Harry Targ
Political Culture
In the 1960s political scientists
introduced two concepts to help explain how and why members of a polity develop
their world views and how these views become an operating personal philosophy
of political life. The first concept was “political socialization,” addressing
the processes by which we learn about our immediate community and the culture
at large. Research showed that people learned, for the most part, to respect
their political institutions, political figures, and the processes of
governance that dominate their lives. People learn about all this in the home,
at school, in the media, and among reference groups. The research tended to
show that people “learn their politics” at an early age, and not much changes.
(Much of the research was based on data before the upheavals of the 1960s.)
The second concept was largely content
based: the idea of “political culture.” Political culture referred to the
pattern of beliefs, symbols, and myths that dominate whole societies.
Therefore, from the vantage point of stability, the task of societies and
political systems was to “teach” the dominant political culture to the
citizenry.
These two influential concepts in the literature of political science emphasized implicitly, if not explicitly, the maintenance of the status quo. And paralleling the dominant historical narratives discussed above, stability was the motif of academic theorizing. As the theories of social movements suggest, people sometimes come together to demand change, and, as Howard Zinn has told us, that history is really the struggle between those who want to maintain systems as they are and those who seek change.
Is Israel
Committing Genocide?
Below is the language of Article 2 of the
United Nations Convention on Genocide initiated in 1948. Is there any doubt
that the government of Israel is engaging in genocidal policies against the
Palestinian people in the Gaza strip?
“In the present Convention, genocide means any
of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of
the group;
(b) Causing serious
bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately
inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures
intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly
transferring children of the group to another group.”
Both Israel and the United States are
signatories to the Genocide Convention. However, the Bush administration is
fully supportive of Israel’s policies.
How Modern Genocide Shapes Political Culture
https://www.democracynow.org/2026/10/30/forensic_architecture_eyal_weizman_gaza_genocice
The concepts of political culture and genocide came to
mind while watching the Amy Goodman interview with Eyal Weizman on the
“architecture of genocide.” Weizman described how the Israeli military was
systematically stamping out any evidence of not only the Palestinian people but
their buildings, institutions, and the very ground on which they existed. It
seems that the Israeli’s learned from the Holocaust experience that if any
remains of the victimized peoples exists, their buildings, their property, their land,
historians can reconstruct the horrific character of the experience of
genocide.
In the case of Gaza and the West Bank today, any vestige of people, institutions, buildings, or even land that existed before the genocide is being systematically eliminated. It is as if the goal is to be able to deny that Palestinians, Gaza, the West Bank, and for sure the Nakba ever existed or occurred.
And on reflection denying the existence of the
original occupants of the Western Hemisphere and their extermination had been a
long-term project of every United States government.
In sum, along with the UN Convention on Genocide, the
oppressors engaged in genocide today are trying to eliminate the history of
a people, their land, and their artifacts to someday create the illusion that they,
in this case the Palestinians, never existed.
"Jared Kushner unveiled an ambitious vision Thursday for a cosmopolitan Gaza Strip that will attract investment and tourists after years of war — looking much like his father-in-law President Trump’s call for converting the war-torn Mediterranean territory into a “Riviera of the Middle East.”
