You would think it would be easy to find some poor conscript fuck who didn’t run over civilians in a bulldozer struggling with the fact that they were coerced into being part of a genocide, but no, CNN goes with the guy who crushed human beings. Even as attempted hasbara, that’s some high-level incompetence in CNN.
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.
My opinion of humanity was already so low…
It’s funny, I had the opposite reaction, I see this as pretty strong evidence of our decency. It’s really, really hard to get most people to behave this way, and the ones who do wind up fucked up from it (as they should).
“IN THE HUNDREDS”
Good god someone please operation overlord these mother fuckers.
reminds me of this bit:
“not only will america go to your country and kill all your people but they’ll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.”
For context, this is from Frankie Boyle’s 2016 Hurt Like You’ve Never Been Loved.
Just as Chris Hedges predicted.
Aww, war criminals
Gee I fucking wonder why you have trauma and PTSD??? Fucking moronic fucks, zero sympathy
i sincerely hope his actions haunt him for the rest of his pathetic life
I’m pretty sure they did.
Six months after he was first sent to fight, he was struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder […] Before he was due to redeploy, he took his own life.
Too cowardly to do anything useful to make amends. Just let another conscript fill his space.
Brave enough to drive over Palestinians and call them “terrorists in their hundreds”. Not brave enough to stand up to criticism from his countrymen. This is what spending billions of dollars on an asymmetrical war gets you: a system in which the weakest people can still take the lives of hundreds before being thrown away themselves.
Indoctrination is a hell of a drug.
Not saying these guys should be absolved, but they’re doing this because they think they’re the good guys/helping out.
We should be lamblasting their leadership and all of Israel’s parliament that’s enabling this.
But sometimes, soldiers are just soldiers/grunts. US Soldiers have similar PTSD after Afghanistan and Iraq. Not absolving them of sins, but when you’re trained for most of your adult life to take orders and not question them, and then those orders include killing innocents, it’s difficult to break from the indoctrination/control a group has had over you in the moment. Usually it’s not until you’re finished with your tour and you’re back home and had time to decompress that you realize the horrors you witnessed and perpetuated.
Again, not justifying it in any way, but if we don’t humanize Israeli soldiers, we run the risk of turning them into boogeymen like we did the Nazis. They were human too, and by not acknowledging that and how far humanity can go when they are supporting nationalist movements, we do great harm to any attempt to catch and correct these sort of things early.
There’s no switch that gets flipped that turns people into monsters. The worst atrocities ever committed upon humanity were by other humans. We need to acknowledge that they’re all human, or we risk repeating history.
They made a choice, do not absolve people of what they are doing and continue to do, especially if it’s fucking genocide, that’s literally how these things happen as well as the Holocaust.
At some point, people have to stand up and say no, voice their concerns, and just simply do the right thing.
Literally read what you wrote, the world already did what you are scared about to the Palestinians and is continuing to do so, are you tone deaf?
How about we fucking Humanize Palestine
I don’t think it’s either/or, having empathy for someone who killed himself because of the horrible things his country persuaded him to do doesn’t preclude having empathy for his victims, and it doesn’t mean absolving the crime. It is reality that everyone involved is victimized by war.
the world already did what you are scared about to the Palestinians and is continuing to do so
Part of how this was done is by using the emotional weight of atrocities for dehumanization of those claimed to be responsible. You might say that we don’t need to acknowledge the humanity of everyone universally, because the murderers have crossed a clear line by their own free will. But there is a concerted effort to obfuscate that line and drag everyone into plausible complicity; mandatory military service, suppression and murder of journalists, manipulative propaganda campaigns, it’s all effective and hardly anyone is genuinely immune.
Which isn’t to say the framing in the OP article is right; saying slaughtering people like that is “difficult to accept”, “psychological trauma”, calling all the victims “terrorists”, makes what should be an issue of recognizing and reacting to injustice into a problem of medical treatment to get people to be ok with doing the evil things the state directs them to do. That’s more manipulative propaganda, and many people will be convinced by it. The simplest counter that is least subject to being twisted is the conviction that everyone is always human and should be treated with empathy, without exception.
