If you are expecting to read my usual Left Coast column, I tell you now that you will be disappointed. I write, today, from a place of horror—about the massacre unleashed against civilians in Israel this past week, and about the morally cretinous bloodlust reaction some who fashion themselves as being on the “left” seem to have experienced in its aftermath, but also in despair at the ghastly collective punishments being unleashed from the air on Gaza residents by Netanyahu’s far-right government and the Israeli military.
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Genocide is bad
in all my years on this site and leftist subreddits and discords and irl meetups, through all of the disagreements and struggle sessions we have I think unironically the one single issue that most determines which users I feel affinity with is the divide of:
vs
And the biggest divide I see is between the people who genuinely want the world to be better and the people who are using political radicalism as their excuse to voice their murder fantasies, who dream about standing in an angry mob as 8-year-olds get sent to the gallows for the crime of being born from a royal vagina.
Spare me your melodrama, children and babies are not your fucking oppressors. If you seriously want to tell me that calling for babies to be beheaded and every Israeli being burned alive is “desperate revenge against oppressors”, then I guess Netanyahu really is doing self defense right now.
If you genuinely want the world to be better, you have to pick a side. You can’t just rest in your armchair in your ivory tower and condemn the material reality on the ground on all sides.
I am picking a side you dingdong. That doesn’t mean I want the side I’m rooting for to ethnically cleanse the other, holy fuck.
Not an idealistic side you made up in your head, a side that actually materially exists in the real world.
Israel and its goals or Hamas and its goals.
Pick one.
Hamas does not have a policy of completely exterminating of all Israelis. You are, despite nominally supporting Hamas, implicitly promoting anti-Hamas Zionist lies.
As far as I’m concerned, unless we in the crackerverse take up arms against our settler governments we are complicit. I include all of the settler-colonial project in this, so I’m guilty too because I’m posting instead of dedicating my life to opposing this evil project in all its forms.
Am I supposed to not be held accountable just because I merely create wealth for my ruling class and pay into the imperial death machine?
Are you actually on the side of Palestinians? You seem more like a bog standard online leftist that has done the bare minimum of recognizing a genocide for what it is and has taken that to mean they can just say whatever edgy nonsense pops into their head and pretend that’s anticolonialism. “Oh, you can’t criticize me for saying shit that Zionists pretend are the actual stakes of the conflict because I have right opinions.”
You are not special here. You are not more outraged than anyone else. You are valuing the clout of appearing more “extreme” to a handful of internet leftists over the damage of giving Zionists screenshots of Palestine supporters actually wanting to commit genocide. If you’re worried about what side people are on, first worry whether you’re even helping the one you pretend to care about.
Clout? I’m anonymous.
Posting isn’t politics. We can’t help anyone here. If I was worth anything I wouldn’t be wasting my time arguing on an underwater basket weaving forum, I’d be doing something that actually matters. We’re complicit. If I were killed for it, I’d understand.
Excuse me? Do you think I was implying I’m pro-Israel or…?
You sure sound anti-Hamas, therefore:
I see that divide too. Too many self-described leftists don’t really care about society improving somewhat as much as they want to be knee-jerk contrarians against the status quo and also think violence is fun instead of sometimes necessary.
falling into genocidal antisemitic tropes in response to the israeli state being ghouls is not hopeless desperation. these are not palestinians posting after having their homes bombed and their loved ones lynched. this site is still mostly westerners living in much more comfort, lots of white westerners with no real connection to the conflict. most people here have no fucking excuse to be posting like that, other than putting on the costumes of the actually oppressed to vicariously play out their outrage.
it is adventurist nonsense. no, you actually can manage your anger enough to not call for murdering babies, if you lack the discipline to not even help but at least not produce propaganda for zionist liberals - and they do in fact watch this place for shit takes like this - then you are worse than useless.
if you’re mad, at least focus on presenting the IDF as monsters instead of presenting their victims’ perspective as wanting to kill babies. you can recognize that the actual victims are not going to respond well to being genocided without stepping in to say awful shit on their behalf.
Killing children is inherently evil yes
conflating israelis and jews is not good either
Edit: was a bit hostile, apologies
Specifically singling out babies to me read as a bioessentialist take as babies are not actors with any political agency, and the language of specifically genocide as opposed to, like, hoping the IDF steps on their own landmines has an antisemetic connotation, but I missed the bit about the Nakba. I am much more suspicious of some white person having this extreme a take having some other motivation for talking about genocide than I am someone that was actually directly harmed by Israel.
While you’re correct that it would normally make sense to read it that way, the only reason anyone is talking about babies at all is that the IOF invented a story about “40 beheaded babies” and then immediately said they would not investigate it or provide any evidence. Given that context, I don’t think it necessarily makes sense to interpret it as bioessentialist, but rather as an angry (incorrect) reaction to all of the “Hamas are evil baby killers” propaganda.
