because god knows this struggle session needs more takes, here I go:
These people were completely brainwashed. They were used. We all agree here that the United States has the most powerful propaganda apparatus in the world, and we all agree that nobody is immune to propaganda, so then how can we blame kids for not being immune to the strongest propaganda in the world? This shit literally runs so deep and works so well that you can take a human being - the same blueprint as you and I - and convince it that other human beings must die on sight by the thousands. These people have been completely scrambled and ruined by the bourgeoisie military state and what they need is repair.
To act as if you are better than some kid who gets tricked into rolling around in a Humvee shooting people they've never met; to act as if you wouldn't have done the same in exactly the same material circumstances, is to claim that you are genetically superior. The system is broken, exactly 0 of these kids would have been murderers in hypothetical FALC. All we can do is appeal to them to join our cause and stop destroying humanity and the world, and if they don't want to join, well, that's really sad. I'm sorry they got fucked up like that. *Of course, most of them shouldn't even be considered as acceptable to join our cause, because they have had their humanity mutilated by the most evil state to have ever existed, but if there is evidence that they are saveable, then maybe if any of us has the stomach for it it's worth the rehabilitation.
e: let me frame it as a thought experiment. Say you've got a machine, the Human Ruiner 9000. People keep getting blackbagged and thrown in the machine. What comes out are barely human anymore: these people are near soulless and have a hard time interacting with many or most normal people, possibly forever. We all should agree that the machine is the main evil here, not the people, right? And if someone happens to come out of the machine, as fucked up and damaged as they are, and say "fuck that machine, we need to destroy it", should we focus our energy on destroying them? These people will need aggressive rehabilitative labor, psychologically and emotionally, possibly for years, and that labor may be dangerous work in some cases, but performing that labor, in my mind, is a preferable choice to spending energy and time fighting the person instead of the machine.
e2: for what it's worth, I also entirely 100% agree with badempanada here, no buts. I just think it's maybe sometimes worth it to try for that rehabilitative process, and also we should put more focus on what made them this way - emotionally mutilated veterans (all veterans) are a symptom.
Hell yeah, ACAB is unequivocally true, but also they're bastards because they're cops. If they just stopped being cops then they're on track to stopping being bastards too. Same exact thing goes for troops. It's a long process to undo all of that evil but there is such a process.
They're basically in the same bin. They're both causing irreversible harm, they're both bastards, the world would be a better place without either of them. But they're both, in the lucky cases, rehabilitatible, they both started as innocent children, they were both ruined by an evil state apparatus and essentially possessed for the purposes of evil and harm, and most importantly, they are both symptoms of an underlying disease more than they are the problem themselves. Take any future cop or troop from their cradle and raise them up in Lenin's Russia and they would likely be just as good of communists as their peers.
Okay, that clears it up. I will ask the big question:
Do you believe there is there such thing as a blameworthy individual? Everyone begins as an innocent child and is shaped by circumstances that can lead them to act in certain ways.
Ultimately, even the most racist, horrible mass killer was taught the concept of racism by someone else. Hitler himself was shaped by the ideas that came before him.
In your opinion, at what point do we stop blaming society, and start blaming the individual?
Literally everyone is a product of their environment. So I guess in that regard there's no such thing as a blameworthy individual. If we believe we are products of our environment, we have to actually believe that.
Do I believe that there are people who need to be [redacted]? Hell yeah, lots of them. It's sad that things got this way but sometimes the immediate end to the harm caused by an individual is worth more than their ultimate triumph over their brainworms. Lots of veterans probably fall in this category. I view this as the ultimate and only possible conclusion of embracing historical materialism over great man theory.
I would hesitate to wed socialist thought to determinism. Marx wasn't a determinist and material relations is not the same thing as a lack of free will. Engels was a capitalist and betrayed his class, after all.
I would reject this position as I cannot believe in the morality of harming a blameless person. To me, it would be like executing a mentally ill person. If noone is in control of their actions, then there cannot be punishment for behavior of any sort. It would be horrific to punish someone for behavior they had no control over.
