CindyTheSkull [she/her, comrade/them]

In an ideal hexbear world, we would be as serious and active about banning anti-vegans as we have recently (and thankfully) decided to be about banning misogynists.

I guess I’m just worried we’re falling in the same trap of painting all Israelis as bloodthirsty monsters - instead of acknowledging that some of them are just normal people that have been duped by the Zionist state into committing atrocities against their fellow humans and that black and white thinking only serves to uphold this cycle of hatred. (literal example from this very thread)

Duped into committing atrocities. Duped into committing atrocities. Those poor saps were just mislead into committing crimes against humanity, literal torture upon children. Your logic here is that we shouldn’t paint them all as bloodthirsty monsters since some of them were “duped” into being… well, bloodthirsty monsters. Regardless of how they arrived there, that still makes them bloodthirsty monsters!

You are what you do. It doesn’t matter whether or not someone was “duped” into believing the obvious lie that a Palestinian’s life isn’t worth as much as theirs, or that they were “duped” into committing (or even just supporting) atrocities. They still did those things. Those who were the victims of those atrocities are no less victims, no better off just because one or two of the perpetrators were “duped” into mercilessly murdering entire families. At this point, anyone who identifies as an Israeli but who is not actively fighting against Zionism and all who support it then they well deserve the title of bloodthirsty monster. They deserve far worse than just a label, honestly.

So no, we’re not “falling in to the same trap” of painting with too broad of a brush, we’re recognizing actual material reality. We’re recognizing the material consequences of Zionism and correctly concluding what must happen to Zionism itself. This isn’t black and white thinking, to the contrary it is recognizing the very real nuances that differentiate the colonizers from the colonized, and it is doing so without falling into the idealist trap that you have that leads down the same road as “well those Nazi concentration camp guards, hey some of them were just normal people trying to make the best of a bad situation.” As usual, the problem is not that we as communists are failing to see that these monsters are human too, it’s the liberal who fails to see that “normal humans” can and do become monsters. And whether or not one did so with giddy abandon or because their mind was already rotted to the extent that they believed (were “duped” by) propaganda telling them that they were righteous for trying to wipe out all Palestinian children, it doesn’t fucking matter. Functionally, they are monsters.

Outside of dedicated trans spaces made specifically for that sole purpose, Hexbear stands out as the most welcoming, inclusive, and protective community for trans people I’ve ever encountered online.

I completely agree and this is something everyone should remember. Even so, it’s fair to say that there is a spectrum when it comes to the ahistoricity of any given historical depiction. A work can be a bit off despite the honest attempt of the artist to make it historically accurate or it can be a grotesque mischaracterization that distorts the context beyond any semblance of the historical reality. G*mers tend to demand the latter while pretending they’re the ones championing accuracy.

I appreciate that comment. I may have been too reactive and harsh in my response, and apologize for that. It is admittedly one of my “peeves” when someone I’d otherwise consider a comrade seems to advocate specifically for killing innocents and children as a means to punish the people who do deserve the pit and worse.

I absolutely share your anger, even rage for the demon shitstains supplying WP to aid a genocide. And to be clear, it’s not that they don’t deserve to see their own family killed in the same way they are facilitating the unimaginably painful murder of other families, I just personally think it’s important for us as leftists to draw a line against targeting innocent people especially for the sake of vindictiveness. In other words, if we could somehow make the guilty fascists think that was happening to their own family without actually doing that to the innocent members of their family, I’d have zero problem with that, in fact I’d be all for it. Since we were discussing hypotheticals, I actually rather like that one.

Well wishes to you, I should probably log off for a bit too.

You:

Eh, fuck em. It’s killing somebody’s families either way, might as well be theirs.

Also you:

Save your indignation for those who deserve it.

lol.

If we’re just talking hypotheticals here, why is it so hard for you to say that it would be bad, hypothetically, to kill a 3 year old with white phosphorus?

What you’re apparently trying to say is that your comments advocating for killing entire families based on the crimes of one of their members is that you’re posing this hypothetical situation to people here on lemmy who are in a position to target/profit from/earn a living from white phosphorus. And that doing so will perhaps get them to imagine the horrors and change their ways. Really? K. Keep fighting that good fight then. As a final note, believe me, those who deserve my indignation aren’t getting any less of it just because I took a moment to call out a chuddy comment.

Disgusting. The problem is the torture and murder of people who don’t deserve it. If “their family” only consists of WP provider’s cousins who condone the business then fine, good riddence. But you’re saying their 3 year old niece who knows nothing about any of this should be killed by slowly burning to death from chemical weapons? Nah, fuck off with the “children are valid targets” bait.

