There is a war now. You could call it the Third World War. One front is in Ukraine, a country I was born in. The other is in Israel, the country I live in right now. The war is between Freedom and Dictatorship. Ukraine wasn't necessarily the most free of countries, but it was very trying to become one. And when it started to resemble a good Free Country, Russia decided that it doesn't like it and attacked it. Putin is a dictator of Russia. And a Free County near by is not something Putin wants.
On the other side there are different dictators in different dictatorships around the middle east. If you look at the dictatorship map ( dictatorships in dark blue, countries trying to become democracies in yellow and democracies in green ) you can see that the middle east is mostly a large dictatorship. With some attempts here and there to make something resembling freedom. But without much success. But there is one little county which is a democracy. And it's Israel.
If you solely look at the current state of affairs as they are, it looks like the same kind of situation. Dictatorships do not like a Free Country near by. But I think this is a weak point. From the October 7th onward a lot of the world sided with the dictatorships, encouraging them to make an another dictatorship in the place where Israel is right now. Failing to fight for Freedom. And there could be a couple of reasons why.
- Maybe people aren't smart enough. Maybe people are protesting because they don't see the underlying issue of Freedom at hand. That could be possible because people around the world do not value freedom in general. They use invasive spy-phones and other things well knowing how terrible those are to their freedom. So perhaps Freedom is not important to people at all.
- Maybe people are smart enough and they are protesting because of an underlying freedom issues for something like a counter attack on the Gaza Strip. Or because of how Muslims are treated inside of Israel.
I my opinion the whole situation was caused by an Epidemic of Psychopathy. If Hamas could empathize with Israelis, it would not attack them on October 7th. If Israelis could empathize with Muslims in Gaza it would not attack them back. But what is a name to a lack of empathy? It's Psychopathy. And I notice an epidemic of it all throughout the world.
So not to follow the trends of hate, let's first empathize with both parties. I will start with trying to empathize with Arabs first. This is because I live in Israel and currently experiencing the other side of the conflict. And it would be both my bias and easier for me to start with Israel side of things. So I want to challenge myself in not becoming a psychopath as the rest of the people in the conflict.
Empathy with Muslims
There seem to be two main reasons that collided into an ultra-reason which forced Hamas to attack on October 7th. One is the existence of Israel to begin with. And the second is the treatment of Muslims in Israel. It has only a little bit to do with the religion of Islam. Islam is a kind of dividing line between the two parties. One side is Jewish, the other is Muslim. But the core of the conflict has nothing to do with religion.
Almost a century ago there was no Israel on maps in the area where Israel is right now. Since I was a child I was myself wondering how did a country suddenly appear. But as with many other countries it was a matter of diplomacy and a bit of fighting to declare a country. The US has mostly the same kind of history as Israel. The place wasn't empty of people. But suddenly a super-power arrived and declared a country which was then attacked by the original inhabitants of the place. Because they don't like to suddenly be under a law of somebody else.
The establishment of a country with it's own government and stuff made a lot of Muslim countries angry similar to how Indians were angry in RRR. And a lot of people carried this hate out into the 21st century, slowly loosing any resemblance of reason.
There is a guy that makes videos on GNU / Linux and other Free Software. I believe he is still on Odysee, but otherwise he should be on YouTube. His name is Zaney, or Tyler Kelley. He had a game project in 2021 which I volunteered to help him with. He made a Jitsi call for me and another person who knows Blender well. And we both tried to help Tyler with modeling.
In the middle of the conversation I realized that that other person lives in Iran. A country that is very much against the presence of Israel on any map. I told him that I myself was in Israel. And he didn't quit the call. He didn't rage out on me. He did nothing. So I asked him what he thinks about the whole conflict and he said that people do not care. Is there Israel, is there no Israel. People do not care. They do not want any violence. They just want to live their lives. He said that maybe some old people. Old enough to live during the 40s. They might care a little. And the government cares a lot about it. But people like him. They don't give a damn. It's not even an issue for them. They have other things to care about. The police is way to strict. This is what they care about. The laws are way too dystopian. That is what they care about.
It seems like Arabs are living in a dystopia of a kind no matter where they are in the world. In the Muslim countries, the government itself is a dystopian government. But even around the world there is a kind of presupposition that all Muslims are terrorists of some kind. Something like the infamous September 11 case, made the Muslim stereotype even more related to terrorists. And therefor if a person is Muslim around the world he will be more looked upon, more tracked, more restricted even if he lives in a free country.