I have some reading on this subject I'll share here: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/molyneux/1995/xx/determin.htm
Full disclosure, I haven't read this, I'm too busy fielding other replies, but one question on this - is there some other factor besides lived experience/material conditions that makes a person more or less likely to make "evil" decisions? If so, do you have any idea what that might be?
thanks for believing that I'm engaging in good faith btw you're making me think and I appreciate you :meow-hug:
I would reject this position as I cannot believe in the morality of harming a blameless person. To me, it would be like executing a mentally ill person. If noone is in control of their actions, then there cannot be punishment for behavior of any sort. It would be horrific to punish someone for behavior they had no control over.
:side-eye-1: :side-eye-2:
That sounds pretty correct to me. Punishment is just unnecessary suffering on top of unnecessary suffering.
Why must it be necessary for punishment to be morally justified? Is there some other thing that exists that makes it so that absolutely must be true, other than vague collective opinion?
Yeah, I mean, my biggest "die on this hill" take is that retributive justice is bad. Period. I'm an absolutist about it. I think there are situations where violence is necessary obviously. Sometimes you have to execute someone, in a revolutionary situation, for practical reasons. But I'm against it for retributive reasons.
The example I always use because its fairly extreme, is that like, if world revolution happened somehow and Obama waited out the whole thing in a bunker, and he was still alive after the revolution was finished and secured. And then the leaders of the revolution met to discuss his fate. And I was there (I wouldn't be a leader of the revolution lol, I'd be taking care of the kids, but just for thought experiments sake I guess) I would advocate against executing him. I'd suggest whatever form of restorative justice we could actually accomplish, but mostly just... leaving him alone in a comfortable but not luxurious place mostly separate from society. I would see executing him after he ceases to be a danger to the revolution as retributive, and thus pointless.
And I understand thats a VERY hot take among leftsits.... well sort of. A lot of them will claim to be prison abolitionists and restorative justice believers when asked, but also are also like... extremally bloodthirsty at times. With my Obama example, one of my friends said "if even one Libyan wants him dead, then he dies" (which I think is incredibly absurd but whatever). And I think that takes SIMILAR to that are pretty common. And, honestly, I get it. I get so angry at things like transphobic state legislatures that i want them dead. And its cathartic (WOW I REMEMBERED THE WORD) to demand their deaths as well. But in reality the only reason I want them dead is so they stop hurting people. So I'd also be perfectly ok with them merely removed from power and forced to go through restorative justice programs. Its only the danger they present to others that I want to stop.
So yeah, I think retributive justice is incompatible with leftism and I will die on that hill no matter how much I sympathize with the rage that causes people to want it.
Literally everyone is a product of their environment. So I guess in that regard there’s no such thing as a blameworthy individual. If we believe we are products of our environment, we have to actually believe that.
We aren't merely products of our environment but conscious shapers of it as well. Humans, shaped by their environment, shapes their environment. Given that this shaping is conscious, it means we can assign praise for people who consciously shape our environment for the better and contempt for people who consciously shape our environment for the worse. Marx said that man does not make history as he pleases. He did not say that history makes man, which is what you're suggesting. To suggest this is to slide into undialectical mechanism.
if we're following this thought to its conclusion, do you believe then that people can change? like, yes people are products of their environments but they are not ONLY products of their environments
Sure. Pulling the trigger is a reprehensible and unforgivable act. Have you ever done anything you regret as a result of capitalist propaganda? I have. Understanding that feeling is key to understanding how things got like this. They just got sucked in deeper and emotionally mutilated more thoroughly than you or I. We were raised in a way that put our uncrossable line before pulling the trigger, they were raised in a way that put their uncrossable line after pulling the trigger.
We agree that neither you nor I would pull that trigger (at least I hope you believe that about me; I believe that about you). Why wouldn't we do it but they would? Are we made from better stuff? Or did something happen differently between us and them?
