I was raised reform Jewish and am half Jewish by family history. I have ancestors who were victims of the pogroms in the Russian pale of settlement – specifically, all four of my great-grandparents on my father’s side, along with their parents (my great-great-grandparents). When they were children their families fled and eventually resettled in the USA.
There is another place that they could have gone instead: Palestine. At that time it was still part of the Ottoman Empire, and some of the displaced Jews of that time did elect to go to Palestine. As it happens, my ancestors chose the US, but they could have gone to Palestine if they’d wanted to.
The fashionable posture on the left to take towards Israeli Jews recently has basically been a combination of glibness and vitriolic hatred, often reaching the point of wishing death upon them (examples: 1 2). I don’t know… I just can’t really feel good about stuff like that. The fact that my family ended up in the US and not Palestine is really just a quirk of fate. I don’t think that my ancestors were, like, morally better people for choosing the US over Ottoman-era Palestine. (And given the recent uptick in “Turtle Island” discourse, it seems like a fair number of leftists believe my ancestors shouldn’t have been allowed to resettle in the US either.)
I think that Zionism (with the possible exception of cultural Zionism) has generally been a noxious idea throughout its history. I don’t think the state of Israel should continue to exist as it is currently constituted, and I think the near-ubiquitous racism among Israelis is shameful. But I also don't think that every Jewish person who moved to Palestine in the last 150 years was a bad person for doing that, and I’m not prepared to circle-jerk over the deaths of people that I have a fair amount in common with historically.
Am I missing something? Have I been hoodwinked by Zionist propaganda?
Retribution is definitionally a punitive and idealist aim and therefore a reactionary one. There is a difference between seeking to kill someone for having been an oppressor (silly, counterproductive) vs accepting that some oppressors need to die to practically accomplish the goal of liberation.
Bullshit. Retribution is not reactionary. Revenge is a moral good. Denying the oppressed revenged is siding with the oppressors.
I appreciate the fervor but this is a very childish take. revenge for revenge's sake is not only definitely not a moral good, but also often tactically counterproductive. I also would say that probably most of the oppressed are not longing for revenge but liberation, which are emphatically not the same thing. I don't mean to put words in anyone's mouth, but (as an example) I have not seen or read anything since october 7th that suggests that Gazans are eager for revenge itself. In fact portraying the oppressed as foaming at the mouth for revenge seems like it aligns well with Israeli colonialist narratives about Palestinians
Why not both? And why does your conjecture give you the ability to speak for the oppressed? In the matters that directly affect me and my family, I want liberation, yes, but I also want revenge. Many harms can never be fixed, so the next best thing is to inflict harm back on the perpetrators so that they suffer too. If we achieve utopia it would be absolutely fucked up to let the monsters who made so many people's lives hell just walk free and enjoy that utopia too. It would be unjust.
Your moral compass is fucked if you think war criminals shouldn't be punished for all the harm they did. Prioritizing the lives of war criminals over their victims' is some white christian-socialized lib shit. The oppressed don't owe liberals like you a performance of saintly turn-the-other-cheek bullshit. There is nothing wrong with the oppressed wanting revenge on their oppressors. Revenge is frowned upon in mainstream christian theology because the dominant strands of christianity encourage meekness and submission in the face of oppression but, at least in the strand of Islam my family comes from, it is actually a moral virtue to strike back against oppressors.
And you know what, here's some cross-religious solidarity between Muslims and Jews: I cannot fault Nakam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTOhItq5Xow. It's a damn shame that their efforts to seek revenge (because justice, the undoing of genocide, was impossible) were stymied and diverted and that they ended up going to Occupied Palestine to become the oppressors. Yet another atrocity to lay at the feet of the Brits, the Brits shouldn't have interfered. And there we have it: anyone who interferes with the oppressed's righteous revenge against the oppressors is inherently siding with the oppressors, protecting them, making it so the oppressors get away with committing atrocities against someone but then are protected from all consequences. A thirst for revenge is simply the natural result of oppression.
Revenge causes no change in material conditions and does nothing to help the oppressed in a meaningful way. It serves only as a means for the person enacting revenge to feel as if they helped, without actually helping.
I understand, the Nuremberg Trials were going too far. Those Nazis should have been rehabilitated or mercifully allowed to enjoy a retirement after murdering millions of people. /s
Hexbear needs a tagging feature like RES has so I can tag libs and know not to even bother reading your comments in the future because your brains are full of mush.
Removed by mod
Ok and??? This is a weird argument to try to pick with me. I don't care about fake laws, I care about what's right and what's wrong. It is wrong that genociders should walk free, it is right that they be punished. Who does the punishing doesn't matter, and the way they're punished matters only in so much as it is severe. If there's something that seems confusing about what I'm saying you can try to extrapolate or read between the lines and privately hazard some guesses, I think my position is obvious but since I live in Amerikkka and free speech is banned here those are private thoughts.
Edit: Oh you're the OP of this weird cringe lib post and now I'm looking at your other post and comment history full of concern-trolling. What are you even doing on this site? You're either a lib or a fed, either way you should be banned. GTFO
I disagree.