This is also true about Israel. Israel is at a constant paranoia from Muslims. Muslim towns in Israel are often walled from all sides, so to not make it easy for rogue Muslims to try and attack Jewish towns. Gaza is one example of such a wall. But there are others. All the Jewish cities in West Bank have heavy security posts installed on the entrances with military personal checking every passing vehicle for presence of Muslims. Many Jewish people in Israel fear Muslims. And even sometimes just wish all Muslims seize to exist. Because with Muslim presence there is always fear in Jews. And Jews are sick of that fear already.
So there is a kind of discrimination of Muslims inside of Israel. And not only inside of Israel. But since Israel is in the constant fear from them, Israel tends to be very discriminatory to Muslims. And that, combined with utter desire of some Muslim groups to destroy Israel all together, we have a conflict that is now raging as a war.
Empathy with Israelis
The Jewish state of Israel was a reaction to atrocities of Nazism. There was a tension of Jews versus non-Jews for a long time in Europe. And slowly but surely this culminated into a Nazi regime that tried to wipe all Jews out of the face of the earth.
It seems like there are two main reasons Europeans hated Jews in those days. One of them being that Jews are often clever in how to accumulate wealth. While something like a Christian tradition sees wealth as something unholy. Jewish tradition sees poverty as undesirable. And sees nothing wrong with rich people. Therefor it seems like the major economic players in the entire Europe in those days were predominately Jews. Which lead to a lot of people to think that it was somewhat unfair to the core population of Europe. A similar tension is now possible to see with American economy. And places like Hollywood. Where Jews are the major players.
Another reason is probably have to do something with Jewish looks. Being of a middle eastern origin and due to religious reasons, unwilling to mix genes with Europeans, Jews looked very different to the other people. And also because of the tradition, religious Jews wore very different types of clothes. There is a Jewish character described by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist. And he writes about this very ugly old man. Probably a sentiment of how people viewed Jews back in those days.
Here and there, there were various violent acts that Jews managed to survive in Europe. But then a psychopathic leader rose to power in Germany. And made such an attempt at killing Jews that it was overwhelming. Something had to be done about it. And so a decision was made to start a country with military and everything, where Jews would have a chance at fighting back. There was a lot of question of where this country should be made. But ultimately a decision was made to make it where Israel is now. A decision based on Jewish history that describes various times of Israel existing at the same exact area as Israel now. By 1948 the plan succeeded and Israel declared independence.
Before 1948 the area where Israel now stands was called Palestine and was populated primarily with Muslims. There were Jews as well in this area. Jews were and still are everywhere. But the government was Palestinian. And an establishment of a country on their land ( at the time ) pissed them off, as I already talked about in the previous chapter.
Because of how pissed of they were they were fighting with Jews all of the sudden, making a whole new conflict. It was no longer a problem of Nazism. It was a problem of Palestinians. But since there was a dream of having a country which is Jewish where Jews can be safe. Those attacks would need solutions. And so slowly but surely vectors of Palestinian attacks were blocked by the government of Israel. Making it very hard for Palestinians to do attacks.
So Palestinians became cleverer in their attacks. Which prompted more paranoia in Israelis. And that resulted in increased control of Muslim communities over time. Israel even before October 7th suffered a lot from Palestinian terrorists trying to do some mayhem out of desperation. And each time it caused some more of that Muslim paranoia.
I was personally in a mall to watch a movie in cinema. It was way before October 7th. I remember seeing a lot of people there and feeling uneasy about it. Because the more people there are in one area the more chance there is that some rogue Palestinian will try to do something terrible there. Fortunately nothing happened. But it wasn't true for people at the music festival on October 7th.
Palestinians have a tendency to pretend friendly now a days. I believe a large chunk of Muslims are actually friendly. But there are a lot of stories that I hear people discuss which have to do with Palestinians or members of Hamas lying to Jewish people, pretending to be nice, but in the same time just trying to survey the attack vectors. This is called intelligence in the military sense. But since Hamas do not try to simply fight the Israeli military, but rather attack Jews in general, it creates a very insane amount of paranoia toward anybody who is Muslim. Since anybody could be a secret agent of Hamas.