Imagine writing this about members of Wehrmacht, which at least had conscription. I'd be skeptical of welcoming into my org former Nazi soldiers who say they're reformed. I'd be very skeptical if they're unwilling to publicly apologize to their victims, or if they seem more interested in promoting their identity as a troop than anything else.
Some human beings are permanently ruined. I don't intend to suggest that the power of love and friendship can save everyone. But to blame the individual is to excuse the primary blame holder: the ones who put the guns in their hands and taught them who to shoot at.
Also, yeah, if they can't apologize to their victims, they are still ruined. Their humanity has been destroyed by an outside factor. We can't accept them in that state. The boldest among us can try that repair process but it's grueling work and it's sure as hell not guaranteed to succeed.
yeah I don't think we should trust vets either and most are completely unrepentent and don't even think they did anything wrong. Far more of that guy who killed Neely than people sincerely trying to move on.
But at the same time I think it is imperative that we allow people chances to change who they were. That isn't saying trust them implicitly as soon as they even hint they want to change though the safety of others is more important than their chance to change but revenge is less important
Brainwashing is a two way process, if brainwashing is accepted as an excuse for participation in genocidal wars, theres obvious gain in playing along with it and claiming you were just brainwashed.
Also I am fucking better than that kid, because I've never killed anyone.
I have not been in whatever hypothetical material condition this hypothetical kid was in, but I belive I could trust myself to not take blood money in exchange for participation in imperialism.
Not because of some strawman genetical superiority, but because I think thats a matter of basic morals and solidarity. And if I did take take the blood money in this situation, I would deserve repercussions from that.
I get that you're not being serious here but this is exactly what I mean. They had a different mommy. Maybe they were abused and only learned to influence their surroundings through violence. Maybe the truest love they'd ever felt was the pride of their parents for believing the same lies. Almost certainly they had the un-humanity of the Other drilled into their head harder than it was drilled in to yours or mine.
look comrade, I have literally already - in a reply to you, not elsewhere that you might have missed - stated that a just system would put bullets in these people's heads yesterday. All I'm saying is we need to understand what made them like this in order to keep more of them from existing.
Friend. Pal. Buddy. You're making shit up about what I said. I'm not excusing genocide and to accuse me of such is either deliberate bad faith or a straight-out lie. I have genocide victims in my family and I don't want to let you win by knowing that you're pissing me off, but you're pissing me off.
I'll read your hour long essay when you demonstrate to me that you have read the thirty seconds of conversation that we're literally having with each other. Until then, I'm reading the other essay I was linked by a person who is far more effective at communicating and coherent than you are.
the point is that you can recognize both the bad conditions and traumas that would make a person want to accept brainwashing while also understanding their own conscious acquiescence to the material benefits of that situation, and often an integration of the accompanying propaganda. it's not a carrot and a stick, it's popcorn and a movie, but i don't think we have to care per se about which factor is potentially more dominant in making a person a genocide supporter: they're helping do global murder.
This comment doesn't actually disagree with the person at all, though. You're right, and they're right. We should be distrustful of veterans, but not because we're mystically superior beings who are just built different. We should be distrustful of them because they have a provably dangerous mindset, given all the murder.
So why does the distinction matter? Well, it wouldn't, if people wouldn't also keep bringing morality in the conversation. Once we start talking about some sort of abstract moral judge of character, the distinction becomes very important, because of ethical implications I'm too burnt out right now to explain.
I would like to see you actually answer this question because its pretty key to dispelling the notion that you DONT think you were somehow born with "dont participate in genocide" genes.
This is especially important because military recruits are children. Groomed for killing instead of sex.
I disagree, I think the whole exchange is sob story bullshit that would be laughed out of the thread if it was applied to any other comparable state.
This is the kind of dilemma libs fret over when they read about the Nazis and "Oooh geeee I dunno would I be participating in the kristallnacht if I was in Germany? Ooooh I just dont have any agency oooh."
Well I don't fall into that strawman so you have to actually engage with my point. I'm an absolutist about this and don't differentiate between nations that did evil.
