As readers have probably noticed, throughout the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas I’ve devoted relatively little attention to that topic. Not because there is nothing to say—there is—but because I did not want to gladden the Philistines daughters’ hearts. Now, however, the point has come where I can no longer avoid telling my countrymen- and women the truth about the danger facing us. My vehicle for doing so will be a long quote from the famous historian Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny. Kindle Edition. 2024.
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”Most governments, most of the time, seek to monopolize violence. If only the government can legitimately use force, and this use is constrained by law, then the forms of politics that we take for granted become possible. It is impossible to carry out democratic elections, try cases at court, design and enforce laws, or indeed manage any of the other quiet business of government when agencies beyond the state also have access to violence. For just this reason, people and parties who wish to undermine democracy and the rule of law create and fund violent organizations that involve themselves in politics. Such groups can take the form of a paramilitary wing of a political party, the personal bodyguard of a particular politician—or apparently spontaneous citizens’ initiatives, which usually turn out to have been organized by a party or its leader. Armed groups first degrade a political order, and then transform it. Violent right-wing groups, such as the Iron Guard in interwar Romania or the Arrow Cross in interwar Hungary, intimidated their rivals. Nazi storm troopers began as a security detail clearing the halls of Hitler’s opponents during his rallies. As paramilitaries known as the SA and the SS, they created a climate of fear that helped the Nazi Party in the parliamentary elections of 1932 and 1933. In Austria in 1938 it was the local SA that quickly took advantage of the absence of the usual local authority to loot, beat, and humiliate Jews, thereby changing the rules of politics and preparing the way for the Nazi takeover of the country. It was the SS that ran the German concentration camps—lawless zones where ordinary rules did not apply. During the Second World War, the SS extended the lawlessness it had pioneered in the camps to whole European countries under German occupation. The SS began as an organization outside the law, became an organization that transcended the law, and ended up as an organization that undid the law.”
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Let me make myself clear; I am not trying to equate Israel with Germany during the last days of the Weimar Republic. Not yet, at any rate. But the potential in the form of political extremism and armed militias, rampaging mainly but not solely in the West Bank, is definitely there. So are threats on the justice system and its desperate attempts to keep some kind of order. And it is growing every day. First anarchy then, by way of a “corrective,” Fascism.
This country is at war, the most terrible and, in some ways, most important activity man can engage in. God grant our leaders (and those on the other side) the wisdom to know what to do and, above all, what not to do. Or else, I am afraid, we will all meet in hell.