I mean, that is their dream, that is indeed the ultimate capitalist goal that you’re right they have largely achieved. But an important aspect of that capitalist dream world would be to do that in perpetuity, with all this kept in a stable balance they forever control from the top. That is where the dream can never be truly realized. They do have to struggle to maintain it, and while they have been doing an astoundingly good job of that for the most part (despite how well all of us here can see the gaping contradictions, we also rightly lament how communists are an insignificant minority in the west/core and how captured by capital nearly every institution is), that struggle still demands they have to keep inventing increasingly complex and stratified apparatus to keep their contradiction-riddled structure of exploitation afloat.

And that’s what we’re really talking about here. At what point does that corrosion from the countless contradictions become so extensive that maintenance of the structure becomes a truly lost cause? Where is the point where the downward slide back out of their capitalist dreamworld (the proletarian nightmare) accelerate into the certainty of waking up from it? The answer is necessarily subjective, since we can all pin different moments where we think this has or will happen. But it is an inevitability.

You were asking about the shifting nature of the meaning of the term whiteness. Go up and read your own comment to see how you related that to authoritarianism. If you can’t follow your own train of thought, then I can’t help you because it makes it apparent you’re not asking in good faith.

You’re saying “authoritarianism = non-whiteness = opposition to the NATO bloc”

What I’m trying to explain to you is that “we” are not saying that. The people who use whiteness to justify their actions and otherize their enemies are saying that. This isn’t difficult.

Why not skip the middle step?

Go ask the NATO bloc and their supporters. The obvious and surface answer is that it has to do with making for an easy “us-vs-them” identifier. “Of course they’re bad, they aren’t white like us good wholesome folk are, who are inherently good and wholesome because we’re white, and being good and wholesome makes us right and correct in what we do and you can tell because we’re white. The ones who are bad clearly aren’t like us. They’re not white!” Yes, it is circular reasoning and garbage logic. But I don’t know why you’re getting pissy at us for that instead of the dipshits white people who keep moving the goalposts on the meaning of whiteness, as they always have done to suit their agenda. Take it up with them.

No one is making anything “sound easy,” we’re just pointing out the fact that education is not and never has been a prerequisite for revolution. It’s ignorant, ahistortical, and bordering on chauvinism to say that’s the reason “all the poor countries” haven’t had revolutions. It’s ridiculous on it’s face when you actually look at history and see that almost all successful revolutions that became AES countries did so with the support and participation of their largely uneducated populous. Or no, I guess the masses of peasantry in rural China all went to uni otherwise the Chinese revolution could never have happened. 🙄

Not true. You may need an educated vanguard party, but not an educated population. Even then, the vanguard need only be “educated” in legitimate theory. An “educated population” that has been educated mostly in capitalist propaganda like in the US is a hindrance to revolution, definitely not a requirement. “Uneducated” people aren’t dumb, they can still recognize inequality and the injustice of not being able to eat while a small elite wallows in the wealth made off their labor.

This is the right answer. Several of the the comments in this thread have correctly identified climate change as an important factor, but it seems like they aren’t recognizing how much of an accelerant for revolution it really is. Maybe revolution is not the perfect term here so much as radical and extreme political change because as you say, it can go in the direction of communism or fascism depending as always on the material conditions. Either way, the current status quo for every nation on the planet doesn’t have long left, and its death is going to happen faster and faster in the coming few decades.

Exactly. And in turn, revolutions in the periphery weakens the core and increases the possibility of eventual revolution there as well. All of these systems have built-in feedback loops that need to be considered and exploited.

I think what you’re failing to take into consideration is that all those poor countries that haven’t had communist revolutions have had the weight of the most powerful empire ever to exist on earth bearing down on them and doing its best to ensure any communist revolution was strangled in its crib. Yet despite this, some of them succeeded in communist revolutions anyway! The lack of revolutions in the periphery since the advent of capitalism is not evidence for the lack of revolutionary potential in a starving population. Saying it is is just not taking all the material conditions into account.

As I already said, you have no understanding of what settler-colonialism is, and your disgusting (and actually racist) insistence that the Palestinians (who we agree are being genocided right now) will simply genocide everyone living on their stolen land is testament to your ignorance. You know how space_comrade pointing out you were telling on yourself by spouting a Zionist delusional fear, and that it is pure projection? Well it really is both those things: delusional and projection.

Most of what you said I already addressed, and you seemed to have missed it, so it doesn’t make me very keen to respond to it again. But this part:

you should be looking for a solution that doesn’t involve destroying a nation and its people.

is very revealing. Destroying a STATE is not the same thing as destroying a people and it’s very sneaky to pretend that it’s the same thing.

The site I already linked has a FAQ, and here is one entry from it:

Does Israel have a right to exist?

People have a right to self-determination, but no state in the world has a right to exist. This ‘right’ simply has no foundation, and Israel is not special in this regard. More here

Since I don’t expect people to always read when something is linked, even when they absolutely should do so if they have even a passing interest in actually understanding the situation they are talking about (let alone talking as if they have the solution, lol) I am going to paste another piece from the write-up that I linked and suggested you read in my last comment. It puts the lie to your insistence that a Palestinian state (which is the only way forward that is congruent with both justice and long-term peace) would also necessitate another genocide.

