Far from being "invincible," the IDF's morale is broken. Snip:
After a year of committing genocide in Gaza, more and more Israeli soldiers are quietly refusing orders to return to the strip to fight, saying they are depressed, worn out, psychologically damaged, and unmotivated, according to a report by Ha-Makom magazine published on 20 October.
The ultra-Orthodox-oriented magazine interviewed multiple soldiers and parents of soldiers who refuse to return to Gaza. When a platoon of 30 soldiers of the Nahal Brigade was recently ordered to enter Gaza for the latest of several tours, only six reported for duty.
“I call it refusal and rebellion,” says Inbal, the mother of one of the soldiers in the platoon.
“They return to the same buildings that they cleaned, each time trapping them anew. They have been to Al-Zaytoun neighborhood three times already. They understand that it is futile and pointless.”
Although they had only a fifth of their personnel, the commander still insisted they enter Gaza.
Early in the Holocaust, the Germans just had their troops carry out massacres through shooting, stabbing, burning, etc. This caused massive numbers of psychological problems among German troops. Although they believed what they were doing was a necessary evil, they still struggled to cope with that evil. A lot of them fell into substance abuse or ended their own lives.
Enter the death camp. In these, they could have only the most enthusiastic members of the party guard undesirables. You had to be a member of the SS in order to volunteer for guarding a camp. That meant the guards wanted to be there and took pleasure in killing Jews, Roma, communists, homosexuals, and so on. But they still found another way to absolve themselves of guilt.
Inmates were told to take a ticket and remember their number so they could get their stuff back after taking a shower. People voluntarily walked into the gas chambers because it was the same system used for everyday hygiene. Then the SS had other inmates move the bodies to furnaces, with a different set of prisoners loading and unloading. Even when deploying the gas used to kill people, they'd have prisoners drop the capsules into chambers by forcing them at gunpoint. When not gassing people, kapos were inmates used to enforce the rules during downtime. They'd get special privileges like better meals or access to recreational facilities in exchange for snitching and occasionally beating other inmates.
Every step in the industrialized murder machine allowed for nazis to tell themselves they weren't the ones actually killing people. The inmates went into the chamber by their own free will. Other inmates disposed of the bodies. Guards weren't the ones using the gas, they just forced someone else to do it, so that person was responsible. What happened at night in the bunks was the responsibility of the kapos. This is why after the war, they tried to defend their actions with "I was just following orders." They got orders to make prisoners do things, then passed those orders down.
Enforcing and imposing these jobs onto prisoners was done at the hands of only the most bloodthirsty of the SS. They would gleefully torture and murder prisoners on a whim, which made sure the prisoners did what they were told (lest the guard get pissed and decide to torture you out where everyone could see). Other guards only had to watch, telling themselves it was okay because they weren't the ones killing children.
This is how the German people rationalized their participation. Germans outside of the camps only had to report to police or local garrisons when they found "undesirables." Those police and troops only had to load those undesirables onto trains, who took them out of sight and out of mind. Guards then got those people to get off the train and walk right into gas chambers willingly. And this is how nazi high command implicated the entire country in genocide.
I would simply stop being settlers committing a genocide but ya know.
Yah know you could just spot participating in a genocide, that'd probably do wonders for your mental health
I find it hard to get upset during the tank-introduction scene in "All Quiet On The Western Front" because we all know what happened to a hell of a lot of German soldiers who survived WW1.
I'm reminded of that anecdote from Wretched of the Earth where a colonial cop who'd been made his department's designated torturer went to Fanon for help because his job was destroying him emotionally. When Fanon advised the cop to quit his job, the cop said that no, he didn't want to quit his job, he wanted Fanon to make him okay with doing his job.
Fanon doesn't say he responded by pushing the cop out of a window, but it would have been entirely warranted.
Is this cause they are getting their shit rocked, or is it that they are human and are traumatized from following orders? I dunno which would be the better answer. I’m just glad Israel is falling apart
The latter, probably. People fundamentally do not handle horror and atrocity well, no matter how eagerly they dive into it or how loudly they beat their chest and bay for blood. It's something inherently corrosive and destructive that can't just be warded off by being a bloodthirsty fascist genocidaire.
I struggle to articulate how absurd and evil it is, that they're eagerly destroying themselves just to spill more blood, just to slaughter and spread terror and death and misery for the sake of monstrous fascist ideals. Self-interested evil is horrible enough, but they're beyond even that, it's just death and horror for the sake of death and horror and fascist supremacy. All they have to do is not fucking do that, it's in their best interests to not fucking do that, but their twisted fascist ideology demands they sacrifice themselves for the sake of genocide.
