-7DeadlyFetishesFascisms
I spent a lot of time adding that spider head to hexbear. Gotta use it every chance I get!
Lmao it's wild that on a Communist forum, the position "carrying out genocide is never acceptable" is controversial.
But what if it's genocide, cept only feet...haha...just imagine...:squidward-nervous:
"A struggle session"
"A struggle session? on the internet? located entirely on my leftist forum?"
"yes"
what is this weird obsession with attacking another poster lol. the power of the state can force it’s subjects to fight it’s imperial wars, this is seen literally throughout history
yes there is no analysis or nuance needed of why someone would commit atrocities ,follow draft orders. i view history as something happened and there is no more analysis beyond that.
for fucks sake this is literally a marxist website cmon :what:
you can understand as a victim hating the actions of a person while also understanding material reasons for why they committed their actions. like rehabilitation is a thing for the worst of society ex. murderers and rapists. victims have forgiven such acts before, not that they are obligated to or should
No one is saying there’s zero nuance. We are saying you start from a position of anti-imperialism and condemning genocide.
Understanding how people are systemically funneled into fascism is important to combatting it. It does not absolve a person of having committed atrocities.
Rehabilitation is important. It comes from a place of first acknowledging the evil a person has done.
victims have forgiven such acts before
When the predator admits guilt and asks for forgiveness. It’s also the victim’s choice whether they accept.
?
Oh you asked me to not reply in a different comment. Okay then.
You don't understand! They might have had to experience poverty like those subhumans they genocided!
are you ok? Like you replied to 4 of my comments and seem to not understand anything I’m saying.
:wtf-am-i-reading:
we can understand the reasons someone commits atrocities, understand that the economic factors that lead up to it, and still understand that they're fascists who must be fought, god damn.
you're up and down this thread arguing that we should forgive genocidiers because of the reasons they had to commit or abet atrocities. no one is saying slaughter them. but neither can they simply be forgiven for what they did. rehabilitation and restitution require so much more than merely saying "I see the economic factors that forced your hand". you're engaging in apologia.
i have not argued that we should forgive genociders, if i did feel free to copy and paste where i did. my point should be clear from my recent comments
The vast majority of troops in Vietnam volunteered to commit genocide.
Every single one of them could've taken a prison sentence, where they would not die, would not commit genocide, and would not see their friends die.
They went there because they are vermin Americans, and, like you, consider foreigners subhumans and their deaths an acceptable price.
You don’t understand, no one at the time could have possibly resisted the vietnam war.
I wonder if there was some kind of famous athlete who sacrificed his career so as not to go do some genocide.
Yes, liberals have a long history of co-opting words that have meaning. Proud of you bud. :headpat:
You’re literally repeating militarist revisionary talking points. The claim that the majority of combat troops in Vietnam were volunteers is an incredible distortion to present the draft as less unpopular/significant than it actually was. If you follow up on those claims you’ll find that 2.2 million of the 2.5 million were drafted, many of them only volunteering AFTER they received notice to try and avoid infantry which is reinterpreted as a volunteer in order to ignore the coercion present there. Please don’t repeat right wing bullshit.
Do you have a source for this? I'm not finding a lot of info that confirms it.
http://michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu/antivietnamwar/exhibits/show/exhibit/draft_protests/the-military-draft-during-the-
Top search result while I’m at work, I can get other sources w/o difficulty.
Obsession is when this site dunks on someone banned for defending nazis. Thank you fed, very cool.
:marx-ok:
I had family who died in the holocaust. I had other family who refused to fight in any of America's imperialist wars and paid for it. I don't have a lot of patience for anyone trying to absolve nazis of their guilt or claim it was impossible to resist the draft.
most people can not “pay for it” most can’t flee to another country or be thrown in jail for 5 years and then be released into homelessness and poverty. this is the 60s we are talking about lol. I’m glad your family was class conscious/anti-imperialist but a large majority of Americans are not/were not.
Honestly it wasn’t even 5 years, I just rolled with that number because he pulled it out of his ass. More like 2-3 tops.
Anyway, there were tons of people in the 60’s who fought back and resisted the Vietnam war. My family weren’t an outlier.
Homelessness and poverty is such a strange assumption about what happened to draft dodgers, especially given what happened to vets when they came back.