What makes revenge good? Simply declaring that is, uh, less than convincing. Violence is often necessary, but seeking it out for its own sake as a means of catharsis or to balance out some cosmic ledger does nothing but cause more pain. Seeking revenge, furthermore, undermines the ability of the oppressed to achieve their goals. See, for example, the common scare tactic among racists that black people must continue to be oppressed because, if they are not, they will arbitrarily choose to seek making white people suffer as they have. This is a myth, the vast majority of black people of all stripes ideologically seek nothing of the sort, but that promise of "revenge" is used to deliberately undermine the solidarity between black and white people.
I seek the destruction of oppressive systems and irresolvable antagonisms, not to take now-disempowered oppressors and torture them forever in some dungeon.
Mao rightly believed that it was a great victory of the Chinese Communists that Emperor Puyi -- who collaborated with the Japanese and facilitated immense human suffering -- did not need to be killed or even harmed, but instead was able to be peacefully reformed into an honest worker and integrated into society in a pro-social way. Torturing him would not have brought back the many people his actions helped to kill. Killing him would have just added one more body to a massive pile of corpses. It was this power of reform that the CPC even brought against American soldiers in the Korean War, whose conversion became a profound testament against America.
I don't know how to explain a fundamental moral principle to you if you don't already know it.
To give monsters a good life after they've enslaved, raped, tortured, and murdered so many people is to shit on the graves of their dead victims, and spit in the faces of their surviving victims. It is to reward them for their evil -- they've reaped the benefits of the violence they do and are spared the harms. You think war criminals should be allowed to retire in peace and paint in the old age they denied the people they murdered? That's so obviously evil I do not know how to teach you if you don't understand.
Plenty of people believe in Hell and dance on the graves of war criminals when they die. "Henry Kissinger is burning in Hell" they say. Well what is Hell but divine revenge? It's hypocritical for people to support the idea that a God may be punishing people with eternal torture but clutch pearls at the thought that humans should hedge our bets and make sure war criminals experience a bit of Hell on Earth before they die just in case there is no Hell to receive them when they die. I'm not saying you're a hypocrite by the way, I don't know what your thoughts and claims are, but this is an inconsistent view I have seen people express.
lmao @ you bringing up Mao when Mao also understood that the retribution liberated peasants took against their liberated landlords didn't need to be endorsed, but didn't need to be stopped either. The oppressors spin the ropes and set up their own gallows.
Now sure, I can understand foregoing or limiting revenge due to optics and strategy so as to not alienate pearl-clutchers. Fine, to some extent. And rehabilitating captured enemy soldiers is one thing -- if it can be done, it's fine, and if they were conscripted and are fighting against their will it's even a morally neutral thing with immense strategic value so I support it. But the higher-ups, the leaders and their army of propagandists, do not deserve mercy. They have caused immense pain in hundreds of thousands to millions of people, and it is only fair that they experience an approximation of a fraction of that pain back.
But you really aren't operating on idealism, just some set of rules that has no grounding in how the world operates and therefore no proof. Scientific socialism? What's that?
The less quippy response, and I think this really covers everything you said outside of the Mao case, is that you have the pseudo-religious moral conviction that can only be reaffirmed by tautology and instead of reflecting on its shortcomings, all you're doing is talking in circles.
Reform is indeed better than causing more destruction for its own sake. I want a better world, with all available resources spent improving the world, not one that is dragged down paying blood taxes for no benefit.
I believe Hell would be unjust and that most secular people who use expressions like that are being hyperbolic, because they recognize the New Atheist truism that even in a retributive framework, infinite suffering cannot be a proportional punishment to any finite crime, no matter how great. I think even a finite Hell would be fucked up and only a very liberal interpretation of Purgatory could be justified. Torture just isn't worthwhile.
I'll also say here though you repeat yourself that what I am doing is not "pearl clutching", i.e. expressing moral indignation. What I am doing is calling it idealistically "grounded" and wasteful. Healthy people don't seek catharsis in inflicting pain on others, so sadism is not an indication that someone should be tortured but that the sadist needs a more medically sound type of help.
If you need to say things like this, subverting what you claim is a moral principle for the sake of "optics", you have a hint that something makes sense. Communists disdain to hide their aims.
What a fucked up calculus it is when rehabilitating conscripts is merely neutral. I think moralism is not a useful framework, but that's bad even for moralism.
It doesn't undo the harm they did, there are no ghosts being allowed to rest in peace, it's just a ritual of sadism taken as an axiom.
For all your bluster, you don't actually address Puyi because you know you're fucking wrong. Mao was a champion of rehabilitation in both the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War.
I readily said that violence is sometimes strategically necessary, and the situation with the landlords was very much strategic. Mao didn't have the resources to go around liquidating the landlord class with the PLA, so he had the peasants take it into their own hands. He knew that this strategy would lead to "excesses" carried out against the landlords, but he accepted it as a much lesser evil than the landlords continuing their brutal exploitation of the peasantry. It was rather like that Mark Twain quote:
I ain't reading all that, fuck off lib (actually I'm just blocking you, I can't take anything you say seriously and I have better things to do with my life than read your peace-policing bullshit). ACAB includes peace police.
try actually studying Mao next time <3