Oh, I can't wait for the sympathy piece on Auschwitz guards to drop any day now. They must have seen some very, very, very difficult things too, poor souls.
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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Gil Hochberg described "shooting and crying" as a soldier being "sorry for things I had to do." This "non-apologetic apology" was the self-critique model advanced in Israel in many politically reflective works of literature and cinema as "a way of maintaining the nation's self-image as youthful and innocent. Along with its sense of vocation against the reality of war, growing military violence, occupation, invasion, [there was] [...] an overall sense that things were going wrong."
Interesting read thanks.
Karen Grumberg noted that "the Zionist soldier, a man with a conscience, loathes violence but realizes he must act violently to survive; the dilemma causes him to weep while pulling the trigger. Looking inward, he despairs at the violence he feels compelled to enact this way because he fears his moral corruption."
Amir Vodka wrote "It typically depicts the IDF in a critical light, as a traumatizer of young soldiers, yet the genre itself is often criticized for turning the assailants into victims, and in a sense allowing the continuation of war under the guise of self-victimization."
They don't seem that traumatized when they are literally filming their own war crimes and posting them on Instagram for all the fascist clicks.
The only way I could rationalize the OG Nazis...trying to get into their head and how they managed to do the things they did...was that they were straight up brainwashed.
It sounded crazy when I was younger. Like, something out of a comic book instead of a history book.
But as I watch and try to critically understand how the modern propaganda machine works, I can't help but wonder if maybe I was right.
OG Nazis experienced the same thing. Killing people on en masse mentally fucks with your head, even if the individuals you kill are perceived as vermin/degenerates. This is why they moved on to using other means that is more dehumanizing i.e. pressing a button for the gas chamber
Brainwashing is perfectly easy. Just ask the US Marine Corps.
That creepy thing people in the US do, hanging flags in front of their houses? That's brainwashing. That's what it looks like.
That's how easy it is.
Not sure if "OG Nazis" only include the first generation, but their Children were pretty much brainwashed.
You can look up "Hitler Jugend" If you want, that organisation basically indoctrinated children while growing up. Right when humans are the easiest to manipulate.
I'd wager that, maybe, you were right.
You can look up “Hitler Jugend”
You have plenty of examples closer to home.
Oh man I totally forgot about Hitler youth.
Iirc they were taught to (and did) narc on their parents.
Honestly wouldn't be surprised, if Trump were to become president, if they co-opted BSA for a similar purpose.
Posted this in another thread, gonna post it here, too.
"Looking another human being in the eye, making an independent decision to kill him, and watching as he dies due to your action combine to form one of the most basic, important, primal, and potentially traumatic occurrences of war."
It's an unpopular take, but I recommend everyone read the book "On Killing" by Dave Grossman. It's obvious that what Israel is doing is very much a genocide, but I stand firm in my opinion that their boots-on-the-ground infantryman are also victims of the Israeli political machine.
I stand firm in my opinion that their boots-on-the-ground infantryman are also victims
Settlers enlisted in an occupying force that seeks to claim more territory over the bodies of the native occupants are not victims.
but I stand firm in my opinion that their boots-on-the-ground infantryman are also victims of the Israeli political machine.
Sure, but couldn't the same be said for many of the literal guards at Auschwitz? A lot of those people were just kids who were drafted and were simply following orders. Even many of those who were there willingly only did such things after being subject to years of ruthless Nazi propaganda.
At some point, regardless of what circumstances led you to that moment, you become responsible for your own actions. There is no set of circumstances that can make murdering innocent civilians justified. And if you do that anyway, you bear full moral culpability, regardless of what may have happened in your life before that point.
We literally hashed this out during the Nuremberg trials. It doesn't matter what propaganda you were subject to. It doesn't matter how you were raised. It doesn't matter if you were "just following orders." It doesn't even matter if you yourself would face execution for refusing to kill innocent civilians. It is never OK to kill innocent civilians, to perform genocide, or commit ethnic cleansing. If you do that, you deserve to hang for it. Full stop. No excuses.
The Nuremberg Trials are a great example of how you don’t hang if you provide enough value to the military-industrial complex, and a terrible example of full stop no excuses. Seems ill suited to be a foundation for a moral philosophy.