I’m glad your family was class conscious/anti-imperialist but a large majority of Americans are not/were not.
And? The imperial machine marches on whether or not imperial subjects choose to recognize it. Imperialists who commit atrocities can't just get a blanket pardon because they didn't know better
I’m not saying blanket pardon, I’m not even saying forgiveness, I’m simply talking about analyzing the material / societal reasons. unless you believe people are just evil and like doing evil it seems like the “normal” take leftists should have lol
Nobody is arguing that we shouldn't do that.
Analyzing the material reasons people do what they do is good. Recognizing the systemic factors that lead imperialists to project imperialism is something that we should do. But that doesn't mean treating imperialists with these uwu kid gloves, especially when they haven't deprogrammed.
Oh well if the genociders might have had to experience poverty if they didn't commit genocide, that's hunky-dory! I wonder if the people they were genociding ever experienced poverty or homelessness. 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
Are you saying fighting for imperialists (or less charitably, commiting genocide) is preferable to prison?
I'm saying from a person in the 60s pov yes. You have been force-fed American exceptionalism and anti-communism from the cradle, of course, you should fight those dirty commies. (although only 1 out of 7 draftees was in combat) But the alternative is if you don't have a family to fall back on you lose everything(job, car, house if you have one), have a criminal record, and have spent a prolonged period of time in an American prison, an institution that is proven to turn 1st-time offenders into repeat and more violent offenders. or you have enough money to go to another country/have a good enough education to get into college (during this time a huge % of people, especially in the midwest did not finish high school)
i think my main point is there is a reason the draft worked in the 60s and early 70s, but we wouldn't dream of it being attempted today; less dissenting news against US imperial interests, a lack of a real existential threat (china/sinophobia is like 1% of what the population thought of Russia. side note for example my father/mother and most everyone they went to school with 100% believed that nuclear war was going to happen, it was a fact of life) and a lack of understanding of how awful the war was until later into the conflict. Today day 1 we would see pictures of soldiers getting blown the fuck up/mass refusal to report if you got drafted also inpart due to a cultural shift towards anti-war among younger people.
like 5 years and a 25k (200k adj. for inflation) fine or have a 6 in 7 shot of never seeing combat for 2 years then returning with GI bill benefits + pay. It is understandable to me why some took the state's offer. That does not mean it is GOOD, or ABSOLVES THEM OF WAR CRIMES, it means i can see why,at the time, draftees did not see themselves as the modern-day wehrmacht
I mean, the same logic works for the Wehrmacht itself. There were a good six years between the Nazis taking power and the invasion of Poland. Plenty of time for propaganda pushing on top of the resentment from losing WWI. Nobody sees themselves as evil.
Like, if you want to go full materialist and say everyone is a product of their times then sure, but that line of thought is really only suited to historical research. It doesn't serve a purpose politically other than to absolve those people of any crimes they committed, and since that doesn't seem to be what you're going for, it's kind of a weird argument to make on a leftist politics website.
you’ve been tagging him and attacking him since like 1am
Oh come on now, we both know I had a good night's rest and woke up to wonderful news!
7df is not the enemy, he is simply posting a take that is “people more often than not choose the path of least resistance”
Umm that wasn’t what he argued.
The path of least resistance is going to prison where you won't die. It's objectively safer and easier than going to war.
They volunteered to go because, like you, they see foreigners as subhumans.
American prisons in the 60s were not objectively safe as you seem to deem, especially if you weren't white
like empires have conscripted soldiers against their will for thousands of years
You are right, and throughout that time, people have come together and rebelled against it.
If you don't attempt draft dodging, you're technically worse than Trump lol
The people who were drafted to work the concentration camps during WWII knew what they did was fucked up, why do you think most concentration camp workers after being caught apoligize for their crimes and ask for forgivness? You don’t do that if you were proud of your work or believed the fascist project. Once again, not all Germans were Heinrich fucking Himmler, they were coerced through the violence of the state and had their literal livelyhoods on the line to run the german war machine, and though they have been victims to this system, we still activly pursue these individuals to seek justice years after the fact.
No Nazi was drafted for the concentration camps, they literally did if for extra pay. Even if they had been "conscripted", they would still be fucking monsters.
