Just reposting this excellent point from lemmygrad
- Show
Edit: A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.
We now have literal “Soviets were godless barbarians” arguments. The revolution is never perfect enough, is it? Wish there was a time machine to send people back to moralize about doing what needs to be done and Christian moral goodness to the leaders of a nascent revolution being ruthlessly attacked on all sides. I’m going to reserve my tears for the thousands of dead Jews and millions of starving and dying peasants.
Maybe we can have a struggle session over dead teenage Nazis from WWII next time.
I also don't like it, mostly because i fuckin hate wojak and every one of these images is incredibly ugly.
The children might not have deserved it at all even if it were needed. I would argue that the Bolsheviks made the correct decisions even if it wasn’t “deserved” simply by virtue that they would have posed a threat for the rest of their lives
Aesthetic communism is when you support the actual, real life actions of an actual, real life revolution.
I think stuff like
is fine because 1. It's a Nazi and 2. It's not a real person.I know a bunch of dead Nazis in a pit that would disagree with that second statement.
I think
is fine because it was a bunch of partisans getting retribution during wartime.Sounds very similar to Russia in 1918
Maybe it’s a response to the 100 years of liberals sobbing their hearts out for a murdering pogroming failson and his murdering pogroming family.
But no, I just like killing people. That’s it.
I don’t want to be hostile but I’ve got years of disingenuous libs grinding my patience down
I guess it’s because that’s usually implied whenever a critique of the Romanov execution.
And I don’t mean to imply that you’re against the Soviets, I just find calling the execution “aesthetic communism” anathema.
I think talking about “killing” in a vacuum is meaningless. I’m sure most people would be against it in the abstract, but I think killing monarchs in a revolution is a justifiable action. I don’t feel insulted by anyone saying I support the Romanov execution, because that would be true, but by the implication that I support killing for the sake of it. It’s hard not to read that into the last paragraph of the comment I replied to. I certainly don’t think it takes bad faith to interpret it that way.
With the whole federation thing, it’s really hard to tell between genuine criticisms and liberals concern trolling. I’m sorry for the initial reaction.
I think you might be talking about "nazbols" there? People who hear western propaganda about Stalin being "as bad as Hitler" and decide that makes the USSR totally awesome because of all the oppression, and supporting this false, cartoon villain version of a union of nations.
While it was probably necesarry to kill the royal family to avoid a counter-revolution
Gestures broadly at the Russian Civil War that happened anyway.
Here's a rule for those of you at home, don't machine gun kids.
If she's presents anything more than an annoyance on Twitter I'm sure the Italians will flip her right-side up.
Eh, I disagree. The kids didn’t deserve it but it was necessary as they would have served the counterrevolution for the rest of their life’s and would have been a rallying call by the reactionaries
There are still Stuart and Bonapartist pretenders, the presence or absence of heirs isn't what determines if you have an armed Royalist insurrection against you, as evidenced by the fact the civil war continued long past the murder of the royal family.
Having royal family members can provide some legitimacy to the insurrections. They didn’t know what was going to happen, only that the kids being gone may prevent an issue in the future and I would have agreed with them. The Bolsheviks were right on this instance
That arguments even worse, it takes it from "killing the kids solves a current problem" to "killing the kids may solve possible future problems", and if that's the standard, then it's never not justified killing kids, as you can always posit some possible future where some kid is going to cause issues.
Say what you will about the CPC but at least they correctly realized that Pu-Yi didn't need to eat a bullet to head off any issues, and that was even after he collaborated with the Japanese.
the kids were an issue that could have been mitigated
the rest of them got what they fucking deserved
the kids were an issue
Badumptiss
the rest of them got what they fucking deserved
Metaphysical pablum.
lol, fair
my point was that they posed a problem
but that problem could have been mitigated without shooting them
That arguments even worse, it takes it from "killing the kids solves a current problem" to "killing the kids may solve possible future problems", and if that's the standard, then it's never not justified killing kids, as you can always posit some possible future where some kid is going to cause issues.
That argument is completely absurd. Just because you can always posit some possible future where some kid is going to cause issues doesn't mean it's likely.
