterday that they had gotten sick and lost their sense of taste. Look up recent online reviews for scented candles.
Using "childish" as an insult. Bruh, have you talked with kids? Literally any kids. Easiest group of people on Earth to radicalize.
"Israel" is to blame for everything but somehow the USA is still good. This is thanks to Hollywood and the fact that the USA is a far bigger and more successful "Israel." Very few people know that Columbus was a Zionist. People around the world still dream of living here and making it big because of Hollywood movies and friends or relatives who immigrated here and somehow made it work.
In my experience, Arabic speakers are ready for a revolution, as long as it excludes women's liberation / queer liberation. Spanish speakers have profound levels of liberal brainworms. Portuguese speakers are typically pretty aligned with hexbear without knowing it. White leftists seem uninterested in returning the USA to indigenous sovereignty and paying full reparations to slaves / the descendants of slaves, and this is one major reason why their movements always go nowhere. (I hate the term "leftist" but I don't know what else to call these people since they aren't communists and yet they're still a bit more radical than the average democrat.)
What are some of your left-ish peeves you regularly encounter online?
For sure, he was into settler-colonialism too. His lifelong obsession was “liberating” Jerusalem from the Turks, something very strangely never mentioned in any of my history classes. Plenty of good history books about him also won’t bring it up.
Christian conquest of "the holy lands" is not Zionism, Peter the Hermit was not a Zionist, Richard the Lionheart was not a Zionist, Imperator Caesar Flavius Heraclius Augustus was not a Zionist. You are not using the term Zionist correctly. Zionism is specifically a Jewish ethnonationalist project, and neither the concept of Judaism or ethnonationalism are appropriate to apply to this.
Edit: If we are to apply the label "Zionism" to a desire for conquest of Palestine for revanchist or religious purposes, then we have to conclude that Saladin and Rameses III were Zionist.
On the face of it, Zionism is the idea that Jews should colonize and control Palestine. By this definition, Columbus was not a Zionist. But the concept doesn't just randomly appear in 19th century Europe. It has deep roots, and not all of these are Jewish. Zionism is a kind of realization among the capitalist ruling class that Jews can be used for something other than slave labor in concentration camps, that they can instead be used to create a kind of postmodern colony / military base / crusader state meant to control the most important region on Earth.
"Controlling Palestine" is not Zionism, because if I believed this, it would mean that I believe that Hamas is Zionist. I'm talking about using the Bible to justify dispossessing indigenous people of their land, usually (but not always) in Palestine, and often in the name of fulfilling prophecy to bring about the return of Jesus and end the world. European colonists constantly used the Bible to justify colonization, genocide, and slavery, and often acted in this way (in Columbus's time) because they were deeply concerned about the Ottoman Empire advancing in the east.
Zionism is not purely a Jewish phenomenon. Most Zionists on Earth right now are not Jews (although a majority of Jews are Zionists). Jews in the diaspora likewise spent thousands of years only speaking of Zion in a metaphorical sense, or even lived peacefully in Palestine before the 19th century. Their descendants, Arab Jews, Jewish Arabs, Palestinian Jews, are anti-zionist.
Modern Zionism is a mix of European bourgeois nationalism and Biblical literalism. Any Christian who believes that the Bible is the literal word of God likewise believes that every inch of Palestine belongs to Jews. Just to take one example, the Book of Joshua states that Jews should not only control [the Biblical] Israel, but slaughter every living thing there (people, animals, whatever) in order to do so. Christians and Jews today will point to this text as proof that they should support "Israel." But between the Roman destruction of the second temple and the nineteenth century, few if any Jews took the Book of Joshua seriously, while Christians were exterminating indigenous people and seizing their land while making allusions to the "city on a hill," i.e., Jerusalem.
I don’t know. I just find it extremely suspicious that you’ll never know that Columbus was obsessed with Jerusalem unless you do a little digging.
Reconquering the holy land was a bugbear for many, many Christians in the early modern period. Columbus was not unique in this regard, but even if it were unique to him it still would not make him Zionist. Christian Zionism is not when Christians want Jerusalem, it is when Christians support Zionism (a Jewish ethnonationalist project). A Christian Zionist still supports "Israel" rather than a Christian crusader state or something, because they believe that a Jewish presence in Palestine is necessary for their eschatology or just because they hate brown people.
Calling Columbus a Zionist is just wrong.
What else am I supposed to call colonialism and imperialism backed by the Bible? There's something qualitatively and quantitatively different about the Crusades and the European colonization of islands in the Mediterranean, then the Canary Islands, cities on the coast of northwest Africa, and then the Americas and many other parts of the world. Isn't the Bible a crucial part?
What's so bizarre is that Crusaders were genocidal toward Jews for centuries. The Bible said that the Holy Land belonged to them, but the Crusaders didn't care. Maybe it also has something to do with the Reformation, when both Catholics and Protestants began paying a lot more attention to the Bible in an effort to one-up the other. In the 19th century, the first Jewish Zionists came up with the idea of settling in Palestine as a reaction to European nationalism and anti-semitism. But plenty of non-Jewish members of the Western ruling class thought this could be useful (not just the British but also the Nazis and others, even, sadly, the Soviets), for religious and geopolitical purposes, possibly as an early reaction to decolonization, the idea that European Jews are actually indigenous to Palestine because the Bible says so.