OP's point was if you went through the exact same life experiences you'd make the exact same choices. If your reason for believing this isn't true ISNT "I have the dont participate in genocide gene", then what is it? Because "im just born different, my morality is in my bones" is the only explanation for that I can see.
Its not a fucking sob story because I dont feel sorry for them. I think accountability is necessary when harm is done.
I think this line of argument is tedious horseshit meant to ultimately wedge in apologism for veterans no matter the assurance that "oh no I definitely still think the bad ones should get punished", and that this would not be fucking accepted for any other comparable state, yet the American instincts of this site seem to demand endless horrible dogshit debates like this be had no matter what when American veterans are maligned, when the same people would rather hurl than argue like this for something like the IDF.
Well sure its real fucking easy to say that when confronted with an accusation, but I dont think you would actually, I just do not believe that because I see threads about other militaries and 99 times out of 100 stuff like this isnt said.
And I am speaking in general, this thread has over a hundred replies, and there have been like a dozen threads just like this this year. Sorry that you specifically feel strawmanned by me speaking of the general tendencies of this site and not taking your uniqueness into account.
Now you're assuming shit about me lol. I didn't participate in those threads. Sometimes I do fall into screaming the usual bloodthirsty slogans for catharsis reasons but my ethos under all that remains the same. I think retributive justice is morally wrong and useless. I think leftist bloodthirst has gone off the rails. And i'm starting to get more and more angry about it and its past my bedtime so I'm going to log off.
If you had the same brain, uprising, memories, environment, friends, neighbors, parents, and exact same sequence of events in your life, you would make the same decision.
This is not apologia for the imperialism or murder. It just means any one of us could have been the murderer if we were born in the wrong place. This also doesn't mean that life is "deterministic", just that our decisions and behavior is formulated entirely by our memories and experiences.
Lmfao this is such a good essay, starts off like one of those late 20th century communist tracts and am currently at the middle where the internet language appears, 10/10 never expected to see the words "crab bucket" or "cope" in a communist essay.
Triumphant, handsome, charismatic, “alpha” men
Holy shit there's even a reference to Chad.
These days Orwell’s reputation among socialists is in well-deserved shambles. Invocations of the specter of his memory as some kind of aspirational revolutionary ideal — as a staunch opponent of “totalitarianism” — are increasingly buried under citations proving he was in fact a colonial cop, a rapist, a snitch, a racist, a proud Englishman, and so on
It's not an excuse as in we're letting them off the hook, its an explanation. They will need severe reworking, they're not excused of shit. Many of them can never be fixed and the only option is the pit. But we should be grieving that things ever got to this point and recognizing that they, despite needing the pit, were born loving and caring human beings just as we were, and that the evil forces that didn't quite catch us got to them and did too much damage to ever undo.
This assumes that everyone who is exposed to propaganda is aware it is propaganda, which seems very optimistic of the political awareness of your average American.
I don't even have to read the essay, suggesting that everyone who does bad things in service of false claims is doing so for their own benefit and also does not believe those false claims is simply absurd. People are just stupid sometimes. Doesn't justify murder, but the majority of people are not playing some sort of gigabrain 5d chess.
The Human Ruiner isn't a deus ex machina, of course. It's made of people and it turns people into more of itself. Until those people are held responsible for their actions, nothing is changing.
thanks comrade, it's one of the most sobering and sickening realizations I've come to but I think it's extremely important for us to recognize that the only thing separating us and them is material conditions and influences. I posted this full well knowing I'd get ratio'd and I'd be fighting for my life in the replies but I think it's extremely important to convey that the reason we're all here posting on the bear form and not gunning out the door of a Humvee is material conditions and material conditions alone. Believing this means that we believe material conditions are the thing we need to fix.
Even if someone thinks that outside raising and influences are less important than some kind of innate soul-like inner moral identifier, that would simply count as yet another material condition that influences us.
because god knows this struggle session needs more takes, here I go:
These people were completely brainwashed. They were used. We all agree here that the United States has the most powerful propaganda apparatus in the world, and we all agree that nobody is immune to propaganda, so then how can we blame kids for not being immune to the strongest propaganda in the world? This shit literally runs so deep and works so well that you can take a human being - the same blueprint as you and I - and convince it that other human beings must die on sight by the thousands. These people have been completely scrambled and ruined by the bourgeoisie military state and what they need is repair.