That's how it was for Wehrmacht atrocities in general too: even when there were orders there was no formal coercion to actually commit them, the soldiers just said "oh ok" and did them even when they weren't leaping to do them of their own initiative. Like there's so much propaganda trying to distance the Wehrmacht from the Nazis or paint them as victims (because the US immediately pivoted to restoring less notorious Nazi officials to power and trying to fold as much of the remaining Wehrmacht into NATO as possible) when the truth is they were willing, active participants in the Nazis' crimes as well as taking the initiative and committing their own crimes as well.
Not only that, but nobody batted an eye if the soldiers didn't just say "oh ok". The nazis were self-aware enough to know they were doing absolutely ghoulish things that were downright impossible to carry out for most people, there's a Himmler speech he held in front of SS members where he goes through this extensively, praising his underlings for their fortitude while facing thousands of dead bodies. That just wasn't expected of common grunts who wouldn't have been there without the draft.
Exactly. At most there was peer-pressure/guilt-tripping about it, and I know volumes have been written about that.
Although as an aside, I'm curious how well explored the sort of... oh I don't even know the right word, the contrast I guess between the Nazis acknowledging the horror of everything they were doing and the damage that dealt to the individuals actually carrying it out, and the way that they celebrated that, as well as how that ties into the broader warrior-death-cult thing of fascism. That is to say, the way Fascism as a whole idealizes and romanticizes a warrior's death, a sort of self-sacrifice in the name of violence itself. Does their recognition and celebration of the damage caused to the self by committing violence tie into that, or is their whole death cult too incoherent and self-serving to draw any clear parallels? I don't think I'm articulating this right, but I'm not entirely sure how to do so better: it's just this whole romanticization of "shouldering burdens (by committing atrocities)" or "making hard choices" at great cost to the self seems to be a broader facet of Fascist thinking as well, part of their aesthetics of warriors suffering, dying, and triumphing in redemptive violence that is almost as much an end in itself as a means to some other end.
From what i know about Himmler himself, who's basically the prototypical neurotic-esoteric SS :le-pol-face: , there was both a lionization of becoming desensitized to violence and a downplaying of how emotionally stunted that makes people. Like, he took a lot of inspiration from zen bhuddism of all things, of mental techniques the zen monks developed to blank your mind and weather everything the world throws at you, and tried to apply that specifically to become more capable of doing unspeakable things. That's actually where the phrase zen fascist (as in the Dead Kennedys California Über Alles) comes from. At the same time, he praised the people who carried out his orders for mass murder as "having retained their humanity". I don't know if he actually believed that load of horseshit himself, but there was definitely cope going on to maintain a self-image of "good guys who did what was necessary", as absurd as that sounds. The nazi death cult rested on the assumption of being the hero, not the villain. They seriously didn't get that they were the bad guys, just as today's fascists thing that we're the baddies.
I sincerly doubt people were lining up at the ready to dig mass graves for jewish people or gun down innoncent civilians in Mai lai
was the gold for me. yes, they literally were, that's why we oppose the fascist war machine and imperialism, because this shit is evil
well it's even worse case they weren't digging those graves, they were making jewish groups do it and also shot them last
As a former imperial troop... I don't remember all of the citizens of Nazi Germany being marched into gas chambers after the USSR liberated Germany. It wouldn't surprise me if there were far more Nazi troops immediately executed during the liberation, but I also don't remember the entirety of the Nazi military being fed into wood chippers.
So yeah, as a dumbshit poor white trash 17 year old who signed up through the delayed entry program, I kinda have to support the "treat us as the Nazi's were treated for their genocide" mindset.
I mean yeah. Communists aren't nazis. The USSR conducted extensive background checks on the soldiers of the nazi military to prosecute any war criminals for their crimes against humanity.
This isn't saying there's a clean nor permanently stained German military - it was shades on the slider. An example of this was that during the nazi campaign east in the "liebensraum" phase there were both SS and general army battalions engaged in genocide of entire villages. There was also a few battalions that either did not participate ( their commanders actually had a moral backbone). The Soviet investigation into nazi warcrimes would gather evidence of either case and make a judgment to either prosecute the soldiers involved or pardon them.
