Thursday, June 28, 2018

Revenants and Ghosts and Me

Remember my revenant post of 14 years ago (already?)?

It's core essence:

...why I think the word "revenant" should be used instead of "settler". 
a revenant is one who returns after a lengthy absence. A revenant can be any person who shows up after a long absence such as those who come back to their ancestral home after years of political exile. This is the classic definition although Sir Walter Scott used it in his novel the Fair Maid, to denote a ghost. It stems from the French "revenir," which means simply "to return". 

That 'ghost' connection disturbed some and others took advantage of it as if it made my term irrelevant.

Of course, that was before the Oscar Awards and Leo DiCaprio's performance.

But there actually is a 'ghost' in classic Zionist thinking.

Take this into consideration, from Leo Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation:

With the loss of their fatherland, the Jewish people lost their independence, and fell into a decay which is not compatible with existence as a whole vital organism. The state, was crushed before the eyes of the nations. But after the Jewish people had yielded up their existence as an actual state, as a political entity, they could nevertheless not submit to total destruction — they did not cease to exist spiritually as a nation. The world saw in this people the uncanny form of one of the dead walking among the living. 

The ghostlike apparition of a people without unity or organization, without land or other bond of union, no longer alive, and yet moving about among the living, — this eerie form scarcely paralleled in history, unlike anything that preceded or followed it, could not fail to make a strange, peculiar impression upon the imagination of the nations. And if the fear of ghosts is something inborn, and has a certain justification in the psychic life of humanity, what wonder that it asserted itself powerfully at the sight of this dead and yet living-nation ?

Fear of the Jewish ghost has been handed down and strengthened for generations and centuries. It led to a prejudice which, in its turn, in connection with other forces to be discussed later, paved the way for Judeophobia.

...Judeophobia is a form of demonopathy, with the distinction that the Jewish ghost has become known to the whole race of mankind not merely to certain races, and that it is not disembodied, like other ghosts, but is a being of flesh and blood, and suffers the most excruciating pain from the wounds inflicted upon it by the fearful mob who imagine it threatens them.

Judeophobia is a psychic aberration. As a psychic aberration it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable. It is the fear of ghosts; which, as the mother of Judeophobia, has evoked that abstract, I might say Platonic hatred, thanks to which the whole Jewish nation is wont to be held responsible for the real or supposed misdeeds of its individual members, and to be libelled in so many ways, to be buffeted about so disgracefully.

So, I'm still using the term revenant.

You?

P.S.

'Settlements' are communities.

'Settling' is actually resettling.

^

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