When I was 14, I had to take a class at Hebrew School about Hasbara, it went through various arguments about Israel & how to rebut them. 1 topic I remember is Israel an illegitimate state. The teacher opened with “name me one state that is legitimate? What is state legitimacy?”
(i started this thread about a specific topic but it turned into a general nostalgic narcissistic exercise accounting for myself. I’ve told these stories b4, but I like talking about them, will return to the main topic at the end & am also almost certainly going to delete it)
Students rose their hands one by one to say things like a Constitution or Declaration of Independence or ideals & he dismissed all of them, pointing out how each was a cover for violence, revolt, state force & the recognition of other states.
He kept saying “name me a legitimate state!” & whenever people rose their hands & said one, he’d dash their starry eyed optimism or patriotism to explain why said state was actually founded through mass violence, dispossession, illegality, criminality, war, oppression & diplomacy
Independently of that, Our Sophomore year in High School, we had to do a speech in front of our class. The whole school does it & the people who do the best have to do it before the whole school & if they succeed get an award & shit.
My speech was called “If Less is Better, then None is Best” and I argued that if one took the principles that everyone around us claims to upholds—Liberty, democracy, nonviolence, etc—then it clearly follows that we should abolish governments.
When I was very young my first obsessions were like ancient history especially in the Middle East, world religions & computers. By the age of 11 I’d read all the major world religions texts & decided myself I was some sort of pantheistic universalist with an Abrahamic twist.
But then came the 2004 election, & my brief 2 year long emo/mall goth phase, where I became interested in politics & music. Read Marx & Goldman & started wearing A beret & a Che shirt with Tripp pants to school.
This phase lasted through when I was 13, from which this photo well known among true Yungneocon Simps, was taken. id dropped the Tripp Pants & now was into folk punk & neutral milk hotel. Go figure.
However, from 13-15 I had a transitionary phase, where riddled with teen angst & the disease of knowing enough to feel smart but not smart enough to know how stupid to are, I took a brief turn toward libertarianism.
So I read everything Ms. Money Cigarettes wrote, & even went to their conferences, but I Also was a fan of Beauvoir, Nietzsche, Arendt, feminism, critical race theory, anarchist bookshops & critiques of prisons, police, war, surveillance, death penalty, torture & so on.
Any neutral thoughtful observer could see me & my views for what they were—an attempt to balance my more empathetic & emancipatory deep values with my obstinate, immature, need to distinguish myself via edginess & provocation, & to justify to myself my social angst & loneliness
Suffice it to say, that period was over as fast as it began & I returned fully to communism & anarchism, by way of many other means. There were several factors, intellectual, social, personal, political, aesthetic & experiential that kept me from the worst & brought me back.
Intellectually it was my deep dive into literature, science, history & ‘theory’ often with the arrogant idea that I was going to read postcolonial theory, Judith Butler Or Zizek etc to ‘disprove’ them or some shit, & all they ended up doing was convincing me.
Socially, it was because of the social dynamics of my high school & who the cool hipster kids were, on the one hand, and, on the other, it was a group of older friends, mostly philosophy & science students, who took me under their wing & rekt me w facts & logic.
Politically it was the 2007 financial crisis, volunteering for a reproductive rights group, & Palestine & anti war activism. A combination which brought about these photos.
The most relevant Personal variable was frankly mostly just because I wanted to get laid. But aside from those broader processual reasons there were also experiential, aesthetic & personal experiences which overlapped with a lot of the above it were emblematic of them.
For example, there was emailing Chomsky in an attempt to ‘disprove’ his formulation of anarchism & then him patiently explaining why each of my arguments are full of shit & then sending me info to attend talks by him, & others, talks, which I did.
There was also my trip to the ICA, where I experienced the sublime in the form of James Turrells piece ‘Big Red’ & discussed postmodernity, poststructuralism & Art theory with the Emerson film student who brought me there, which shifted many of my views & interests.
There was when my high school’s pro Israel group invited Dershowitz to speak because Chomsky had & then seeing him get absolutely rekt in a debate by like 4 16 year olds.
There was the 3-4 Marxian teachers at my high school of history, film, etc—altho this mostly came later—who introduced me to a lot of literature & eventually resulted in shit like this:
From the age of 12/13-14/15, I adopted positions designed to be the ultimate form of contrarianism, that would piss off my parents; teachers, liberals, conservatives, the high school’s hipster socialists, & many more.