A more contemporary version would be looking into the service history of soldiers and seeing what careers they lead and their political associations are. An infantryman that was stationed in FOB bumfucksville Valley, Iraq where the most illegal thing he did was drink bootleg rotgut and work out the entire time and has no political associations as a dumb boot that checked out of politics to watch his team on Sundays would be considered pardonable whereas the logistics guy that spent his entire career counting the grooves on rifle handgrips and giving briefings to dipshit officers on the importance of not loosing equipment but has right-militia associations and is suspected of smuggling military equipment out to them would face further investigation and possibly prison if not execution depending on circumstances.
Making sweeping condemnations or pardons is not the communist way. Scientific examination of the evidence on all issues is.
the logistics guy that spent his entire career counting the grooves on rifle handgrips and giving briefings to dipshit officers on the importance of not loosing equipment but has right-militia associations and is suspected of smuggling military equipment out to them
Sgt. Contreras of the NCR
Lmao his wiki entry bruh.
Also for real though there's actually soldiers in military logistics doing this for reals and it legit scares the shit out of me .
And I can say for a fact I never mentioned nazi battalion commanders. You and that 2 day sus account are, intentionally or not, misinterpreting my phrasing and making assumptions based on thosr misinterpretions. And if that is the case then I apologize for not making a clear distinction in my sentence.
Back to the topic itself, field commanders that did not participate in the eastern genocide, ranging from polish repressions, to the Belarusian "village relocating", and so forth, belonged, insofar as I am aware, to the German army command structure, and not the parallel nazi party paramilitary SS command structure. This was to illustrate that regardless of the fact the entire organization of the German army followed the nazi party's orders eastwards and participated and even reveled in the genocidal project the fascists were orchestrating, after the war was won careful examinations in the records of the surviving German military to properly judge and prosecute the war criminals and fascists on the basis of their crimes against the Soviet people. An example of sorting out said war criminals from the general soldiery would be as listed above.
I'll wrap this up by saying if you continue to ignore the overall bulk of my writing on the topic and focus on the misunderstanding after I, hopefully, corrected the misunderstanding then I'll have to interpret any further conversation as being in complete bad faith and I'll have to ask you to disengage in this conversation. I genuinely hope it doesn't come to this.
It's alright, as long as we correct misunderstandings I can't hold it against anyone for getting tilted at me getting tilted over tilted shit
Because there weren't any nazi commanders. There were German army commanders, yet those were few and far between and often purged for their humanity.
Edit: wait I'm not even talking about army commanders, aka the big beautiful generals :trump-anguish: but about battalion commanders! Whole different meaning there since army commanders are strategic level officers that engage in more political fighting than frontline fighting whereas battalion commanders are the last officer grade that engages in frontline fighting and is generally less politically involved (unless they're jockeying for a promotion). Was this entire thread the culmination of a misunderstanding of military organizing? Probably lol
2 day account trying to say how things are done around here :lmayo:
If you can't accept the historical fact that the Soviet Union didn't mass execute the entire German military after they liberated east Germany and instead engaged in a scientific effort to sort out the war criminals and fascists from the rest of the military to face execution, and that we should follow their example - all I can say is you're a fucking ultra.
Being a willing commander ,and too a lesser extend grunt ,on a genocidal and enslavement against an entire race of people war of aggression 2000 miles from home while civilian holocaust of tens of millions of people is happening around you perpetrated by 95% of your brothers in arms makes you indeed permanently stained and unclean. You dont have to rape women or execute every civilian you see.
There where shades on a slider but even in the outmost edges of it there certainly werent "clean" whermacht soldiers and commanders "with moral backbones". Shades still started with almost black into pitch ,zero photon reflecting, black
Uh huh, I really don't give a shit about this continual moral harping on over the fucking army of nazi germany.
I've made my point over and over that this is a discussion over how the Soviet union, after they liberated east germany, processed the surrendered German army to filter out war criminals and fascists from among their ranks in order to demoralize and reintegrate them without having to worry about a fascist uprising after the war with the above example as being a possible gauge for execution, imprisonment, reeducation, or reintegration.
If you want to discuss that then I'm down, but if you're going to try to argue about what shade of vanta or coal or super or soot black you think best suits the nazis, then go argue with someone else.
:07: for coming around and winding up on the right side of things.
I didn't enlist out of some patriotic duty or something, I was just poor and terrified about not being able to pay for college.
The Army experience was both horribly disappointing and enlightening in a bunch of different ways though.
