Penetrating, profound essay that really gets to the heart of what we're dealing with in the current mass psychosis.
"... What the Palestine word-symbol does to the populations that internalize it is not, in the first instance, a matter of ideology or belief, even though the ideology of anti-Zionism is indeed its only ideological content. But, in the first order, it is a matter of cognitive occupation. The symbol, once installed in the political consciousness of a population, takes over the entire space of political reasoning and renders the actual structures of that population’s political and economic condition unthinkable. The mechanism operates not by suppressing alternative explanations but by occupying, in advance, the cognitive territory in which such explanations would have to be developed. The alternatives are not censored but are simply completely unavailable, because every available cognitive pathway runs through the symbol, and the symbol terminates every line of inquiry before it can reach any other destination...".
"... What the Palestine word-symbol does to the populations that internalize it is not, in the first instance, a matter of ideology or belief, even though the ideology of anti-Zionism is indeed its only ideological content. But, in the first order, it is a matter of cognitive occupation. The symbol, once installed in the political consciousness of a population, takes over the entire space of political reasoning and renders the actual structures of that population’s political and economic condition unthinkable. The mechanism operates not by suppressing alternative explanations but by occupying, in advance, the cognitive territory in which such explanations would have to be developed. The alternatives are not censored but are simply completely unavailable, because every available cognitive pathway runs through the symbol, and the symbol terminates every line of inquiry before it can reach any other destination...".
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