Israel doesn't want to target anybody who is innocent. I personally did everything I could to not go to the army, because it may result in killing someone wrong. But Hamas makes it very hard for Israel to do anything properly. They learned to be clever about war. For example, a lot of Hamas military posts in Gaza are positioned in such a way as to have innocent civilians or hospitals near them. So if air attack could be done from Israel, it would kill those innocent civilians too. And therefor make Israel look bad. When now there was a plan to enter Gaza and clean it free from Hamas, the Israeli government asked people from the north of Gaza to move south, to avoid military operations. But Hamas told those same people that if they comply with Israel, they would commit a crime of supporting Israel. And therefor it would be more than okay for Hamas themselves to kill those people. Which made the operation even harder. Also Hamas kidnapped nearly 200 Israelis and have them probably near critical military posts in Gaza, to complicate the things even more.
The stories that I hear from people seem like the classic problem in philosophy which makes utopias impossible in general. The problem is:
How do you deal with a Psychopath?
A psychopath is a person without empathy. And if a psychopath chooses to follow rules, there is nothing wrong with the psychopath. But if a psychopath is evil and tries to do things that are evil, we got a problem. And it's easy to say, just a kill the psychopath. But it's not that simple.
Freedom is important and I hope everybody who reads this article can agree with it. And freedom is important equally to all people whether they are Europeans, or Americans. Whether they are Jews or Muslims. Whether they are Russians or Ukrainians. Whether they are Empathetic or Psychopathic.
But a psychopath doesn't hold freedom of others as important. He may understand it on an intellectual level. But not on the emotional level. And even on the intellectual level he may choose to not understand it at all. Making a dis-balance of trust.
We can trust empathetic people with respecting our freedom. But you can't ever trust a psychopath. Since he might undermine your freedom at any point. And so the only two ways to deal with him is either to run away, or to fight. To run away may be a thing that could work. But what if a psychopath is fixated on you. What it is a stalker wanting to hurt you specifically? The only thing you can do is to fight. But a psychopath might not want to fight with you, so you won't have consent for hitting him. So to protect your freedom you have to take the freedom of the psychopath away. And this is where the problem is.
Psychopaths are notorious for exploiting empathy in other people. A psychopath might take control over police by taking hostages. A psychopathic police officer might bulldoze through the place and kill everyone including the psychopath and including his hostages. Mission solved. But most people have empathy and understand that killing the hostages is wrong. And therefor a psychopath can use this to make it very hard to deal with him.
The worst part in psychopaths is that psychopathy is contagious. People that are forced to live near other psychopaths may become psychopaths themselves. We can see this in business a lot. Where the most important thing is the bottom line of the company. And therefor any abuse is tolerated. People in such environments might start to feel the same way and train their brains out of feeling any empathy.
Military training camps do a watered down version of this concept. They present new soldiers with such a tough instructor that they become tough themselves. In this case the instructor is not entirely psychopathic, and the time spent with him is not that large anyway, so the soldiers do retain some humanity in them, but I doubt a similar consideration is happening with military of Hamas.
Hamas attack on October 7th showed clearly that they are a bunch of psychopaths. They broke into people's houses. They killed innocent people. They killed people that were even fighting political fights to give Muslims more freedoms. They threatened their own people with death. They strategically used innocent people as shields knowing very well that Israeli military are a bunch of Empathetic teenagers. Manipulating the entire world to side with them because the world is Empathetic. But so many psychopaths? The only explanation is that most of them have turned into psychopaths, by being with other psychopaths.
And if you trace the history of the middle east backwards, you can see how the psychopathy basically spread over the whole region like a virus. It could be traced back to the British Colonialism in the area. Perhaps British were indeed a terrible force of evil in the place. Not unlike what was shown in RRR. But some argue that a level of psychopathy in the region could be traced even further into the BC era. I personally am of an opinion that the most violent types of psychopathy happened not too long ago with British Colonialism and then with Israel.
At first perhaps there were attempts at arguing out the Israel state. Like civilized people. But since the reasons for Israel were so enormous at those times, no argument could go through.
And while the rest of the world including Israel embraced the new idea of a Free Country. Muslim countries frustrated with how everything turned out, tried to stay as far away as possible from this Free Country ideas. Also fearing that pro-Israel movements could happen in those countries, they were very much against the idea of Free Speech. And therefor all of them failed to be Free Countries. It's not like they were Free Countries before Israel. But now they are worse.
Now some of them are still trying to introduce this or that law that will make it a bit easier to live. But they are very hard places to live in. Even in Russia with the political pressure there ( which is nowhere near as strong as something like Iran ) people are going mad and sometimes become psychopathic. It's no wander that Palestinians are so psychopathic.