In Palestine and Israel, the tendency for former IDF members to grandstand about their traumas and regrets is called "shoot and cry"
It's to mock how many seemingly Palestine-sympathetic Israelis want therapy more than real justice.
The Soviets killed a bunch of Nazi soldiers after they were captured (fucking good) and put a lot more into their gulag system for 4-10 years where they either died or ended up reeducated. Nazi soldiers were not treated well, though said Nazis were trying to genocide all kinds of groups, including settler-colonizing Russia, and burned, raped, and pillaged their way to Stalingrad, so I'm not going to cry over them under any circumstances.
I've been reading up on the early days of the DDR military, and a lot of captured Wehrmacht got reeducated and made emergency police in the occupation zones while things got sorted. Like the Soviets showed mercy to nazi pawns more than I would be willing to.
Like Alaskaball pointed out extreme background checks on all US soldiers, draft or not, seeing the actively participated in war crimes and crimes against humanity in any and all of the past and present US wars and punishment accordingly should be the way. For the rest radicalization/re-education till they can recognize the error of their involvement and then actively being comrades is a good line to draw
This is better executed the closer to us the conflict is. For lets say Vietnam we cant do any such thing at this point but when talking active boots on the ground we do know that a a big chunk, likely a majority was involved in crimes against humanity and war crimes one way or another. And we do know that the vast vast vast majority doesnt regret em or has reconsidered and is proud , hell a big majority % of em voted for Trump and supported every subsequent war. So in this sense treating Vietnam vets as you would have treated nazi soldiers will have you be correct more than often than not
As a former troop… I struggle immensely with this. Yes of course our actions in places like Vietnam were genocide and cleansing. But the framing/lying about these actions and the brainwashing of soldiers leaves me confused. Maybe it is because I went through it and have seen how/why people join in the first place, and even I had no idea the magnitude of my actions until years after, and I still struggle immensely to the point of 3 suicide attempts.
How do we know if troops are redeemed? Can we fully be? I try to do work in a communist party here and work within the veterans commission to reach out to others, but is there a point sometimes?
Of course there will be veterans who do see the error of their ways and do become active comrades. And you are. But as far as the general approach ,rhetoric and mindset of the movement regarding any and all active or former boots on the ground troops goes, it shouldnt be one of not highlighting and prioritizing their participatation in war crimes and crimes against humanity. The feelings,experiences and outlook of the hundreds of millions of victims of the actions that group has been the perpetrator off on the ground shapes the worldwide proletarian movement , even if the end result are the baseline being hate and rejecting those active or former troops . Exactly just as the feelings of the black,poor and indigenous victims of a police state domesticaly in the US and in every country unavoidably shapes the outlook and extremely slim margins of "acceptance" of these movements for active and former cops.
Also former troop here. I find it difficult to look back on the decision to join and judge myself too harshly just for the fact that I'm not sure how else I would have known it was a terrible idea without the benefit of hindsight. I joined shortly after 9/11 and genuinely thought it was a noble thing with the knowledge I had at the time. Once I did realize it was a huge mistake, I ended up getting myself booted out and have zero regrets about that of course. Not sure if you see it the same way, but I feel like there's kind of a weird American thing to reduce "the troops" to a political symbol so that people tend to paint every single one as either a hero or war criminal based only on what they represent, as opposed to how an individual decided on a course of action with the knowledge and experience they have when confronted with a moral/ethical choice. This, imo is really what we should be concerned with, and if there are regrets for decisions based on a genuine lack of understanding, all you can really do is process what you've learned and use it to make better decisions going forward and this really goes for anything in life.
Reading over this again, it might be just a more convoluted version of what Skoubalon said, but I hope it's helpful and makes some sense.
Also, related, I feel like we (leftist vets) could do a lot of good with the knowledge and experience we have as far as countering the propaganda that once convinced us, and this includes going after recruiters on social media. I have some ideas on this if you ever want to discuss.
I feel like we (leftist vets) could do a lot of good with the knowledge and experience we have as far as countering the propaganda that once convinced us
That's why I admire the folks on the What A Hell Of A Way To Die podcast, their primary intent is to convince people not to join the military. That said I'm sure you have some other knowledge and experience that might be useful in the coming years.
I’ve heard of that podcast but never really listened to it. I’ll have to check that out. Seems like exactly the kind of thing I’d be into.