I don't want to pull the "I'm a statistics professor card", but I'm literally a statistics professor so unless I see an integral over a sample space in the denominator I don't want to hear about likelihood, and especially not when someone's half-baked narrative of possible possibilities gets treated as meaningfully bearing on that likelihood.
Like are we just throwing that word around or is their some objective method that apparently everyone else knows about for now to compute these probabilities and arrive at these conclusions.
Yeah it's called guesstimating
There's no way to objectively calculate the worth of an innocent person's life anyway, so you can't really put it into a formal equation. Sometimes you just have to make decisions based on incomplete information, I don't see what the problem is. It's not like I want to kill kids, but if I evaluated that there's a high enough chance that it could save a high enough number of lives, I'd pull the lever on that trolley problem 100%. What am I, a Kantian?
If seems to me that if we're willing to acknowledge that our subjective estimation of probabilities aren't necessarily any good at predicting actual outcomes we could not only save ourselves a ton of trouble handwringing over what level of perceived benefit justifies turning on the orphan mulcher, it would also go a long way to ensuring we don't accidentally make common cause with the people who do enjoy mulching orphans.
You can pretty easily draw a thoughline from the slapdash deployment of political violence to the elevation of ghouls like Beria to the head of the organs of state.
You've already decided you're ok with orphans getting mulched the moment you pick up a gun and call for revolution. Innocent people die in war, that's a fact of life. It may not be you who mulches the orphans, but you're the one setting of the chain of events that will cause them to get mulched. I feel like anybody who cares about this just has an extremely romantic view of war.
Revolutions don't happen on a regular basis, and a failed revolution can change the course of history and deny opportunities for centuries to come. And in the short term, it can mean the death of everyone you know and love, and countless others beyond anything you're capable of comprehending. You have to understand what you're getting into when you go down that path, and you have to be willing to do whatever it takes to win. You try to fight honorably, you pass up on a potential advatange, you can be assured that the enemy won't. There's no room for half measures, you either fully commit or you back down.
I just wanted to say thank you for arguing against the celebration of the murder of children.
Obviously the kids of a deposed ruler represents far more of an issue than regular children in a country. I seriously don’t think non-revolutionaries far after the event have a leg to stand on to critique the actions of the Bolsheviks from some Ivory Tower of morality. What happened was during a revolution and they were the children and heirs to the position of the sunpreme enemy
Obviously the kids of a deposed ruler represents far more of an issue than regular children in a country.
Right it was some great great cousin of the Tsar that opened the Soviet Union up to the west leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union and not some hereditary nobody.
I seriously don’t think non-revolutionaries far after the event have a leg to stand on to critique the actions of the Bolsheviks from some Ivory Tower of morality.
I mean, they fail even a basic "ends justify the means" test given that Russia is currently a hyper-capitalistic dystopia so yeah, I don't think my critique of the path they set down is in fact ill-posed.
Capital, in all it's algorithimic and anti-humanistic glory is the supreme enemy, not some guy wearing a funny hat in a bunch of medals . The french killed their funny hat guy and 10 years later they had an Italian in an even funnier hat running things, so this notion that we can just kill our way into socialism by executing certain lineages seems a bit daft.
Saying that I am promoting “killing our way to socialism” is patently dishonest. I am stating that the Bolsheviks took out an easy path to anti-revolutionary activity and stopped the flower of evil from flowering. I don’t wish to have a conversation if you are going to misrepresent what I said by claiming that I want to “kill our way to socialism”
misrepresent what I said by claiming that I want to “kill our way to socialism”
Well let's strip out the euphemistic cover to the following.
Bolsheviks took out an easy path to anti-revolutionary activity and stopped the flower of evil from flowering
What specifically did that involve? A smidge of killing possibly?
You are willingly misrepresenting what I am saying. The path to socialism isn’t about killing but of course killing is generally necessary, the enforcement of authority of the proletariat must be carried out agaisnt the former oppressors. If you can’t understand that, I don’t know what to say
Fuck you. Killing children is never necessary. If you can't understand that, I don't know what else to say.
the enforcement of authority of the proletariat must be carried out agaisnt the former oppressors.
