Humanity Needs a Plan B for Survival (YouTube Content): Difference between revisions

'''Eric Weinstein''': Well, I knew—it took me a little while to realize that Sinwar was actually innovating. And part of the problem with innovation in the Middle East is that it's not necessarily something wholly new. But there are moments—we used to have the golden age of airline hijacking in the 70s, and that gave way to the age of suicide bombing with the marine barracks in Lebanon, which was really a technique that was imported from the Tamil Tigers, separatist movement in Sri Lanka. There's no history of suicide bombing, I think, in the Middle East before that. And what I realized is that—I was trying to figure out why would Sinwar do this crazy thing? Doesn't he know what's about to happen? And then I realized, oh, no, no, no, he knows exactly what is about to happen. And he is figuring out how to force Israel's hand in something that is not widely known in the US, at least, called Hybrid Warfare. And the concept of Hybrid Warfare is that kinetic war, which is what we traditionally think of as the majority component of war, is not necessarily the major component, and the major component, in fact, was video. And he was desperate for video. And then what was the video that he was desperate for? The video he was desperate for was the IDF killing his own people. And that was the plan. The plan was to force Israel's hand. And I don't know how many chess players we have here, but there's a very important—I'm not really much of a chess player myself. There's a very important concept—it's a little subtle—called zugzwang, and the idea is that you put your opponent in a position where they're begging not to move. Every move puts them in a worse position. But there's nothing called "I don't want to move, I pass my turn" in chess. It doesn't exist. And so you put somebody in zugzwang when they have to act and their action hurts them. So the options were that either the IDF could do nothing and look weak in a region where you cannot afford to look weak or respond to a situation in which you've gone beyond human shields. We have language for human shields, but we don't have language for what Sinwar did. And I thought about this in terms of this concept of suicide by cop. I don't know how many people are familiar with suicide by cop, but it didn't exist, I think, until the 1990s. And the reason that the language came about is we had a spate of instances nobody could explain. Some moron would pull a gun, a toy gun, on a policeman and get shot and killed. And so you keep thinking like, who's dumb enough to pull a toy gun on a policeman until you realize that that's the objective. And in fact, this was going to be IDF-assisted suicide. And in IDF-assisted suicide, the whole game is to make sure that the video corresponds to a pre-written narrative, which is that the Israeli people and by extension the Jews were genocidal maniacs who wanted to kill Arab children. And—

'''Eric Weinstein''': So you have a very strange situation where a planet that was, I don't know, really unprepared for war, Western Europe and the United States. I had this thing I've called The Great Nap that lasted from 1945 until 2025, where we forgot what war actually was, what it means to have an enemy, how you have to get your people to think about sending their children into harm's way, what heroism is, all of these sorts of things. And in fact, Israel, to be blunt, forgot to set an alarm on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Note to self, whenever you have an anniversary of an old battle, always set an alarm. I think 9/11 was the anniversary of the Battle of Vienna where Christian Europe defeated the Muslim invaders. So you have a situation in which Israel was asleep at the wheel. It did not understand what was happening. Quite honestly—and this is, like, pretty unpleasant, the second day back in Israel after 30 years, you don't want to be in the diaspora telling the Israelis what's actually going on, it's offensive—but you got outplayed, and it's very hard to recognize that an evil genius that didn't really care that much about his own life, and certainly not the lives of people under his care, outplayed you by figuring out that the world was in this place where it was very angry at the Jews, and it didn't need things to make sense or add up too much. It just needed to present a general narrative of a crazy colonial power, which Israel is not, engaging in genocide, which it is not, against a people that don't exist. And I don't mean that the people don't exist, the Arabs exist. And the flavor of the Arabs is the Palestinian Arabs. And they do have claims on this land. I'm not claiming that they don't. But I am claiming that the invention of The Palestinian People, if you go to Google Ngrams, corresponds to January of 1964 and the failure of something called the United Arab Republic, which bizarrely many Israelis from today clearly do not know actually happened, that there was a union of Syria, Gaza, and Egypt as part of Pan Arabism. And the whole purpose of creating The Palestinian People, as opposed to the Mizrahi people, the Satmar people, the Bukharan Jewish people, is that the U.N. had this vague language in its charter, which was that you had self-determinations for "people". So when Nasser's Pan-Arabism collapsed, the imperative was to create a people to engage a charter that was purposefully vague and, by virtue of the fact that nobody seems to know the history or understand this stuff, it worked pretty well. And so Israel found itself in a situation where it couldn't explain its actions, even though it seemed obvious to people here because the rest of the world hadn't been at war, hadn't dealt with something this diabolical. When I was growing up, we knew what diabolical techniques the Vietcong were doing because we were broadcasting it on the six-thirty and seven-o’clock news and, you know, as I tell people, my parents turned off the news the day that we saw American GI’s heads on pikes being proudly carried by the Viet Cong. We don't see that anymore. 9/11, the most famous photograph is something called Falling Man, which is unknown in the US because the US papers blocked it. So, in part, Israel walked right into a situation that it didn't prepare for. It certainly didn't consult me or anybody else who was seeing it from this perspective in terms of laying the groundwork for what it had to do. And you got outplayed. And my concern is that I don't think people even understand the language of Human Terrain. Look it up. It's the weaponization of the social sciences against humans, used as if they were valleys, mountains, river crossings. And you turned the world into this thing called Hybrid Warfare, where the major component is not necessarily kinetic. It's not necessarily somebody shooting or firing explosives or a drone. Very often it's something like Tokyo Rose or videos with high production values or the like. And so, you know, in part it's a lot, but Israel utterly and totally failed to explain what was about to happen, which could all be seen. The reason I left that tweet there, and I haven't really talked about it that much publicly, is you could see this before Israel went into Gaza completely. And if you don't give that devil his due, you will continue to lose.

'''Fleur Hassan-Nahoum''': The Great Nap, or The Big Nap—