It absolutely could, and should. I'm not saying that the crimes should be forgiven, but it is not a purely black and white area. It is very grey. To ignore the fact that they were ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, just because it's uncomfortable to think about, would be a disservice towards efforts to prevent things like this in the future. People are complex.
They have a choice. They could either kill innocent people or sit in a jail cell. Picking the first one makes you a sociopath.
I guarantee he would face a lot less trauma in jail, especially since he is a trained soldier.
Stop making excuses, "complexity" doesn't justify genocide. Do you also think that our soldiers who slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis are just victims? Do you think the surviving family members would agree with that sentiment? That their families murderer is a victim?
It's all the same shit. They are copying us creating more terrorists for the future wars
I guarantee he would face a lot less trauma in jail
glances at the state of Israeli prisons, complete with guards who have the designated job of raping prisoners
Maybe not a lot less.
They are copying us creating more terrorists for the future wars
Given the degree to which the NATO states consult with IDF security officials when training their own police and military, it might be them passing their brutal and fascist policies onto us.
Would you rather be raped or slaughter children?
I'd rather neither. But I accomplish that by not being an Israeli Settler forced to choose.
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“So, there is no such thing as citizens,” he said, referring to the ability of Hamas fighters to blend with civilians. “This is terrorism.”
Fuck the IDF
Well when he said “this is terrorism” he was correct. Just that it’s the IDF terrorizing innocent people.
"cop needs therapy after shooting unarmed child"
Yeah, I suppose it was traumatic, bombing food relief convoys and hospitals. You could have avoided a lot of that PTSD by refusing to follow illegal orders.
Also, get farked, CNN.
My interpretation of this is that some mid-level staffers at CNN pushed the story knowing exactly what was in it. Their bosses wouldn't let them do obvious things, so they got a little subtle.
Didn't the US use to invade countries for much, much less of a reason than that? Sheesh.
These days I'm finding myself agreeing with the Iranian government more and more often because of Israel's crap. I don't like agreeing with the Iranian government.
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Poor guy. Did he also have to murder the little baby terrorists and their sobbing, horrified terrorist moms and terrorist sisters too? Poor fella. I hope he can muster the strength to do the right thing.
Fuck Israel and fuck conservatives (including neoliberals) who gleefully support this genocide. The wrong people are being erased.
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Some have labelled Israel as a rogue nation, but their actions are explicitly and implicitly condoned through other nation’s support and silence.
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Ah yes, those hundreds of "terrorists" all nicely lined up in the road.
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and if he had refused to do as commanded would he have been shot himself?
If the army starts shooting its own soldiers, it's not going to exist for very long. You can read very obscure stories about occasional killings during the Vietnam War, but those are almost always things that happened in the jungle when nobody would ever find out.
If they try that kinda thing in Israel today, it's not going to be a secret, and all of the other infantry and their family are going to wonder who is next, which in turn would massively reduce support for the Israeli military.
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No he would sit in a jail cell. As a trained soldier no one would fuck with him
Essentially a perfectly risk-free environment. But he chose murder instead
In the aughts, once the US torture programs started getting public attention around 2003, I did my obsessive thing on the German Reich and the Holocaust.
During Operation Barbarossa, the SS was experimenting with eradication methods. The most common was the pogrom, endorsing the locals to massacre the undesirables. When they weren't undesirable enough or it was the whole village, the einsatzgruppen (death squads) had to come do it, usually forcing them to dig a mass grave and then executing them along the side.
It was messy and brutal and gross, and there was high turnover among the death squads (the US has a similar problem with its combat drone operators). And this was a major problem.
The SS experimented with other ideas, including deathwagons that would pipe the vehicle's exhaust into an enclosed chamber to kill dozens at a time, but even that was too harsh and too slow.
This is how the prototype genocide machine was made at Auschwitz. The program was contrived so no one who interacted with the live prisoners also interacted with the dead corpses. The guy who pushed the execute button was two persons removed in the chain of command from the guy who signed off on the execution order, and none of those people had to face the prisoners or the outcome. The point specifically was to make the process of massacre less stressful for the people involved.
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