Everything below is from: https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/the-two-state-solution-is-the-only-way-forward/

These anxieties are not unique to Jewish Israelis, settlers in many different colonies throughout history have echoed these same sentiments. If we were to take a look at the narrative surrounding anti-Apartheid South Africa activism and boycotts, we would find eerily similar projections and arguments.

For example, In an article for the Globe and Mail under the title “The good side of white South Africa” Kenneth Walker argued that ending the Apartheid system and giving everyone an equal vote would be a “a recipe for slaughter in South Africa”. Others, such as Shingler, echoed similar claims, saying that anti-racist activists were actually not interested in ending Apartheid as a policy, but in South Africa as a society. Others came out to claim these activists were actually motivated by “anti-white racism”, fueled by “Black imperialism”. Political comics displayed a giant soviet bear, bearing down on South Africa declaring “We shall drive South Africa into the Sea!”

Sound familiar?

Yet even when it is rarely acknowledged that Palestinian refugees were wronged, and deserve to return home, the refrain is that while it is tragic, it is the only way to keep the Jewish people safe. Once again, this pretense is hardly unique to Jewish Israelis, as a matter of fact, similar arguments were used against the abolition of slavery in the United States. For example, Thomas Jefferson likened slavery to a wolf:

“we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”

How utterly ridiculous this all sounds now.

While the first approach is crude and vile propaganda, designed to instigate fear and panic, it is par for the course for settler societies. Perhaps the second approach stands out a little bit more for its brazen attempt at manipulation. In a final endeavor to center their experiences and erase their victims, settlers frame themselves as the stars of their own tragedy, in the end they were the tragic victims of fate, forced to wield injustice for the sake of self-preservation.

Underlying the logic of both of these approaches are racist assumptions that the colonized are barbaric, bloodthirsty and ruthless. It is a deeply dehumanizing logic, steeped in every colonial and Orientalist trope. The idea that a decolonized, free Palestine would inevitably lead to genocide comes from this same logic. As a matter of fact, for all the claims of the Palestinians wanting to push Israelis into the sea, only the opposite has occurred in reality.

Regardless of your ideological leanings, the reality is that we are already living under a de facto one-state reality. Israeli politicians proudly boast about never allowing a Palestinian state to materialize. Israeli school books already erase the green line. Israel already rules the lives of everyone there. Palestinians calling for the dissolution of this naked colonialism is legitimate and just. The fact that Palestinians are even asked to guarantee the well-being and welfare of their oppressors as they are killed, imprisoned and brutally repressed daily is a testament to their utter dehumanization.

Removing the Israeli state “from the river to the sea” as you say, would mean another genocide.

No it fucking wouldn’t. Completely dismantling the STATE of Israel, a terroristic settler-colonizer project, would not necessitate a genocide in any way and by pretending it does, you’re doing the propaganda work for the actual genocidaires.

I guess at the end of the day, it’s always ok to commit a genocide, but only if it’s your side committing it, eh?

Stfu with your false equivalency bullshit. Let’s use the stolen house analogy that was used elsewhere in this thread because it is apt. If a group of armed assholes comes into your house and starts killing off your family, claiming your house as their own, your doing everything within your power to get them back out of your house is not committing a crime at all, let alone one that is equivalent to the crime they are currently perpetrating against you.

The real solution is to create two states, one for the Jews, one for the Palestinians, create a well-defined border

Consider again the analogy above and ask yourself if the real solution is letting those who came in your house and killed your family have their own kitchenette, bathrooms, and bedrooms in your house, just with new walls. When they’ve been saying the whole time (as they were killing your family) that that’s all they actually wanted to do.

The following is from: https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/the-two-state-solution-is-the-only-way-forward/ which you should read in full.

Is the two-state solution the only viable solution?

Viable for whom and for what?

The two-state solution is inadequate to right historical wrongs, as it focuses on the pre-1967 borders as a starting point, which are in themselves a product of the colonization of Palestine, and not the root cause of it. It is thus preoccupied with finding solutions to symptoms, rather than dare address the root cause, which is Zionist settler colonialism and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

This automatically means that Palestinians must relinquish any rights or hopes for their millions of refugees, and it also means that Palestinians must relinquish their rights to live in over 80% of the land they were ethnically cleansed from. Consequently, resource distribution, from water to fertile land, will be heavily stacked in Israel’s favor.

Shortly put, the two-state solution is more interested in maintaining Israel’s colonial gains and artificial demographic aspirations, and lending them legitimacy, rather than seeking justice for the Palestinians in any form.