That said I’m sure you have some other knowledge and experience that might be useful in the coming years.
The most useful knowledge I have honestly is the kind of fun stuff I like to post in the diy comm.
Yeah I posted some diy stuff back when the site* was first starting out I should get back on that, also reminder that most of our military training material is available free online because it is publicly funded and a lot of it has practical applications outside war/combat.
let's not forget the bolsheviks were radicalised at the front (i'm talking rank and file not leaders), obviously if you were not drafted there will always be that confusion but think proactively, to avoid another 1919 in Germany and that should be more than enouh cosmic redemption
There is a point in your case, but none at all in doing Nazi apologia and calling opposition to that "tryhard". If you called people who refused to join the military when you did tryhards even after you knew it was wrong, that would be a different story entirely. SDF refused to self-crit, you are here BECAUSE you self-crit
Reminds me of leftists getting their heads spun around on the term "Police Union".
Boy I sure do love my local pipefitters union refusing to get vaxxed and voting for Trump
Wasn't there a big struggle session over unions? Memory is hazy on that.
lol this is great. Uncritical support for comrade @Brak in the posting wars.
There really are people in this community ,and much more in the general american "left", that would treat former boots on the ground Iraq or Vietnam troops differently than they would treat former on the ground IDF soldiers....
also the poverty thing is rarely true. The background demographics of the troops are indistinguishable from cops. People with low income , let alone poverty backgrounds arent a large part of active troops, nor overrepresented. The choice for 95%+ of the troops was never even close to "enlist or poverty and homelessness"
A good episode of Lions Led By Donkeys that's relevant to this whole discussion The Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht
If you shot the Kenosha Killer nothing would measurably improve. If you shot PFC Shithead nothing would measurably improve.
Vietnam I'd have some sympathy due to the draft. Anyone who signed up for Iraq is worse than the IDF, and the ones who did it for "free college" are just as bad (if not worse) than the bloodthirsty psycho Chuds.
It's always a treat when long time posters out themselves though.
7DF outed himself like 500 times, this was hardly ground breaking tbh. I know he was banned from some comms already before this
It always seems silly to me when people just get banned from a comm, like they're going to go elsewhere and keep melting down, it's best just to do away with them.
Depends on the comm, I think a lot of people have been banned from the vegan comm that aren't in any way reactionary
Nah I mean it's understandable to ban people from comms for comm specific rules like "no omnis" in the vegan comm, my point was more that getting banned from c/vegan for something comm-specific doesn't warrant a ban from the rest of the site
I like vegan because they give cool recipies about beans :cool-bean:
That's true. It seems like a lot of people wander over there looking for a fight though, but I wouldn't really know because I'm not subbed to it.
It's easy enough to wander in there if you're not filtering by subscribed, I learned my lesson and only filter by subbed now since the whole VCJ fiasco
I mean it makes sense for people to be banned from stuff like the vegan or Christian comms if they're not part of that group and they keep butting in unnecessarily. Or to be banned from news for posting fake news/bits/memes
the problem is we have little to no active site mods, so sure your neighbourhood comm mod will do it, but then nobody else is around to clean this shit up and make the call when to yeet fuckers
It works almost like a temp ban or warning ban. I kinda like it.
Lib: "Social imperialists don't exist"
7DF: "Hold my callipers, I'm going to heil."
i avoid situations like this by simply not defending the nazis who carried out the holocaust.
Sorry, that is not a 'let me educate you' take. Also dude has been around leftist spaces for a long fucking time, he should know better.
Once again, the Vietnam take, eh, lukewarm bad but pretty expected to come up from westerners, whatever. Defending concentration camp guards however is fucking :gulag:
And like, y'know, they're Nazis. They also factually were not conscripted to work concentration camps, they got a bigger pay check for it and people volunteered. Leftists doing clean wermecht is a big no for me
"Nazis didn’t choose to do it” is like a super common take in :amerikkka:
I've only ever heard that coming from conservatives and cryptofash, but maybe I've just been lucky.
Good thing the stakes here are so low they can learn from it!
I avoid situations like this by simply having the worst posts imaginable but wording them in a way that makes BMF look sane
web forum with a userbase that originated on reddit unable to foster healthy disagreement, becomes pure self-gratification and reposts from /r/latestagecapitalism