To act as if you are better than some kid who gets tricked into rolling around in a Humvee shooting people they've never met; to act as if you wouldn't have done the same in exactly the same material circumstances, is to claim that you are genetically superior. The system is broken, exactly 0 of these kids would have been murderers in hypothetical FALC. All we can do is appeal to them to join our cause and stop destroying humanity and the world, and if they don't want to join, well, that's really sad. I'm sorry they got fucked up like that. *Of course, most of them shouldn't even be considered as acceptable to join our cause, because they have had their humanity mutilated by the most evil state to have ever existed, but if there is evidence that they are saveable, then maybe if any of us has the stomach for it it's worth the rehabilitation.
e: let me frame it as a thought experiment. Say you've got a machine, the Human Ruiner 9000. People keep getting blackbagged and thrown in the machine. What comes out are barely human anymore: these people are near soulless and have a hard time interacting with many or most normal people, possibly forever. We all should agree that the machine is the main evil here, not the people, right? And if someone happens to come out of the machine, as fucked up and damaged as they are, and say "fuck that machine, we need to destroy it", should we focus our energy on destroying them? These people will need aggressive rehabilitative labor, psychologically and emotionally, possibly for years, and that labor may be dangerous work in some cases, but performing that labor, in my mind, is a preferable choice to spending energy and time fighting the person instead of the machine.
e2: for what it's worth, I also entirely 100% agree with badempanada here, no buts. I just think it's maybe sometimes worth it to try for that rehabilitative process, and also we should put more focus on what made them this way - emotionally mutilated veterans (all veterans) are a symptom.
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Hell yeah, ACAB is unequivocally true, but also they're bastards because they're cops. If they just stopped being cops then they're on track to stopping being bastards too. Same exact thing goes for troops. It's a long process to undo all of that evil but there is such a process.
A bit confused here. Are you saying cops are blameworthy but not soldiers?
They're basically in the same bin. They're both causing irreversible harm, they're both bastards, the world would be a better place without either of them. But they're both, in the lucky cases, rehabilitatible, they both started as innocent children, they were both ruined by an evil state apparatus and essentially possessed for the purposes of evil and harm, and most importantly, they are both symptoms of an underlying disease more than they are the problem themselves. Take any future cop or troop from their cradle and raise them up in Lenin's Russia and they would likely be just as good of communists as their peers.
Okay, that clears it up. I will ask the big question:
Do you believe there is there such thing as a blameworthy individual? Everyone begins as an innocent child and is shaped by circumstances that can lead them to act in certain ways.
Ultimately, even the most racist, horrible mass killer was taught the concept of racism by someone else. Hitler himself was shaped by the ideas that came before him.
In your opinion, at what point do we stop blaming society, and start blaming the individual?
Literally everyone is a product of their environment. So I guess in that regard there's no such thing as a blameworthy individual. If we believe we are products of our environment, we have to actually believe that.
Do I believe that there are people who need to be [redacted]? Hell yeah, lots of them. It's sad that things got this way but sometimes the immediate end to the harm caused by an individual is worth more than their ultimate triumph over their brainworms. Lots of veterans probably fall in this category. I view this as the ultimate and only possible conclusion of embracing historical materialism over great man theory.
I would hesitate to wed socialist thought to determinism. Marx wasn't a determinist and material relations is not the same thing as a lack of free will. Engels was a capitalist and betrayed his class, after all.
I would reject this position as I cannot believe in the morality of harming a blameless person. To me, it would be like executing a mentally ill person. If noone is in control of their actions, then there cannot be punishment for behavior of any sort. It would be horrific to punish someone for behavior they had no control over.