Children were never the oppressors you fucking ghoul! You remind me of the goddamned apologists for the US nuking Japan "anything done in the name of furthering the goals of my side, even deliberately to innocent people born in the wrong place at the wrong time, may seem icky but thems the way it is. I'm just being practical." Not only does the argument rest entirely on a possibility of what might happen, it's completely unjustified regardless.
I don't think it's fair to equate the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the injury and radiation poisoning and genetic defects of countless more to killing, what, 5 children? That's absurd. You're blowing this completely out of proportion.
You can argue it's wrong but I can't imagine getting upset over something like that. There's a simple matter of scale to consider.
And again, that's exactly what the fascist apologists for the dropping of nuclear bombs on innocent Japanese civilians say.
"I can't imagine getting upset over something like child murder." I almost put in one of the disgust emojis here but it felt like it was too light-hearted for the disgust I'm actually feeling right now for people I used to think of as comrades.
Lol holy shit 5 innocent people were killed a hundred years ago and you're throwing around "people I used to think of as comrades" because we're not clutching pearls hard enough over it.
What a ridiculous thing to care about. Do you support revolution? You realize that lots of innocent people would die in a conflict like that, right? Way more than 5, I can tell you that! Revolution is not a dinner party.
I'm sorry that I don't consider the lives of royals to be worth more than other people. Kill the lib in your head.
"lol, you actually care about innocent people? What a rube! What a LIB!"
And no, I don't give a shit what you clutch pearls about - I mean, I would have thought someone interested in liberation would give a shit about human beings, but maybe that was naive of me - I'm said the "former comrades" thing because I expect the people I consider comrades not to support murdering the children simply because those children were born to their (and my) class enemies.
And get the fuck out of here with your "ooooooooh, but that's ReVoLuTiOnN!!" schtick. You're like the fucking reactionaries talking about those woke tankies for being upset by the "collateral damage" of all those Iraqi civilians. Oh boo hoo, innocent people. Who gives a shit about them, right? That's just WAR. Yeah, no shit people die in war, but you pretending that that's the same as there being innocent people who are your prisoners and are defenseless, literally children who at your mercy and then choosing to shoot them... That kind of false equivalency and gross disregard for innocent people truly is beyond the pale.
Kill the reactionary chud in YOUR head.
So yes, fuck you. You are no comrade of mine, just as no apologists for bigotry, SA, fascism, or in this case, child murder, are. It's like that Che quote "if you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine." Well, you clearly aren't because you clearly don't give a shit about injustice, so long as it's perpetrated by those you deem to be on your side.
Comparing killing the Romanovs to not only dropping atomic bombs on civilians, but also to the Iraq War you really have no sense of scale at all huh.
I really don't care about this at all, I'm sorry it makes you so upset.
You are beautiful. Thanks for sharing your compassionate indignation, I agree fully.
enforcement of authority of the proletariat must be carried out agaisnt the former oppressors.
Like a 12 year old? I guess that's the part I don't understand.
Having royal family members can provide some legitimacy to the insurrections.
Are we idealists with a great man view of history now? Do we think these symbols actually hold real power to sway a insurrection's success one way or the other?
The notion that printed symbols on a paper can change whether or not you should machine gun kids is silly, please refer back to the previous rule.
I'm not asking you to feel bad that it happened, I'm just making sure we're all on the same page about not machine gunning children.
I'm just making sure we're all on the same page about not machine gunning children.
I'm honestly shocked that this even has to be said here, let alone that apparently so many really aren't on the same page that machine-gunning children is both wrong and unjustifiable.
Eh, I know it's a minority position on the left but that's why it's a drum I beat every time it comes up. Unironically forced me back into religion when I realized that leftist politics without axiomatic moral grounding results in disaster.
Now I go to leftist meetings to avoid being useless and Quaker meeting to avoid being terrible.
I don't know, if the marxists or anarchists I work with irl ever said that kind of shit, I wouldn't work with them anymore (and we have discussed the topic). Simple as a that. Personally, I'm an atheist and haven't come up against any contradictions between my leftism and my morality or humanism. But if religion is what it takes for people to recognize that killing kids because of some hypothetical future scenario is wrong and will never be justified, then I say keep the churches full.