For example, at 14 I was a militant atheist who thought the state should launch an atheist Jihad against fundamentalists at home & abroad. i was anti Jewish (due to personal rebellion), anti Zionist (due to anti nationalism), but pro Israel bc i wanted to piss off the leftists.
This ties us back to the first story, because it was in a Hebrew school class at the same place that presented the Palestinian view of the subject & a class with a post Zionist rabbi very into left politics, science fiction & Death from Above 1979
When I explained my views they said they were ridiculous & there was no case to support the latter w/o the former. And by that time next year, I was at Boston protests, within 2 I was on an ISO charted bus to DC to protest Cast Lead & within 3 I went to Palestine for BDS training
Anyway, aside from anything else, my first point in this thread is simply for my own fun of reflecting on the past. The second is discussing the weird an interesting ways social, intellectual, political, personal, & meaningful experiences combine to create one’s outlook.
It also offers a silly case study in how radical politics develop, including in several cases where the causal influences may have pushed it the other way ( I mean I could’ve been the smarter Ben Shapiro by now if I’d stayed on the one path)
Ultimately, my curiosity & I won’t say innate but long standing commitment to emancipation & standing up for who I think the underdog is & my nebulous ‘we live in a society’ youthful views provided a lifeline bungy cord that always pulled me back from my weirder commitments.
Of course, I think this characterizes a lot of people who end up reactionary, it’s just that I got lucky—I met interesting people; friends & mentors, who helped me channel my discontent & intellectual curiosity into things other than masturbation, literal & figural.
It’s also funny the things I learned at Hebrew school, although they were often unintended, only apparent later, and existed only because of the pre existing context & social world allowed them.
And, also, it shows how the main things that shift & change views aren’t necessarily intellectual; rational, or emotional, but are tied to social relations, influences, & most importantly behavior & commitments.
many of the young ppl on social media who seem to flit back and forth between ideologies & end up reactionary (I had one flip flop & then returned, remaining in a broad camp ever since), probably wouldn’t do so if they participated in irl orgs & had friends & mentors to help them
But, finally, the substantive point & one I began with, but continued as a thread throughout the entire story, is that being awakened to political realism, where I discovered the secret of state legitimacy—there is none—& it is intrinsically tied to violence, control & war
that all arguments for authority & legitimacy are obfuscatory copes, that rely on singling out some features & ignoring others, all the while dancing around the fact that the only thing that grants states legitimacy is violence & recognition by other states, & that
liberal sentimental ideas & ideals about states & international law, as well as the Moralistic idealistic rhetoric of politicians who claim to oppose the government aren’t emancipatory, but actually merely provide the state cover for its actions.
What’s more, the advocates of realpolitik who sees the state as being just a vehicle for power, violence, it’s own reproduction & its territory, & to defend against & take over other states are in a neutral social scientific, historical & justificatory sense correct.
Because the people who make said arguments are often either reactionary defenders of the state, or are creators of their policy, we like to pretend that their admission of the truth is *also* reactionary, but it’s not.
This is because it is not a normative claim but a descriptive one. It is ironically the liberal trying to rebut it & place it in the realm of justification & values, & replace it with random humanitarian cope, who ends up reinforcing this.
Anyway, I suppose it was my particular mix of exposure to ideas & arguments of some of the worst people & my reading & listening to elites & state shills when they tell the truth, combined with my constant bungee cord to emancipatory aims & politics which ultimately has so
In other words, by being exposed to the honest admissions & theory of right wingers, reactionaries & defenders of the state, in conjunction with being exposed to superficial liberal & left wing arguments that functioned as obfuscatory cope at a time when I’d be skeptical of them
which combined with my pre existing revulsion against violence & desire for emancipation however nebulous, & being grounded in a social milieu which guaranteed I’d stay on the right path, & could indulge understanding these ideas without being convinced by them
that formatively created my political views which took existence at a young age, from which I briefly strayed, but then returned & with which I have remained for the last 1.5 decades, & from which I don’t believe I can ever be disabused.
The most important role back then that leftist theory had like Marx & Goldman, was to give me a label for my ideas to explore & a reference point. Their most important role later was in giving me tools to explain & understand things I already believed.
It’s easy to reflect back and think it was just because of the books I read & ideas to which I was exposed that mattered, & I used to tell the story that way, but in reality it was the social & political lived reality & commitments that did it & the ‘theory’ was just a tool
Ultimately, belief follows action & commitment, not the other way around. that is a fundamental idea of none other than Maimonides, & also something, ironically enough, I was also taught in Hebrew School.
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