I have some reading on this subject I'll share here: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/molyneux/1995/xx/determin.htm
Full disclosure, I haven't read this, I'm too busy fielding other replies, but one question on this - is there some other factor besides lived experience/material conditions that makes a person more or less likely to make "evil" decisions? If so, do you have any idea what that might be?
thanks for believing that I'm engaging in good faith btw you're making me think and I appreciate you :meow-hug:
:side-eye-1: :side-eye-2:
That sounds pretty correct to me. Punishment is just unnecessary suffering on top of unnecessary suffering.
Why must it be necessary for punishment to be morally justified? Is there some other thing that exists that makes it so that absolutely must be true, other than vague collective opinion?
Yeah, I mean, my biggest "die on this hill" take is that retributive justice is bad. Period. I'm an absolutist about it. I think there are situations where violence is necessary obviously. Sometimes you have to execute someone, in a revolutionary situation, for practical reasons. But I'm against it for retributive reasons.
The example I always use because its fairly extreme, is that like, if world revolution happened somehow and Obama waited out the whole thing in a bunker, and he was still alive after the revolution was finished and secured. And then the leaders of the revolution met to discuss his fate. And I was there (I wouldn't be a leader of the revolution lol, I'd be taking care of the kids, but just for thought experiments sake I guess) I would advocate against executing him. I'd suggest whatever form of restorative justice we could actually accomplish, but mostly just... leaving him alone in a comfortable but not luxurious place mostly separate from society. I would see executing him after he ceases to be a danger to the revolution as retributive, and thus pointless.
And I understand thats a VERY hot take among leftsits.... well sort of. A lot of them will claim to be prison abolitionists and restorative justice believers when asked, but also are also like... extremally bloodthirsty at times. With my Obama example, one of my friends said "if even one Libyan wants him dead, then he dies" (which I think is incredibly absurd but whatever). And I think that takes SIMILAR to that are pretty common. And, honestly, I get it. I get so angry at things like transphobic state legislatures that i want them dead. And its cathartic (WOW I REMEMBERED THE WORD) to demand their deaths as well. But in reality the only reason I want them dead is so they stop hurting people. So I'd also be perfectly ok with them merely removed from power and forced to go through restorative justice programs. Its only the danger they present to others that I want to stop.
So yeah, I think retributive justice is incompatible with leftism and I will die on that hill no matter how much I sympathize with the rage that causes people to want it.
I suppose the Nuremberg trials went too far, in your opinion?
We aren't merely products of our environment but conscious shapers of it as well. Humans, shaped by their environment, shapes their environment. Given that this shaping is conscious, it means we can assign praise for people who consciously shape our environment for the better and contempt for people who consciously shape our environment for the worse. Marx said that man does not make history as he pleases. He did not say that history makes man, which is what you're suggesting. To suggest this is to slide into undialectical mechanism.
if we're following this thought to its conclusion, do you believe then that people can change? like, yes people are products of their environments but they are not ONLY products of their environments
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Sure. Pulling the trigger is a reprehensible and unforgivable act. Have you ever done anything you regret as a result of capitalist propaganda? I have. Understanding that feeling is key to understanding how things got like this. They just got sucked in deeper and emotionally mutilated more thoroughly than you or I. We were raised in a way that put our uncrossable line before pulling the trigger, they were raised in a way that put their uncrossable line after pulling the trigger.
We agree that neither you nor I would pull that trigger (at least I hope you believe that about me; I believe that about you). Why wouldn't we do it but they would? Are we made from better stuff? Or did something happen differently between us and them?
Imagine writing this about members of Wehrmacht, which at least had conscription. I'd be skeptical of welcoming into my org former Nazi soldiers who say they're reformed. I'd be very skeptical if they're unwilling to publicly apologize to their victims, or if they seem more interested in promoting their identity as a troop than anything else.
Some human beings are permanently ruined. I don't intend to suggest that the power of love and friendship can save everyone. But to blame the individual is to excuse the primary blame holder: the ones who put the guns in their hands and taught them who to shoot at.
