Many people besides me must be surprised how quickly American opinion has turned against Israel. Personally I have started to overlook political differences with 'the usual suspects' as long as they speak up against Israel. For instance I watch "The Young Turks" on You Tube. Maybe that type of "difference-burying" solidarity is necessary when a people coalesce into a real nation.
Many Americans are starting to see that 'their' government is not really theirs. How can Americans even see Americans as a sovereign country when its leaders have been completely suborned by a tiny little shit country in the Mideast?
But let's back up a step. Didn't World War II unify America? I am not sure it really did. The country's existence was not in doubt. My mother was a teenage girl during WWII and she once told me that she couldn't even tell a war was going on. After all, the Pacific Ocean was on one side and the Atlantic on the other.
I will always be grateful to the Four Score Graybeard for turning me on to Bernard Cornwell's "Last Kingdom" (Saxon Tales) historical novels. Think of Alfred the Great's disunited Saxons and Angles being conquered piecemeal by the Danish pagans. The Danes' root vocabulary overlapped with the Anglo-Saxons, since they were cousins on the Germanic language tree. The Danes didn't look different from the Anglo-Saxons: they were basically the same ethnicity. A couple centuries earlier, the Anglo-Saxons had even worshiped Thor and Odin (Woden), and it still shows in English names for the days of the week and Easter. The Yule holiday at the winter-solstice was papered over as "Christmas."
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| from historywarfarenetwork.com, Alfred and his Angle-Saxons watching the Vikings |
So why wasn't Alfred the Great willing to be conquered by the Danes? It was probably due to his devout Christianity.
An even more remarkable story of coalescence into nationhood was the 750 year battle of the Irish against England.
So sometimes a people is nearly conquered and they decide to submit. Other times, their back is pushed against a wall, they become stubborn, and invent an identity, a loyalty, that they refuse to surrender. Now we will see which side of this divide Americans take.
P.S. I let Google's blogger.com automatically list keywords in my posts for searching. For instance, it chose 14 words or phrases in this post. But it didn't choose Israel or Zionism. Why do you think that is?
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