Maybe this is a bit irrelevant, but do you ever think of the Red Army seeing the absolutely vile atrocities the Nazis were doing, and how they found the will to keep going to stop them at all costs? I wonder if it's more demoralizing than not, I can only imagine that finding death camps with piles of childrens' clothing with their owners nowhere to be found has to really make you feel like any semblance of good in the world you're fighting for has already been lost.
And I guess it's just crazy that the Zionists are fighting to create that world, to create a world where the most defenseless are thrown to the mass graves and forgotten. How have they found the will to make it this far? How can fascist ideology push people to do as much harm as they've already done without putting a bullet through their CO's skull and then their own? Isn't it too much after you kill the second or third kid?
Isn't it too much after you kill the second or third kid?
For the last 80 years they've been told that the people they're killing aren't human beings. At a point they check out and are okay with it.
seeing the absolutely vile atrocities
I can see it giving me nightmares, PTSD, etc. But personally, this really would strengthen my resolve to keep going, the knowledge that these atrocities are out there and we can stop it by continuing to march, that's a good reason.
All said, it'd still be a heavy burden on the mind, which can leave one acting irrationally after too long.
It's the first one. It's not that they see the people they're fighting as human, it's that they keep getting washed and burned out.
It's not that they see the people they're fighting as human
I'm saying that's not a shield against it. Genocidaires dehumanize their victims and they still get fucked up by their own actions and what they're taking part in. It's not about morals or consciences or anything like that, it's just people not handling that sort of violence and horror well at a fundamental level. That's not to say "oh it makes them sad, it makes them unhappy, it makes them regretful" because it can just as easily make them worse and more violent and unstable, it's just to say it's something that actively attacks and corrodes their own humanity. They can psych themselves up and dehumanize their victims and beat their chest as loud as they want, as loud as they need to to push themselves to actually do it, but they're still going to be broken by it in some way.
This isn't something original to Israel, obviously, though that provides a very clear and visible example of a population trying to keep themselves whipped into a bloodthirsty frenzy and breaking at the seams because of it. I know it happened to the Nazis too, and that there's research on that and how Nazi ideology tried to recuperate that self-destruction through violence by lionizing it and making it a pillar of their ideology. I'd assume it's just a universal phenomenon, that such violence just kind of does that to people regardless of how they try to psych themselves up and cope with it.
I mean some people that work at abattoirs have PTSD, it's not unique to seeing humans slaughtered.
I think both things are true. The same way someone who works in the business of slaughtering barn animals won't go vegan or even vegetarian, even if they have PTSD.
It's got almost nothing to do with "seeing too much slaughter" in the case of the iof. It's actually laughable (and sad) that some people on this site really think those people are somehow getting tired and traumatized by the genocide.
The iof literally say why they're feeling this way, it's quoted in the article
"They return to the same buildings that they cleaned, each time trapping them anew. They have been to Al-Zaytoun neighborhood three times already. They understand that it is futile and pointless.”
They feel that they're doing meaningless busy work that's also getting them killed. Mind you, if they thought their slaughter was actually doing something they'll happily keep it up so long as they're not getting fucking washed by resistance fighters.
I'd argue it's laughable and sad that some people on this site really think these people are entirely unable to get tired and traumatized by the genocide. We know that even the worst of the worst of WW2 Nazis couldn't face gunning down their victims en masse, it'll be little better for the IOF.
Does it mean they're good people who will protest genocide tomorrow? No. But it does mean they're humans who will only physically take so much of doing it. Just because they're a genocidal force that must be stopped doesn't mean we need to deny they have innately human traits.
To add to this, to paint Nazis, Israelis, anyone committing atrocities as inhuman monsters is to fool yourself into thinking there’s something different or other about them. This is just what happens when people grow up brainwashed into hate and conscripted into the army. Normal humans are going to feel bad butchering people, they’ll justify it to themselves and keep doing it but unless they’re psychopaths (which is uncommon) they’ll still have a physiological reaction.
It's absolutely the first one. When's the last time you've heard a conquistador or a member of the 7th Cavalry get PTSD from butchering the Indigenous? But once the colonizers start getting their ass handed to them by the colonized is when the crocodile tears and whining about PTSD start coming out.
Didn't they?