Also, yeah, if they can't apologize to their victims, they are still ruined. Their humanity has been destroyed by an outside factor. We can't accept them in that state. The boldest among us can try that repair process but it's grueling work and it's sure as hell not guaranteed to succeed.
well that was more or less the society of East Germany wasn't it.
Under the leadership of a communist government that denazified the country and suppressed reactionaries.
We don't have anyone denazifying vets seeking to join our organizing or proclaiming to be leftists. We have to be critical of them ourselves.
yeah I don't think we should trust vets either and most are completely unrepentent and don't even think they did anything wrong. Far more of that guy who killed Neely than people sincerely trying to move on.
But at the same time I think it is imperative that we allow people chances to change who they were. That isn't saying trust them implicitly as soon as they even hint they want to change though the safety of others is more important than their chance to change but revenge is less important
so you're saying under different material conditions the vets could be rehabilitated? wow crazy
Not necessarily, they could be nullified and shamed to a point. Rehabilitated is a strong word
https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
Brainwashing is a two way process, if brainwashing is accepted as an excuse for participation in genocidal wars, theres obvious gain in playing along with it and claiming you were just brainwashed.
Also I am fucking better than that kid, because I've never killed anyone.
I have not been in whatever hypothetical material condition this hypothetical kid was in, but I belive I could trust myself to not take blood money in exchange for participation in imperialism.
Not because of some strawman genetical superiority, but because I think thats a matter of basic morals and solidarity. And if I did take take the blood money in this situation, I would deserve repercussions from that.
I would simply choose not to gun down a crowd of innocent people.
Where'd you get your basic morals and solidarity?
My mommy.
I get that you're not being serious here but this is exactly what I mean. They had a different mommy. Maybe they were abused and only learned to influence their surroundings through violence. Maybe the truest love they'd ever felt was the pride of their parents for believing the same lies. Almost certainly they had the un-humanity of the Other drilled into their head harder than it was drilled in to yours or mine.
I will simply not be excusing genocide.
If you are going to reply to this with further sob story hypotheticals, simply do not, fuck off instead.
look comrade, I have literally already - in a reply to you, not elsewhere that you might have missed - stated that a just system would put bullets in these people's heads yesterday. All I'm saying is we need to understand what made them like this in order to keep more of them from existing.
Read the essay.
Friend. Pal. Buddy. You're making shit up about what I said. I'm not excusing genocide and to accuse me of such is either deliberate bad faith or a straight-out lie. I have genocide victims in my family and I don't want to let you win by knowing that you're pissing me off, but you're pissing me off.
I'll read your hour long essay when you demonstrate to me that you have read the thirty seconds of conversation that we're literally having with each other. Until then, I'm reading the other essay I was linked by a person who is far more effective at communicating and coherent than you are.
the point is that you can recognize both the bad conditions and traumas that would make a person want to accept brainwashing while also understanding their own conscious acquiescence to the material benefits of that situation, and often an integration of the accompanying propaganda. it's not a carrot and a stick, it's popcorn and a movie, but i don't think we have to care per se about which factor is potentially more dominant in making a person a genocide supporter: they're helping do global murder.
This comment doesn't actually disagree with the person at all, though. You're right, and they're right. We should be distrustful of veterans, but not because we're mystically superior beings who are just built different. We should be distrustful of them because they have a provably dangerous mindset, given all the murder.
So why does the distinction matter? Well, it wouldn't, if people wouldn't also keep bringing morality in the conversation. Once we start talking about some sort of abstract moral judge of character, the distinction becomes very important, because of ethical implications I'm too burnt out right now to explain.
I would like to see you actually answer this question because its pretty key to dispelling the notion that you DONT think you were somehow born with "dont participate in genocide" genes.
This is especially important because military recruits are children. Groomed for killing instead of sex.
I disagree, I think the whole exchange is sob story bullshit that would be laughed out of the thread if it was applied to any other comparable state.
This is the kind of dilemma libs fret over when they read about the Nazis and "Oooh geeee I dunno would I be participating in the kristallnacht if I was in Germany? Ooooh I just dont have any agency oooh."