How are we supposed to convince people of our vision of a better world if we can't even get the easy stuff like "don't murder children" down? Christ even the liberals have the sense to pretend to feel bad about drones strikes on weddings when pressed.
I'm not looking to sour relations and am not going to take your position on the matter personally, and it's not that you stoked this argument, it's that I'm actively evangilizing a humanism first leftism. I think as soon as machine gunning kids enters into the political toolkit, regardless of what problems it resolves, we've lost the plot. Whatever nuance you want to inject into the scenario is fine, but at the end of the day it does boil down to you thinking that under certain circumstances it's acceptable, so I don't think I'm unfairly characterizing your position at all.
literal infanticide becomes a political necessity as a product of MONARCHY
If they wanted their children to be safe, then they should not have forced them to be the sole inheritors of a brutal dictatorship
political necessity
Just because people stomp up and down about 'political necessity' doesn't actually conjure that ideological abstraction up into material reality. China didn't machine gun Pu Yi and incidentally, their communist party is still running the show. I don't know how difficult it is not to machine gun a 13 year old, and no amount of "you made me do this" are going to change the fact that we're the ones making the (erroneous) decision to machine gun 13 year olds.
Kind to people, ruthless to systems, folks.
If Chinese rebels new this online argument was going to happen they probably would've killed whoever this guy is that they let live.
whoever this guy is that they let live.
The last "Emperor" of China
I mean they literally let him live after being a Japanese puppet during their atrocity spree in the 30's and 40's, so I think my dumb ass using him as a morality puppet would seem just about par for the course to them.
The notion that anyone can peer into the future and see all the possible outcomes to a sufficient degree of certainty to claim that the only possible outcome is to kill the kid is also very silly and Madeline Albrightesque.
We can be absolutely certain that the possibility of reinstating the monarchy would be very bad for lots of Jewish children. It's terrible, but Tsar Nicholas shouldn't have created a situation where he made the existence of his family so dangerous for everyone else.
We can be absolutely certain that the possibility of reinstating the monarchy would be very bad for lots of Jewish children.
Shooting a specific Royal lineage doesn't change anything about the possibility of reinstating the Monarchy. The white's didn't evaporate after the executions in the same way that the coalitions didn't evaporate as soon as soon as Louis XVI got the chop, and the House of Windsor doesn't quake at the thought of the current Jacobite pretenders. . The notion that the fate of the revolution hangs in the balance of Alexei's life is some grade A great man theory nonsense.
The only possible outcome? No, it wasn’t the only possible outcome but still a quite probable one. Maybe it wouldn’t have been needed but it was still justified as they could have posed a threat to the rwvolution
No, it wasn’t the only possible outcome but still a quite probable one.
Somehow I don't think they made this decision after siting down with a slide rule and a bunch of actuarial tables, so I don't know how they arrived at that balance of probabilities.
In reality it's more like cops defending their use of deadly force in any circumstances. They reckoned it had to be done, and their judgement is all that's needed to justify it, and now everyone else has to object to or rationalize their decision.
Sometimes people really do make decisions with uncertain and incomplete information, and sometimes people kill a black teenager for fun and pretend they feared for their lives. These are not the same thing. I wouldn't have killed the kids, but it probably saved a lot of other kids.
but it probably saved a lot of other kids.
Why we don't say stuff like this? We can't tease out the tread of time and say 15 years late what our actions are going to cause. Not with any degree of certainly but also not with any objective or even methodical notion of "probability" that we seem so eager to fall back on. We can stand in the moment and make a decision. Do I shoot the unarmed kid or not? That answer is pretty cut and dry for any humanstic strain of thought.
The fact that I can conceive of a possible chain of events where that has unfortunate ramifications doesn't change that.
Ah it's about that... Yeah death for me will always be a last resort. Because if it's glorified then we will be no better. We use death as a last ditch to resolve Contradictions.
The Russian Civil War ended when the Bolsheviks depicted the Whites as the cringe wojak and themselves as the Chad wojak.