But why was there a failing to address Palestinians before everything went crazy? Why Israelis failed to establish good diplomacy with Muslim countries in the very beginning?
Seems like we are finally coming to the conclusion to this thesis.
Hitler Caused all of it
Comparing Iran to the concentration camps in the Holocaust, Iran is a way better place to live in. Yes, there is the pressing government and everything. But there are no liquidations of massive portions of the populations because the ruler wanted so. There are a lot of politically based murders. A lot of very gruesome murders. But if you pretend good enough to play by the rules nothing will most likely happen to you. In the concentration camps it was way worse!
If even Russia with it's relatively mild political bullshit imposes enough pressure onto people to become psychopathic. And with Iran being more imposing, turns people into Hamas-like Terrorists that would die for a chance to hurt a Jew. Imagine how much of a pressure Hitler put on Jews. Imagine how much of a psychopathic hate there was in the entire Jewish population in that time.
There was enough of it to bulldoze through the area which was then Palestine and force the area under Jewish control. Regrets were made. People calmed down. But the camps didn't go out of the memory. Muslims tried to talk to them. But there was no way they would give up control over the area. They just had to have a country with Jewish person at the head, with Jewish army, to protect Jewish people from things like the holocaust.
For decades the tensions grew. While the new people at the head of the countries tried to soften it by diplomacy. Some progress happened. But ultra-Palestinians are still attacking. Still trying to cause mayhem. And Israelis with their ever-growing paranoia imposing even more restrictions on Muslims because of it. And all due to Hitler being a psychopath.
Conclusion
There is no easy answer to how to solve this issue. Israel at the moment is the only Democracy in the area. Where most people have most rights. Even the Muslims with their restrictions have rights way beyond those you could expect in Iran or similar countries.
The way Israel is trying to work this through is by diplomacy. By talking about peace with Middle East. And it worked well enough for the last few years. But some countries are just not there to see it happen. Iran declared that all countries that are at peace with Israel are traitors. And it seems like one of the reasons Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th has to do with some of those peace agreements. While there are other things they also claim.
When the war will be over and people will calm down, I hope that Israel will try talking sense into Gaza. And help Gaza into becoming a democratic state with people having actual freedoms. Where there will not be a tyrannical Hamas. But a good, well meaning president of Gaza. Or something. Who was chosen by the people and who is not a psychopath.
On the Israel side, I hope we ditch Netaniahu finally. And perhaps establish a similar system to one in the US where a guy cannot be a president for too long. And Netaniahu should get a therapy.
Lebanon ( on the North ) who is lightly attacking Israel to show that it also sort of cares about what Hamas is doing. But doesn't do it strong enough as to cause Israel to go to war. I just saw on the Freedom map that they are yellow. They are trying to make a Free Country there. I hope them finally succeed. And become another green spot.
Jordan, who has a queen and not a patriarchy. This is a great development. I hope that the queen either sets up a democracy, or does at least something that the British did. And make it so the country is ruled by a prime minister. To turn Jordan into a green zone too. Those countries that are trying to make diplomacy with Israel like Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Egypt. I hope them follow and become green countries too. With freedoms and everything. And then slowly but surely we could hope to talk some sense into Iran as well.
And with Muslims becoming more accustomed to freedom. And with them being less against Israel, Israel could ditch all the restrictions on them.
While on the other side of the world. Russia! Please! It was going so well in the beginning of the century. Why? Perhaps they should release Navalniy and make him the president. Of course only if he didn't become a psychopath himself from all this suffering. And he should actually establish constitutional rights for Free Speech. And other freedoms. To turn Russia into a Free Country as well. Perhaps this could force China to do it's last steps. It's nearly there. They just need to push a little. They need to remove the mass surveillance of people. They should start treating workers properly ( yes I know that it will cause prices on thing made in China to grow, but I'm fine with it ). China could become a green state.
India ... I don't think it needs help from outside. It is slowly becoming freer. But maybe if Middle east and Asia will be full of free countries, India will finally ditch the last remaining terrible laws and become a free country too. And then the only one left would be North Korea. Yes it has a psychopath in the head of the state. But maybe with so much political pressure from every direction, even that country could be Free in the end.
It will not be a Utopia. But it will be so much better.
Happy Hacking!!!
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Did Hitler...?
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Did the Jews...?
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