Well I don't fall into that strawman so you have to actually engage with my point. I'm an absolutist about this and don't differentiate between nations that did evil.
OP's point was if you went through the exact same life experiences you'd make the exact same choices. If your reason for believing this isn't true ISNT "I have the dont participate in genocide gene", then what is it? Because "im just born different, my morality is in my bones" is the only explanation for that I can see.
Its not a fucking sob story because I dont feel sorry for them. I think accountability is necessary when harm is done.
And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bike.
So you admit your life experiences lead you to have better morals but still think OP's wrong because... idk?
I think this line of argument is tedious horseshit meant to ultimately wedge in apologism for veterans no matter the assurance that "oh no I definitely still think the bad ones should get punished", and that this would not be fucking accepted for any other comparable state, yet the American instincts of this site seem to demand endless horrible dogshit debates like this be had no matter what when American veterans are maligned, when the same people would rather hurl than argue like this for something like the IDF.
I dont engage with it because of that.
I already said that I dont have that double standard but you're still strawmanning me with it lol. I would absolutely argue this for the IDF lol.
Well sure its real fucking easy to say that when confronted with an accusation, but I dont think you would actually, I just do not believe that because I see threads about other militaries and 99 times out of 100 stuff like this isnt said.
And I am speaking in general, this thread has over a hundred replies, and there have been like a dozen threads just like this this year. Sorry that you specifically feel strawmanned by me speaking of the general tendencies of this site and not taking your uniqueness into account.
Now you're assuming shit about me lol. I didn't participate in those threads. Sometimes I do fall into screaming the usual bloodthirsty slogans for catharsis reasons but my ethos under all that remains the same. I think retributive justice is morally wrong and useless. I think leftist bloodthirst has gone off the rails. And i'm starting to get more and more angry about it and its past my bedtime so I'm going to log off.
If you had the same brain, uprising, memories, environment, friends, neighbors, parents, and exact same sequence of events in your life, you would make the same decision.
This is not apologia for the imperialism or murder. It just means any one of us could have been the murderer if we were born in the wrong place. This also doesn't mean that life is "deterministic", just that our decisions and behavior is formulated entirely by our memories and experiences.
Lmfao this is such a good essay, starts off like one of those late 20th century communist tracts and am currently at the middle where the internet language appears, 10/10 never expected to see the words "crab bucket" or "cope" in a communist essay.
Holy shit there's even a reference to Chad.
Based author
It's not an excuse as in we're letting them off the hook, its an explanation. They will need severe reworking, they're not excused of shit. Many of them can never be fixed and the only option is the pit. But we should be grieving that things ever got to this point and recognizing that they, despite needing the pit, were born loving and caring human beings just as we were, and that the evil forces that didn't quite catch us got to them and did too much damage to ever undo.
Its a bad explanation, the essay provides a superior one that accounts for the agency and participation of the masses in propaganda.
This assumes that everyone who is exposed to propaganda is aware it is propaganda, which seems very optimistic of the political awareness of your average American.
I don't even have to read the essay, suggesting that everyone who does bad things in service of false claims is doing so for their own benefit and also does not believe those false claims is simply absurd. People are just stupid sometimes. Doesn't justify murder, but the majority of people are not playing some sort of gigabrain 5d chess.
You should read the essay.
The Human Ruiner isn't a deus ex machina, of course. It's made of people and it turns people into more of itself. Until those people are held responsible for their actions, nothing is changing.
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thanks comrade, it's one of the most sobering and sickening realizations I've come to but I think it's extremely important for us to recognize that the only thing separating us and them is material conditions and influences. I posted this full well knowing I'd get ratio'd and I'd be fighting for my life in the replies but I think it's extremely important to convey that the reason we're all here posting on the bear form and not gunning out the door of a Humvee is material conditions and material conditions alone. Believing this means that we believe material conditions are the thing we need to fix.
Even if someone thinks that outside raising and influences are less important than some kind of innate soul-like inner moral identifier, that would simply count as yet another material condition that influences us.
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Thats not what their argument was.