Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Russia, and Multipolarism

When I first started this Substack I expected to just focus on the war that’s currently going on in Europe. I had no intention of ever mentioning Israel and Palestine because I have a personal aversion to the subject matter going all the way back to my college years at the University of Maryland at College Park.

During my years at that school I saw first-hand what happens when you talk to people who are fanatical devotees of either side of that conflict. The pro-Palestinian zealots will talk about how Zionism is racism and they want to do nothing more than to evict all Jews from the area and literally drive Israel into the sea. The pro-Israeli zealots will talk about how Palestine was never a real country, Palestinians were never a real people, the so-called Palestinians really belong in Jordan, and Israel is a Jewish state for Jews only. And if you get the zealots on both sides together in the same room, you will hear so much yelling and screaming that you won’t ever get any kind of education about what the real issues are in this conflict.

And then there were the times when these zealots will invite speakers that were definitely designed to inflame the other side. I remember when the pro-Israeli zealots used to invite the late Rabbi Meir Kahane to speak on campus a few times and each time it drew protests. And Rabbi Kahane was such a strident Zionist extremist (he used to frequently refer Arabs as “dogs”) that I remember even other staunch pro-Israel Zionists considered him to be too hateful and extreme for their tastes and they boycotted his speeches. And the pro-Palestinian zealots would team up with a few black students to bring the late Kwame Ture (who was originally known as Stokely Carmichael), which would inflame the pro-Israeli zealots because he contended that the Palestinian Arabs were engaged in a just struggle.

The really bad thing about these extremists on both sides is that they drowned out the views of more moderate Jews and Palestinians who simply wanted the two groups to exist side by side in peace. On top of that, these extremists tended to be the most bitter anger-filled people you’ll ever talk to. They were so obsessed with their side of the cause at the expense of everything else in life.

After I graduated from college I would meet these extremists from time to time and their attitude and total commitment to the cause at the expense of everything else did nothing to change my personal aversion to the subject matter.

This weekend the whole subject of Israel and Palestine have literally blown up so badly that a new war has sprung up. In case you spent this past weekend in a cave, you can check out this newly-created Wikipedia page about the incident. Both Al Jazeera and the BBC have articles that explain the background that led up to this event, which I highly recommend to anyone who don’t closely follow the news coming from the Middle East on a regular basis.

There were horrible atrocities that occurred, including a video that circulated on social media that I actually saw that showed the Palestinian terrorist group known as Hamas showing off the body of a partially naked woman in the back of a pickup truck. That woman was later identified as a German-Israeli woman named Shani Louk who had only gone to Israel to attend a music festival that was focused on peace, which was ironic considering what happened. Given the fact that her body was partially nude, I wouldn’t be surprised if she had been raped.

There was another video I saw of an Israeli woman who was in a jeep that stopped. (Unlike Shani Louk, this woman hasn’t been publicly identified.) The Hamas men took her out of the trunk of the jeep where she was held, then dragged her to the back seat before the jeep drove off. That woman had blood stains on the back seat of her pants so it’s possible that she might have been raped.

Those two viral videos featuring brutalized women aren’t putting Hamas in a good light at all and I’ve read a lot of the backlash on social media.

The sad fact is that this incident is the latest in a long series of violent incidents that have resulted in the deaths of both Israelis and Palestinians. I know that the extremists on both sides will hate me for writing this but both sides have committed atrocities over the past several decades. I could do several days worth of online research to turn up atrocities committed by Israelis and Palestinians going as far back as 1948 (the year that Israel was established as a state) which would lead an average non-extremist to conclude that having a lasting peace in that region seems pretty hopeless while never succeeding in convincing an extremist that his/her side has committed atrocities too just like the other side.

So now you’re going to wonder how is this even relevant to the focus of this Substack on the Russia-Ukraine War and fighting Kremlin propaganda. Here’s the connection.

Russia has been accused of launching propaganda operations on behalf of Hamas in an effort to divert Western support and attention from its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Which leads to a subject matter I had considered writing about just a few weeks ago. It’s about Multipolarism. I originally intended to write about it after I finished the other series of introductory posts I was working on for this Substack. Thanks to current events, I decided to move this topic up by a few weeks.

So what is Multipolarism? To get a definition, we need to look back a little bit in history. The Cold War consisted of the rivalry between two nations—the United States and the Soviet Union. That was called Bipolarism (not to be confused with the mental illness known as bipolar). It was basically a rivalry between a democratic capitalist system that allowed civil liberties (such as freedom of speech) and a centralized communist system that was authoritarian in nature and people were sent to prison for being too outspoken and opinionated. At times this rivalry even affected the ability of many smaller countries to their own self-determination as the US and USSR interfered in the internal affairs of countries like Iran, Hungary, El Salvador, Czechoslovakia, Nicaragua, Angola, etc.

The Cold War ended when the Soviet Union collapsed. It was succeeded by Russia, which abandoned communism. While Russia was dealing with the fallout from the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States became the only world power by default. That became known as Unipolarism.

There is a growing movement, especially among certain leftists, for something called Multipolarism that would replace Unipolarism. The idea is that it’s not good for world peace and stability to have Unipolarism that’s dominated by just one country. With Multipolarism, more countries would share the global power and the world wouldn’t be dominated by just one or two countries.

Multipolarism could be an excellent idea if the ideal countries to replace the US and Unipolarism would consist of democracies like Canada, Sweden, Costa Rica, Japan, and Jamaica. But, no, those who want Multipolarism don’t have any democratic countries in mind. In fact, they have only four countries in mind and, as you shall see in the meme below, they are far from the ideal countries who should have major influence on the global scale.

Their version of Multipolarism consists of the following nations:

Russia: Where Vladimir Putin rules the nation with an iron fist and has an economy that’s based on kleptocracy. I’m currently working on a separate post on this, which will go live this Friday. (Shameless Plug Alert! LOL!)

China: Which is less communist than it used to be and has adopted a form of capitalism that has very few workers rights. Criticizing the Chinese government too much will land you in prison. On top of that, there is China’s ongoing persecution of its Uighur minority.

North Korea: An authoritarian Stalinist-style government who has been ruled by the Kim family for decades. (Kim Il Sung founded North Korea as a nation and he ruled it until his death. His son, Kim Jong Il, became the ruler and he was the leader until he died. North Korea is currently ruled by Kim Jon Un, the son of Kim Jong Il and grandson of Kim Il Sung.) If you cross the government you will not only be sent to prison camps but the government believes in punishment for three generations, which means that your children and grandchildren will be expected to pay for your trespasses by spending their lives in prison as well.

Iran: Has been ruled as an Islamic republic for the past few decades. The government is so repressive that ongoing protests have emerged in the wake of the killing of a young woman named Mahsa Amini by the morality police last year. What crime did she commit that led to her death? The morality police didn’t like the way that Amini was wearing her hijab on her head.

Sometimes those Multipolarism advocates will add other leaders like Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who rules Syria with such an iron fist that he has even committed chemical warfare against his own people.

In a nutshell, these Multipolarism advocates want a world that’s dominated by authoritarian rule and gross human rights violations with few civil liberties and extreme economic inequality with a small group of elites getting the lion’s share of the natural resources and the rest get scraps and are condemned to spend the rest of their lives in poverty. Many of these Multipolarism advocates are cheering the Russian invasion of Ukraine in order to spur towards the ultimate goal of Multipolarism.

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