At first I wasn't going to upvote but I have to give props for kicking off a struggle session over the Romanovs
People always go on about Soviet art and Soviet architecture but one aspect of Soviet innovation that gets constantly overlooked is Soviet interior design, with Yakov Yurovsky being the progenitor of what I'd call Soviet deconstructivist interior design.
Truly Yurovsky is an unsung pioneer of this interior design movement.
While we're doing Ipatiev House memes, here's this one:
Show
(It's much funnier if you know what King George V looks like)
You tankies want to give us real leftists bad drywall? No wonder communism has never worked
It's the wall in the basement where the Romanovs were shot.
spoiler
The pun being basically transphobes get the wall
I think it's a reference to "getting the wall" aka summary execution aka one of the great crimes against humanity perpetrated by revolutionaries in the past that is cause for understandable distrust among leftist non-communists especially, anarchists like myself, whose philosophical comrades were among the murdered.
OP, please don't go there. We're better than that and don't have to repeat the tragedies of the past.
EDIT: To try to reduce the friendly fire, I did not recognize that this image was from the Romanovs.
You think it was bad that the tzar got Merced?
No. Definitely deserved, though trial would have been preferable.
The murder of the children, I do see as unforgivable, however. If they'd committed none of the crimes of their ancestors, it doesn't matter who they were, it was murdering children and should not be excused in any way.
The royal family encouraged pogroms.
Hereditary rule is itself something that is inherently unjust and it is right to put to an end. I don't know that there has ever been a royal family that did not commit crimes against humanity.
While the murder of the inheritors of the Romanov line is regrettable, it is in no way some "great crime".
I was not aware initially that the image was from the Romanovs. I took it to be a blithe dehumanization and calling for summary execution of bigots. That's a dark path to repeating the dehumanization and murder of allies, like anarchists, when it becomes politically expedient.
ETA: I like Hexbears for the leftist unity, taking protection of LGBTQ+ folks seriously, and generally welcoming and engaging conversation. I hope you understand why someone who identifies with anachro-syndicalism can get a bit jumpy when there's talk of "walls" and/or summary execution, considering history.
That’s not how absolute monarchy works. The family line had to end or there is always a rallying cry to re instate an autocratic ruler
I'd argue that China is a historical counter-example. Killing children for crimes that they MIGHT commit is still just murdering children and the kind of thing that the feudalists and bourgeois engage in regularly throughout history, to the detriment of humanity.
This, I agree with. It's easier to judge from a current perspective when not facing that danger. I do think it is important to maintain the context though, as you pointed out, the children were victims of the same system and should be treated as such. Just because an act was monstrous does not mean it may but have been necessary. And just because an act was necessary does not mean that it was not monstrous.
I think, as you mentioned elsewhere, this is such a situation where it's not black and white. The family had been a true blight on the people and could not be allowed to continue their rule. You are absolutely correct in that expecting cold rationality is a mistake humans are emotional creatures (something that I've had to get comfortable with myself). To me, killing a child will always be a monstrous act and being found necessary or understandable doesn't change that.
I agree with your points overall but i feel frustrated since the argument about avoiding revolution and counterrevolution was ignored.
My apologies. Thanks for calling that out and giving me a chance to respond before going on the offense, it was not intentional but came from a but if shock at how quickly several fellow leftists that I've had good interactions with, on a leftist unity site, turned on me seemingly without missing a beat.
The argument rests on the fact that it was not some malicious murder done out of evil in the heart of a vengeful prole (though I would not blame them for it) but instead a politically motived killing caused by the material reality and historical risk monarchial heirs have proven to be time and time again. This is not dehumanising.
I agree with nearly all of that. I do, disagree on the last bit though. To my thinking "they are x, so must be killed regardless of is they have committed crimes" is dehumanization. It is placing them in a category that exempts them from fundamental human rights. I do understand the motivation and it may have ultimately been the correct choice to prevent more suffering, especially in the absence of many examples at the time of heirs of deposed rulers NOT later attempting counter-revolution. China did later show that it can be done, I think.
