Breadtube / Leftube

This is 100% vibes from me, so I'll edit my comment if someone shows me I'm wrong. I never saw him as a leftist. He seems to be a centrist anti-imperalist, or maybe just anti-American (not a bad take).

Using Pepe the frog is a bit sus.

He might be part of the new breed of reactionaries that have gone anti-US military after the Ukraine war, similar to The Duran, but I'm not yet willing to put him in that club as most of his content is pretty OK.

I think it's fair to label him as a "non-Marxist" and admit that he'll have a bad take from that blind spot.

I have some prejudice against GDF thanks to BadEmpanada's video, but I'll give him some grace and watch this. It's worth noting that the comment section of this video is already full of antisemitic dogwhistles. I'll write down some observations:

• 2:30: Brzezinski states that US relations of Arab states for oil dominance jeopardizes American-Israeli relations and that this means American and Israeli interests are not entirely aligned. I think this is incorrect because it relies on the assumption that US - Arab relations are symmetric to US - Israeli relations, when they are of a fundamentally different character. For instance, in the 70s oil shock the US had Faisal assassinated to contain OPEC's threat and to steer Saudis in a more collaborationist path (Vijay Prashad's Darker Nations has a good chapter on this). Meanwhile, Israel would never go out of its way to gain material leverage over the US in this way, because they are the ones that are immediately dependent on the US for material support. So this means that the notion that Israel would have to bait the US to be less friendly to Arabs misses the point that the US already is locked into undermining their Arab allies because of its imperialist position. This fails the materialism check.
• 5:24 GDF argues that Nazi Germany's campaigns of the Holocaust and Lebensraum were not pursued for profit but because of their supremacist ideology. Again, this fails the materialism check. While the Nazi wars were not profitable in terms of tax revenue, the reason that the Nazi regime had broad support from German capital was that, given the contradictions Germany was pushed into after its defeat in WW1: the possibility of communist revolution and their unsustainable reparations debt, German capitalists needed fascism to suppress workers and they needed the violent explosion of WW2 to have a chance to keep capitalism going. This means that Nazi ideology wasn't just born from nowhere, it arose from the material conditions that German capitalists were dealing with. Read Blackshirts and Reds! Fascism is capitalism's rational immune response to communism and its own contradictions.
• 7:14 GDF quotes Ben Gurion,

He appealed to the labor movement to remove [...] "The class concept that obscures the national character of our movement"

as a counterargument to the email he received. This is accepting fascist logic at its face: of course Ben Gurion the fascist would say that nation must obscure class! That doesn't get rid of class society, though, it just reveals the opportunism behind fascist ideology. But what GDF is trying to say is that Israel shouldn't be analyzed through the framework of dialectical materialism and class struggle because Ben Gurion didn't want people to see it that way, and Israel is more like Nazi Germany (see my previous point). This is obviously quite objectionable. The next minute continue with the same argument using various quotes from early Zionists.

• 11:00 GDF essentially just argues against leftist antizionism on the basis that when we criticize Israel, we often land at the same conclusions as the Zionists WRT Israel's importance to the US. He explains that the Eastern Mediterranean Littoral and the Persian Gulf are two distinct regions, so the argument that Israel is used by the US to control both is flawed because Saudi Arabia and other anticommunist Gulf monarchies are already in charge of the Persian Gulf. I think the recent 12 day war in which Israel's terrorist bombings of Iran to police their nuclear program should be evidence enough that this point is nonsensical. Israel absolutely is still America's tip of the spear to bend anyone in the region into submission, despite geographic proximity of other US allies.
• 15:20 GDF argues that America doesn't factor a proxy's ability to carry out a military campaign in lieu of American soldiers all that highly, citing that American leaders don't care to sacrifice many Americans to achieve their goals. He also argues that the military industrial complex favors large scale deployments. This is missing the point: America simply is not the fighting force that GDF is supposing, it can't win the kinds of wars that it needs to win in West Asia by their own efforts alone. This is a complex point and I'm not incredibly knowledgeable about military strategy, but if I can summarize it: you can't take territory with aerial bombings, the US needs allies on the ground to actually hold the territory because attempting to occupy large amounts of land in expeditionary invasions has always been a disaster for the US.
• 16:00 GDF cites various times where the US took the side of Israel's enemies. I'm a bit rusty on the histories of all these conflicts, hopefully someone else can explain them from a materialist perspective. The crux of his argument here comes at 17:18, "Far from being a US proxy, Israel's decision making was independent, and potentially destabilizing." I currently can't think of a great counterargument here because I'm not fully familiar, but I'm willing to concede that the tail wagged the dog a little bit in the 1970s, and the US supported Nasser et al to get things back under control.

I planned on commentating the whole video but I have work to do. If anyone's interested in dissecting it further I might finish it.

I like him, but I think he has a problem of seeing a snake eating a tail and assuming the snake is eating another snake, rather than seeing the full Ouroboros, if that's understandable.

I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

• yewtu.be
• inv.nadeko.net
• yt.artemislena.eu
• piped.video