You are arguing for the dehumanization of the people of Israel. Dehumanizing the enemy is a reprehensible thing to do no matter the side no matter the conflict
How is “they are responsible for their own actions” dehumanizing? If anything the person you are responding to is arguing that IDF soldiers have free will.
Do not buy into the “we didn’t know!!!1!” and “we were indoctrinated!!!” bullshit. This is the exact same bullshit that “former” nazis sympathizers peddled after the war. It’s a lie. A transparent one at that.
Yes, the nazis’ methods of dehumanization were very effective. But that does not, for even a femtosecond, absolve anyone of cold-bloodedly murdering a Jew (or a Palestinian). It didn’t happen on accident, that soldier got in that position through a long series of conscious choices, and it came down to it he chose to run over hundreds of people from the comfort of his bulldozer. That is both very human, and one of the most unspeakable crimes of hate. Human in all the worst ways our species has ever devised.
Some crimes are just beyond forgiveness, because it isn’t in anyone’s power to forgive. Killing hundreds in an act of genocide is one such crime. To be human is many things, but being owed forgiveness is not one of them.
I’m sorry for the emotional message, I am assuming you are playing devil’s advocate in good faith but I can’t just let the dehumanization of innocent murdered civilians be compared to the harsh condemnation of the soldiers who killed them.
The last sentence is fucked up. If you’re running over hundreds of people how in the fuck do you know they are terrorists. These people are intentionally and knowingly committing war crimes then come back home and cry about how this all made them so sad.
Anyone who runs is Hamas. Anyone who stands still is well disciplined Hamas.
Look at how well Israeli propaganda is working abroad. Now imagine how well it must be working on the israeli population.
If the IDF is killing people, then they are terrorists. Not the other way around. You are to be checked for antisemitism/glorification of terrorism. Please report to your nearest IDF bulldozer.
Ask Rachel Corrie, who was similarly run over by a bulldozer protecting Palestinian land. It’s been over 20 years and the US still doesn’t give a single shit about Israel murdering it’s own citizens.
Yeah I remember reading about her. She was an incredibly brave woman. The most horrifying part was reading about the IDF soldiers who had a pancake party to mock her death.
was reading about the IDF soldiers who had a pancake party to mock her death.
Yeah, they’ve really got PTSD from what they do. /s
Give me a fucking break.
Anyone who runs is a terrorist anyone who doesn’t run is a lazy terrorist.
One of the reasons for creating the system of death camps was that Nazi soldiers and policemen tasked with murdering Jewish people and other undesirables had elevated rates of PTSD. Also, during the Cultural Revolution, the People’s liberation Army switched to a lower caliber sidearm because all the executions were giving them carpel tunnel.
You don’t want to loose sight of humanity just because you’re committing atrocity.
I know that another driving force for the gas chambers was to preserve ammunition.
The earliest versions of gas chambers were essentially “piping truck exhaust into a building.” They moved on from that in order to preserve metal (from the piping), fuel, and vehicles for other purposes.
I think they were using vans or buses, not filling buildings with carbon monoxide. Smaller spaces.
Maybe? I know for sure they were doing piping into a building early on.
That doesn’t seem very efficient if you want to gas dozens of people at once, which happened many times.
And yet, they still did it
They did it throughout the war and not merely at the start? So weird that there’s photographic and video evidence of people being gassed in buildings then.
Edit - Here’s evidence that the Germans used chambers (often called “showers”) from 1941 onwards:
https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-camps/types-of-camps/ https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/gassing-operations
While I’m sure vans were still used for their mobility/convenience and in cases where not many people were to be executed, Germany created extermination camps specifically to kill people (in more ways than just gassing) and those locations contained constructed buildings meant for execution with gas, not vans.
Even a few concentration camps had their own gas chambers, which were not vans, that were used to execute people that could no longer do forced labour.
I’m actually speechless.
I hope this guy suffers until his end.
If you run over HUNDREDS with a BULLDOZER, you deserve permanent PTSD to prevent you from ever fucking thinking of doing anything remotely like it again
I believe this particular quote is from a soldier who took his own life. How. Tragic.
Too bad about the order of operations
Child murderer.
ah Israelis and playing the victim, name a more iconic duo.
Let me go get my Planck length sized violin.