I still cannot not agree with that "end justifies the means" ethics approach, especially when it comes to children, who have a greater ability to change.
I don't really get the point about being jumpy by the mention of walls. For one thing it is a common refrain both on this site, and "to be put in front of the wall" or similar phrases are normal in many languages. Assuming that a left unity site would be talking of killing other leftists, strike me as a strange initial assumption.
I don't really see why anarchists would be extra hurt by the talk of walls, if you are here referring to historical conflicts. It was not as though that fighting was a one-sided affair either. The makhnovosts made use of secret police, and were in a lot of ways quite repressive. Reaction and counterreaction is not tied to a specific ideology.
This comes from historical treatment of anarchists and other leftists in the aftermath of revolutions, not directly the meme itself. Dehumanization of a group of enemies makes it easier to later dehumanize allies who don't fully agree on how to organize society. Summary execution and similar acts of violence forces those who carry it out to change in order to reduce the impact of the trauma, and is likely to cause reduction in empathy, etc. Empathy is vital. That's why I object to such a thing being a common refrain.
When it comes to Makhno and the Greens, I do philosophically have to side with the Greens - my loyalty is to common folk who have always suffered the most in every conflict in documented history. Both Red and White armies treated them as ripe for exploitation and seizure of resources, without consideration of the impact on their ability to survive. The formation of a military force for mutual defense was a necessity.
I think the idea of wanting to take protection of minorities and LGBTQ+ seriously, but then also being squeamish at the allusion or mention of violence, strikes me as incoherent as well.
The language used was too open. It wasn't "transphobes who have harmed people" or "bigots that participated in lynchings". It was simply "transphobes". Language and context matter greatly to me (possibly due to not being neurotypical), especially when talking about ending human lives. I took the meme to be akin to the monstrousity of "kill them all and let god sort them out"; alluding to indiscriminately killing without considering ignorance or psychological trauma from abuse that can be addressed.
Protecting people against reactionaires will, at times, require violence. Likewise will the changing of the system require violence.
That is to me a sad fact, but it is only grotesque because we do not consider how much violence is used every day to maintain the system as it is.Sadly, I do agree. Non-violence alone did not win workers rights or the rights of minorities. As much as I detest it, it does appear from all evidence something that is a necessity, in the face of those that understand no other language.
First of all, thank you for the good and productive discussion and not assuming malice or sectarianism. Neither malice nor sectarianism were indeed meant; quite contrary, I want for us to learn from these events and encourage empathy and positive interactions in the hopes of avoiding such in the future.
In retrospect I can see how I completely misphrased my viewpoint. It is dehumanising, you are correct. However it is not the people killing the royal family doing the dehumanising, it is the system which they exist in itself. From the moment those kids were born they were royals, and that fact made them into something other than people. That other thing cannot exist without being a threat to a democratic society.
I don't entirely disagree there and thank you very much for the Robespierre, I've not read him directly before. I find myself that much more glad that such decisions have not been required of me. Royals were not always royals, so, I do not believe that it is something immutable about them the moment that they are born. But, in the context, at the time, I cannot say that it was not the way to save the most lives.
Either way being hung up on these events from a time before we were born seems very counterproductive to me.
Absolutely. I just want to do what I can to avoid rhyming with the harms caused by such divides and help keep it hard to dehumanize our comrades in this struggle.
While I agree it is not specific, I'd like to point out that is a meme. It's not supposed to communicate more than a thought, not an entire concept. It is posted on a leftist forum, and it is assumed you can somewhat interpret its meaning on your own. It's not supposed to be taken 100% seriously, not everything has to be serious all the time. It's meant as joke for us and a threat towards those harbouring a transphobic sentiment.
A very good point. I may have been a bit extra sensitive there due to having been close to kids who suffered senseless violent deaths and my own personal baggage.
taking protection of LGBTQ+ folks seriously
talk of "walls" and/or summary execution
As noted elsewhere, I was not aware of what particular wall it was and took it to be a call for summary executions of bigots in general. I absolutely do think that royals should not exist and should be punished for their crimes against humanity.
