• zaza [she/they/her]@lemmy.ml
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    edit-2
    2 months ago

    Idk I personally can empathize with people that have been forced by the Zionist regime to indiscriminately kill civilians "for the greater good" without necessarily blaming the individuals themselves..

    Like I don't question there are IOF soldiers that are bloodthirsty and see Palestinians as less than human target practice - but I also doubt that a person that experiences severe PTSD and takes their own life was like "hell yeah let's bulldoze some Palestinian kids!1!" - I think this just shows that while the Zionist genocidal machine massively harms Palestinians first and foremost - it also has a detrimental effect on its own citizens (see Vietnamese war veterans) - so while it may seem "just" to clown on the puppets carrying out the genocide on the ground - some of them are still just mislead people that have been fed on an abundant diet of hasbara 🤷🏽‍♀️

    • somename [she/her]
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      2 months ago

      No. That’s bullshit. You can fully blame them. Nothing forced them to serve in the IOF.

      • miz [any, any]
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        edit-2
        2 months ago

        per a recent article posted here from an "Israeli" media source, the IOF isn't even enforcing rules against desertion

        • CindyTheSkull [she/her, comrade/them]
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          2 months ago

          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.

    • FALGSConaut [comrade/them]
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      2 months ago

      Naw they always have a choice. That one person who ran a Taylor Swift fan account took a moral stance and is braver than 100% of any of the cowards in the IOF.

      Every single IOF troop could get hamas-red-triangle or officer-down and I wouldn't shed a tear

    • hotcouchguy [he/him]
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      2 months ago

      To a small degree maybe, but I imagine if you're not enthusiastic about killing children you get shuffled off to some other role reasonably quickly. As an institution they're motivated to match the real bloodthirsty psychos with the hands-on jobs, and give the genocide-support roles to the squeamish ones.

    • Belly_Beanis [he/him]
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      2 months ago

      This is nazi apologia. I mean like actual, 1945, "guards at Auschwitz" nazis. A lot of Germans developed psychological problems due to their crimes against humanity. It's why they created death camps. And they all claimed they were "...just following orders." Many more claimed it was a "necessary evil to eliminate the Judeo-Bolshevik hordes."

      Despite all this, nazis still got hanged after the war (especially if they were caught by the soviets). We can list Germans who didn't commit atrocities or actively fought against the genocide being carried out. There's hundreds of them listed on Wikipedia alone. The Germans knew what they were doing was wrong. They ignored morality because they wanted an excuse to steal from and kill their neighbors.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
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      edit-2
      2 months ago

      but I also doubt that a person that experiences severe PTSD and takes their own life was like "hell yeah let's bulldoze some Palestinian kids!1!"

      I dunno, he sounded pretty fucking happy to me bulldozing Palestinian homes with a shit-eating grin. Just laughing it up with his fellow genocider and appearing on talk shows to brag about bulldozing 5000 Palestinian homes. But it stopped being so funny when his partner-in-genocide got liquidated by the Resistance.

      Hope his suicide was one of those botched hangings where the hanged suffocates for hours before finally dying.