That. The colonialist and imperialist projects of Europe were all backed by clergy citing the Bible. Do you call the colonial empires in India and Africa Zionism? What about the non columbus conquistadors? What about the puritans? Fuck it dude the confederates were justifying the civil war with the Bible, was that Zionism?
That's only bizarre because you are conflating them with modern Zionists. To a medieval crusader a Jew was a Christ killer who refused the word of the Lord when they heard it, and possibly someone currently in possession of valuable stuff that would be theirs if they stabbed them a little bit, an action they were pre-forgiven for. Crusaders did not want a Jewish ethnostate, they didn't want an Israel, they wanted their own fiefdoms in the levant, religious salvation, and the inclusion of Jerusalem in Christendom.
Just to hone in on this example, they called America the promised land, the city on a hill, the land of milk and honey, even the New Jerusalem. Zionism is when Jews want to colonize Palestine using the Bible as justification, but it's not Zionism when gentiles use the Bible to justify colonizing other parts of the world. (The parts of the Bible they use are also usually the Old Testament parts.) It just seems so similar to me, and arbitrary to say, well, Jews aren't involved here and we're in a different part of the world, so although the process is basically the same (use the Bible to justify genocide), the differing locales and lack of direct Jewish involvement makes it different.
Currently "Israel" is attempting to build what it calls a "Greater Israel" which has nothing to do with anything written in the Bible—not just by grabbing territory from Syria or Lebanon, but by dominating as many governments as possible (Turkey, European governments, the USA, etc.). Their goal is basically to turn the entire planet into Syria. The Old Testament is integral to "Israeli" claims to Palestine, but it never mentions countries like the USA, since they didn't exist when the Old Testament was written. Does this then mean that the "Israelis" are no longer doing Zionism, that they're just back to regular European colonialism and imperialism? The result may not even be control of Palestine—after "Israel" collapses, "Israelis" could retreat to places like Cyprus, although obviously they would just be waiting for a chance to return to Palestine, which is their primary goal.
Do you follow Laith Marouf? He's called "Israel" a modern Crusader state. I also just found it bizarre that no Jews are even mentioned in a movie like Kingdom of Heaven, which was a pretty major attempt on Hollywood's part to address the "Israeli/Palestinian Conflict." Apparently not many Jews were living in Palestine at the time in which the film takes place, since the Crusaders had expelled or killed most of them, but Saladin allowed them to return once he took back Jerusalem. There are just so many contradictions here, it's difficult to untangle them.
Even if we assume that Zionism is a purely Jewish phenomenon, OP isn't completely off-base here. While there is debate among scholars, some do support the theory that Columbus was a crypto-Jew.
For historical context, 1492 marked the end of the Reconquista, at which point Spain had conquered the last remaining Muslim kingdom on the Iberian peninsula. At this point, the Spanish crown began evicting Muslims and Jews (sans their valuables). Given the choice to convert or flee penniless, some chose to convert outwardly and continue their religious traditions in secret. (As an aside, while the Spanish Inquisition gets conflated with witch hunts in other parts of Europe, it was in fact focused on rooting out these "false conversions." Refusing to eat pork and lighting candles on Friday nights are just a couple examples of activities that would get you dragged before the Inquisition.)
I'm not going to seek out every point of information given in support of the theory, but one I do remember off the top of my head is the fact that Columbus wrote letters to his son in Hebrew.
You are remembering wrong. If the theory of Columbus being a crypto Sephardic Jew was correct, he would have spoken Ladino and written in Ladino. Which he also didn't. Now the fact that he didn't write letters in either Hebrew or Ladino does not mean he wasn't a Jew. Writing in Ladino would have been evidence of a crime and handing direct evidence to a messenger is probably unwise when you are already under suspicion for your many, many other crimes.
The thing you are referring is the insignia he used supposedly looking similar to the Hebrew letters Bet and Hei, which supposedly is a secret reference to the phrase Be'ezrat Hashem (With God's help).
Edit: Now Spanish crypto Jews (Marrano) did do stuff like that, this idea doesn't come out of nowhere. entirely But your misremembering has resulted in severely overstating the evidence.
Out of some actual weird Sephardic nationalist sentiment and weird Spanish antisemitism. The evidence for him being a practising jew is his use of the phrase "Second house" about Jerusalem and a doodle.
All the other arguments is stuff like Simon Wiesenthal arguing that Columbus went west as a sort of proto-zionist project to save the Jews of Spain by making a new homeland in the "new world" (A theory with approximately zero evidence) and Salvador de Madariaga believing he had the racial characteristics of a Jew like looking Jewish and lacking loyalty to Genoa and Spain (Which is just naked antisemitism)
This is not my area of study, and was something that was mentioned as an aside during my studies that I did not look into myself. I should have researched it further before repeating it, and I appreciate the correction. Columbus was certainly not a good guy regardless of his motivations or background, and I think we can agree on that.
We're on a shitposting site, you can fire from the hip.
And yes, we can agree that Columbus regardless of whether he was Genoese, Marrano or from space, was an incredibly awful person.