To clarify, this is not meant to justify the removed comment which was deranged regardless. Just because the evil settler genocide army is making things up about killing babies, that doesn’t suddenly mean that killing babies is good.
yeah this is closer to the mark for me, I get a bit skeptical when ppl start dredging up the romanovs, or all the french children dessalines killed, or whatever fantastical (or even fictional…) potential outcome, as a cautionary tale of what could happen if revolutionaries were to get carried away… like, it’s just incredibly unrelatable to be this ridden with anxiety about potential excesses when more restraint is honestly the last thing we need rn. on the dessalines thing e.g., black jacobins is pretty critical of that whole debacle bc of the geopolitical consequences for haiti but iirc james pretty explicitly rolled his eyes at the white people shuddering in horror at atrocities, it’s just such a weird thing to be concerned about
off topic but im kinda sure that this has primarily with gender, but I get what your aiming at. Its a mistake to attribute children agency they dont and will not have until they are at least 16-18 (even then its circumstantial and a touchy subject)
I really don’t get why people with a communist would bring such inherently false analysis into discourse. Being Jewish has absolutely nothing to do with this. Its a critique of Fascist Nationalism and Settlerismwhich can be done by any member of any race. And again, Children are just unable to be a part of such exploitation because they have no agency whatsoever. Children are inherently innocent.
Communists know the real enemies, why bring in people and groups that have nothing to do with it.
And yeah, it really should be a rule that one should be suspicious of anything white people (especially imperial core ones) do. Again because of the system they surround themselves in and their material interests are entirely aligned with reactionary thoughts and actions.
what, the original commenter said their family lost everything in the nakba, and they were the one unhingeposting not me
if you take away the wildly inappropriate conflation of israelis and jews, your argument seems basically the same as that of people grimacing at “death to america” and trying to sanitize it as only referring to america as a political formation or something bc it’s so important apparently to observe proper optics to win the sympathy of libs. idc what libs think about anything and I’m not expecting posts on hex bear dot net to have any bearing at all on world events. but im drawn to ppl who lowkey feel
stuff literally sometimes bc that electric sense of helpless outrage resonates with me a lot, and even when I don’t agree with someone like the removed poster there’s a sense of safety in knowing for sure where they stand
While I stand by the statement that calling for babies to be killed as an act of genocide has an extremely antisemetic connotation and I would normally assume someone saying that is doing some antisemetic entryism, I did miss that the bit about the Nakba which better explains their post as coming from actual harm rather than just grandstanding.
However, shit like “death to America” is its own problem, as there isn’t actually any relevant desire to ethnically cleanse white people and so it can be understood as either a joke or indeed just about the nation state, as obviously even if you did actually mean to genocide white people for whatever reason there are a lot of people who are not white here or who are literally indigenous, so an unironic “nuke the US” take would be nonsense even before getting to the fact that whiteness is a social construct that can be destroyed without literally killing all white people. And then there’s the common criticism of leftists using the imagery of people.in the Middle East as violent terrorists to larp as such, along with using terms like inshallah while wishing for violence.
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I disagree with the other user (it’s not good to want children to die, children can’t be held responsible because they can’t understand and affect their environment fully like adults can), but this comment is wrong. Wishing death on Israelis is not at all the same as “6 million wasn’t enough”. Let’s not pretend that being a victim of the holocaust is equivalent in any way to being killed by the people whose land you’re settling, or that the Zionist settler state is at all representative of Jews and Judaism (especially those who were killed in the Holocaust).
I’m not saying it was your intent, but I think it’s a form of antisemitism to draw that comparison.
As always: Judaism /= Zionism, Zionism /= Judaism
Almost all the survivors of the Holocaust are gone, now. But many, many of them voiced their disgust for the conduct of the Israeli state before they passed. Norm Finklestien’s parents narrowly survived the camps had he has voiced righteous outrage against the conduct of Israel since he was a young man precisely because of their experience, to name one prominent person (critical support for Norman he has some other views that suck).
One thing Finkelstein mentioned on one of the TrueAnon eps he was on was that his parents, who were not communists, would get pissed off anytime they encountered someone trying to paint Stalin in a negative light. Apparently that was a common thing with jews of that generation, as they saw him as the liberator of their people.
Doesn’t really have anything to do with what is being discussed here, I just thought it was interesting.
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Prepare the ban hammers, I guarantee they’ll get (rightfully and correctly) owned immediately when they do.
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I agree. It is important to remain vigilant for posters who cross the line from anti-colonialism to anti-semitism. I think it is important for all of us to learn about the politics of Zionism over the past 150 years precisely because the more you learn about Zionism the more you realize that it is not monolithic.
This might have been the case a couple of years ago or whatever, but I’d be surprised if it still was.
Guess we’ll find out.
drawing that parallel is just being a crazy bitch who likes turning on people for making you uncomfortable
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When you counter accusations of genocidal intent with “Israeli isn’t a race” you’ve lost the fucking plot. Stop being a freak and think about what you’re saying here.
children are inherently innocent what the fuck dude
Getting unified palestinian citizenship and paying restitution for the stolen land?
You advocated for the death of babies. Babies don’t even have object permanence let alone the ability to understand what being a settler is.