You should really go ahead and read the other myths discussed there too.

stop it with the holy wars, stop it with the persecutions, stop it with the genocides, stop it with the forced resettlement, stop it with terror attacks, stop it with the bombings

Only one “side” is doing all that and is the only one that has the power to immediately stop doing all of that. Instead, it keeps doing all of that. I wonder why it hasn’t stopped.

and stop it with religions altogether.

Seriously? You are a clown. And I say that as an atheist myself.

Everyone has the right to live, so just live and let live

Oh, just give peace a chance, right? My god liberals are so fucking vapid. This is not a situation with two sides of equivalent means and committing equivalent atrocities with an equivalent power to stop the violence. It is extremely asymmetric in every sense, including the fact that one side is currently conducting an open genocide against the other which is disproportionately made up of children. I would guarantee that most of the Palestinian people would do just about anything to be able to live and let live but Israel will not have that - they never have and they never will, which is the nature of all settler-colonial projects which you clearly don’t understand.

Actually, I will die by your side on that hill, or at least put in a good effort before retreating. The main reason I was repeating how the writing was poor is because the book gets held up as like this literary masterpiece since it’s taught in schools and is on every single list of “books you must read before you die.” Of course the reason it’s taught in school is largely about propaganda, not literary genius, but the people who love it will talk about it like it’s barely a step down from Shakespeare, even though a lot of the writing is objectively cringe. Like I just read the hero’s opening description as having “ruggedly handsome features.” But I agree, it’s really good at what it does well. I think in most cases and in most spaces, it should be shit on and taken down a peg because it doesn’t deserve its common position as being this great masterpiece, but the other side of that coin is that it’s an entertaining and effective book, certainly not trash simply by virtue of how it gets used to serve a reactionary agenda.

Forgive me for posting the same comment twice, but since I just was talking about 1984 in this thread, I’ll say here as well that I don’t think you should be ashamed for enjoying multiple reads of it. I harp on how bad the writing was, but honestly it was… passable. But more importantly, I would argue that that book really did capture some important concepts and feelings and fears that were floating around. It’s just that it was written by a hardcore liberal at heart who just had to fucking blame communism instead of taking the accurate path and blaming capitalism and imperialism. Anyway… what I just posted in another comment:

It’s not even that 1984 was a terrible book. It is rather poorly written by an author who was kinda a shit writer, but the dude did capture a certain important and lasting zeitgeist. He did identify an undercurrent of fear, a very valid fear, that permeated culture. The problem was that he misidentified the direction where the fear was coming from, the systems it was actually bubbling up from were the capitalist systems. But commies were both easy and profitable to make the enemies. The source was the society he actually knew better and mostly lived in, but he had witnessed other systems and wanted to project all the negativity onto the socialist systems that, again, benefited him to badmouth. His book could have been still a poorly written but interestingly prescient warning of capitalism, what it was what it was becoming (and what it is), and some of the extremes trends towards… That’s what could have been if he had correctly attributed the dystopian elements as being rooted in capitalism instead of communism. Also, even thought he may not have been a great writer in general, he was good with using phrases that fit well in the milieu at the time and continue to. Like “thought police” and “Doublethink” and “Newspeak” and “memory hole.” “Big Brother is watching.” “We’ve always been at war with East Oceania.” Bunch of others. There is a reason that shit stuck around, reason that goes beyond just the fact that the capitalists blew it up and made it popular, this otherwise mediocre book they held up for its usefulness in propaganda as some great bulwark against the terrors of communism. Really a tragedy that Orwell was a fucking rat-narc liberal coward.

1984

It’s not even that 1984 was a terrible book. It is rather poorly written by an author who was kinda a shit writer, but the dude did capture a certain important and lasting zeitgeist. He did identify an undercurrent of fear, a very valid fear, that permeated culture. The problem was that he misidentified the direction where the fear was coming from, the systems it was actually bubbling up from were the capitalist systems. But commies were both easy and profitable to make the enemies. The source was the society he actually knew better and mostly lived in, but he had witnessed other systems and wanted to project all the negativity onto the socialist systems that, again, benefited him to badmouth. His book could have been still a poorly written but interestingly prescient warning of capitalism, what it was what it was becoming (and what it is), and some of the extremes trends towards… That’s what could have been if he had correctly attributed the dystopian elements as being rooted in capitalism instead of communism. Also, even thought he may not have been a great writer in general, he was good with using phrases that fit well in the milieu at the time and continue to. Like “thought police” and “Doublethink” and “Newspeak” and “memory hole.” “Big Brother is watching.” “We’ve always been at war with East Oceania.” Bunch of others. There is a reason that shit stuck around, reason that goes beyond just the fact that the capitalists blew it up and made it popular, this otherwise mediocre book they held up for its usefulness in propaganda as some great bulwark against the terrors of communism. Really a tragedy that Orwell was a fucking rat-narc liberal coward.