When it comes to the the children there, that was just murder though. Strip them of their titles and, if they commit crimes, try them for them, as was done in China (though I do think that he was let of lightly for his crimes in Manchuria).
I think the quote from Mark Twain about the two reigns of terror fits in this context as well.
“There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
How many trans people have suffered unnecessarily due to transphobes, how many have died? How many cultures have been destroyed because Europeans came in and enforced a gender binary where there wasn't one before? We don't keep track of every single trans person murdered, we don't keep track of the misery of starvation and poverty of trans folks, we don't keep track of every time a trans person is looked past for employment. If we take the protection of minorities seriously we need to look at these instances and act accordingly and make sure they can't do any more harm. And before you say reeducation, how many of these people have been educated but decided to ignore it because it's a conspiracy of groomers, or they just don't care about the scientific evidence and will just continue to hate it because it's against their religion. What do we do with these people that refuse to change?
I think the quote from Mark Twain about the two reigns of terror fits in this context as well.
Absolutely. Very apt, especially with the context of the image, which I was initially ingnorant of (and look at the fun reactions that I've had from people who I've had previous good interactions with due to that ignorance). I took it to mean "the wall" in general, calling for summary executions.
The Romanovs and every other royal and aristocratic family together committed crimes against quantities of humans that I think is likely in the billions. I do not think that the fate of the family, with exception of the children, is undeserved, though, arguably it was getting off light.
How many trans people have suffered unnecessarily due to transphobes, how many have died? How many cultures have been destroyed because Europeans came in and enforced a gender binary where there wasn't one before?
The answer to both is too many. And it needs to stop.
And before you say reeducation, how many of these people have been educated but decided to ignore it because it's a conspiracy of groomers, or they just don't care about the scientific evidence and will just continue to hate it because it's against their religion. What do we do with these people that refuse to change?
Many have been abused themselves and "educated" to be the way that they are. There are changes in their brains that heighten fear responses, etc. I am not completely certain of the best path for dealing with those that refuse to change but do know that refusing to give them a chance to change in the first place by executing them, as was my interpretation of the meme, is just murder.
I'm not meaning that we should pardon their crimes, if they have committed any, just that every excused murder makes it easier to excuse the next. And that makes it easier to excuse murders of a wider and wider group. State sponsored violence changes people.
Go fuck yourself, seriously, get the fuck out of here
one of the great crimes against humanity
Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME?
Fuck off you liberal scumbag
Come on mate, not a lib. I was not familiar with that particular wall and saw it as a call for summary execution of bigots, which is a fucked up thing.
You can have a leftist community, or you can treat bigots with kid gloves. You can't do both.
Where am I advocating for use of kid gloves? Any fair and just society must treat all as equal when it comes to criminal behavior, not having separate classes where some are "more equal". Bigots trying to cause harm should see justice, as much as anyone else.
Summary execution is not something to be lauded or celebrated. Doing so diminishes you as well as much as it does your enemies.
An anarchist having sympathy for one of the bloodiest regimes of the 19th and early 20th century makes absolutely no sense
Is this a bit?
No. An anarchist not knowing that it was the wall from the Romanovs, thus thinking it might be any wall where people were executed.
Ok that's good for them, I'm simply clarifying hexbear's anti-sectarian policy cause apparently alot of lemmy users take issue with it and following the rules in general
I dunno. I've only been on Lemmy for a few months. Some people really enjoy being edgelords on the Internet. Without the context of what particular wall it was with bullet holes from summary executions, it could just as easily been a farmhouse where Black and Tans murdered someone for speaking Irish, to me.
Context matters and I didn't have it - might be good to ensure that everyone is on the same page before deriding and belittling them. The world's fucked up enough as it is without going off on each other or assuming malice when ignorance is the cause.
I agree context does matter, that's why it's usually sensible to look for context clues before engaging in a sectarian screed about the typical commies murdering folks because it was "perpetrated by revolutionaries in the past"
But hey I got no beef, you claim it was ignorance I'll take your word for it
Getting too many reports from this thread, so its getting locked.
it's the wall where the romanovs got got
it's just saying "not every westerner will be executed, but transphobes will"
