Chamblee54

April 13, 2025 – I am beginning Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem (FLNJ), a six part series by Darryl Cooper (middle name unavailable), aka @MartyrMade. This might prove to be a bit of a challenge. The podcast itself is easy to find as a free download. However, a transcript (the lazy blogger’s ally) might prove challenging. After googling several paywalled sources, I found a youtube edition. This will provide a transcript.
I begin this journey a few days after the infamous JRE featuring Douglas Kear Murray and Dave-no middle name-Smith. I am on team Dave, and found DKM to be an obnoxious purveyor of bad faith rhetoric. At one point, Rogan was trying to say that DC has done 30 plus hours of podcasting about Israel/Palestine. DKM interrupted him, to say “So what. 30 plus hours of podcasting, you do that in a week” I am just starting to listen to that 30 hours. I doubt that I will finish  in a week.
There are so many ironies in FLNJ-1. DKM stridently said, in effect, that DS should not talk about Israel if he had not been there. At 59:54, DC mentions that “Herzl (Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism) had never even been to Palestine when he published his pamphlet calling for the Jews to move there.” In another head scratcher, at 24:44 we learn: “Zionism was competing for recruits with Bolshevism, and these other radical movements. It’s a competition which Winston Churchill … would later call quote little less than a struggle for the soul of the jewish people.” DC opened a can of worms when he said the Mr. Churchill was the real villain of World War II.
Eventually, though a series of World War I related events, Britain issued The Balfour Declaration. This document promised a “national home” for the Jewish people. Unfortunately, Britain had already promised the Arabs their own independent state. Britain also promised France that Palestine would be under international rule. These conflicting promises would lead to problems.
April 14, 2025 Today’s visit with FLNJ is with Episode 2, on my morning walk. FLNJ-2 begins by talking about the effect of World War I on the Arab populations of West Asia. The colonial powers … The English, The French, The Ottoman Empire … were conscripting Arabs to go fight in their war. These men did not understand why they had to go kill each other. This is not surprising, since the European conscripts did not understand the war either.
The first two hours of FLNJ-2 concern the events in Palestine after World War I ended. As could have been predicted, Britain broke its promise to the Arabs. The Balfour Declaration stood, and a portion of Palestine was “given” to the Zionists, under British administration. Meanwhile, Syria became a French governed territory. The Zionists began to build things, including militias. The Arabs were not happy, and the British managed to upset everybody. Before long, people began killing each other, and the whole thing devolved into a quagmire. … This is a greatly simplified view of what happened. For more information, you can listen to FLNJ, or google one of the many histories of this era. … I am going to copy that disclaimer for later use.
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. Russell Lee took the facebook picture in May 1938, Southeast Missouri Farms. Farmers talking together in cooperative store. La Forge project, Missouri. There are more episodes of the Fear & Loathing series available. 041825 042325 042625