Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

In the last hour he's gone to the opposite extreme, posting :

As I said earlier this week, “decolonization”, “from the river to the sea” and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide.

Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension.

'Decolonization' has been in the air a lot recently due to the ongoing war in Gaza but is mainly used to describe the gradual unwinding of European colonialism/imperialism; Wikipedia's article provides a good overview. The term is often associated with Frantz Fanon, who opposed the French colonialization of Algeria, and wrote several influential books on the subject, the most famous being The Wretched of the Earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonization

For Musk to engage in such an abrupt reversal of his stated free speech ideals (and barely-qualified endorsement of white nationalist conspiracy theories yesterday), Twitter's financials must be undergoing a severe erosion.

Decolonization is widely used for much more than simply unwinding European colonialism: It's also invoked when teachers object to simply teaching kids math (because the curriculum and terms are European/Euro-descended American in origin), desperately trying to find a way to teach evolution without Darwin because he's an old white Euro man, and so on.

Invariably, "decolonizing" a subject means systematically booting white authors out, or pivoting from teaching the subject matter plain and simple to teaching ideology and relativizing everything because Heaven forbid a minority kid would feel bad (which itself is mostly just an excuse)

As a thought experiment: these "opposites" aren't really that far apart if you think of Musk's political demographic as consisting, in part, of Christian eschatologists (i.e. people who are simultaneously anti-Semitic and pro-Israel).

That doesn't mean that he himself is one, only that his grift currently lies with some of those people.

Fair comment.

> Christian eschatologists (i.e. people who are simultaneously anti-Semitic and pro-Israel).

“Christian eschatologists” could apply to about 100 different touted beliefs with a 1000 nuance flavors of each. Let’s not paint all those folks with a pro-Israel yet anti-Semitic brush. There may be some of that, but it’s certainly not all and not even enough to consider it a defining characteristic of most.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism#Public_opini...

Not every Christian is a Zionist and not every Christian is an evangelical. And not every Christian ascribes to the same eschatological belief. It’s a mistake to paint Christians and Christianity with a broad brush.

There is also a distinction that should be made between political Zionism and religious Zionism. I am a Christian, I hold a preterist eschatological viewpoint and don’t belong to an “evangelical” church. As such the restoration of Israel in 1948 has ZERO theological meaning to me. However, can I accept the creation of Israel in 1948 a politically valid political event? Sure, the established world authority of the time made it happen and did it for a reason. To me the current conflict is just like many—-over land, money, and power. So I believe that Israel has a right to exist because the world authority gave it that right in 1948. In that sense I am a political Zionist.

That makes me definitely not the same as a Christian who believes the restoration of Israel in 1948 is a sign post pointing to a ton of biblical prophecy culminating in an apocalypse with the current conflict having a supernatural meaning with a theological side that must be taken to scare people into a belief system. Those are religious zionists with a futurism eschatology. We may both believe that Israel should exist, but we don’t believe in the same “why”.

I didn’t say that every Christian is a Zionist. I linked to a statistic that shows that the overwhelming majority of evangelicals are Zionists because they believe the Jews need to be slaughtered in the holy land to bring back the messiah.

It’s entirely possible for you to be the kind of non-evangelical, Christian “political” Zionist that this doesn’t apply to. But that doesn’t change the statistic, and it doesn’t change Musk’s audience.

Your original post didn’t specify evangelicals, you used the phrase “christian eschatologists” and defined it much too broadly which is what I am commenting on. Perhaps you meant “evangelicals” and used the wrong word. Perhaps it was intentional and you simply misunderstood the difference.

Either way I wanted to provide context against the generalization/stereotype your post created.

If they wanted Israelis to be slaughtered wouldn't you be hearing evangelicals saying we need to cut all military aid to Israel, and wouldn't we see these Evangelicals teaming up with left wing progressives who also want to cut military support and Arms shipments to Israel?

I suspect that the commenter believes that by having a futurist end times belief that contains a prophecy predicting a Jewish slaughter to motivate conversion of the remnant Jews to be fulfilled as a stepping stone for their desire for a new heaven and new earth amounts to anti-semitism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com