this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2025
926 points (97.1% liked)
196
5514 readers
869 users here now
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.
Other rules
Behavior rules:
- No bigotry (transphobia, racism, etc…)
- No genocide denial
- No support for authoritarian behaviour (incl. Tankies)
- No namecalling
- Accounts from lemmygrad.ml, threads.net, or hexbear.net are held to higher standards
- Other things seen as cleary bad
Posting rules:
- No AI generated content (DALL-E etc…)
- No advertisements
- No gore / violence
- Mutual aid posts are not allowed
NSFW: NSFW content is permitted but it must be tagged and have content warnings. Anything that doesn't adhere to this will be removed. Content warnings should be added like: [penis], [explicit description of sex]. Non-sexualized breasts of any gender are not considered inappropriate and therefore do not need to be blurred/tagged.
Also, when sharing art (comics etc.) please credit the creators.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us on our matrix channel or email.
Other 196's:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Westerners: Are we the baddies?
All global superpowers are led by evil war criminals.
In recent history the West has had more global super powers so that's a lot of evil Western war criminals.
Big "ALL lives matter!" energy.
Both sides have baddies. Strong baddies on the israeli side. Weaker baddies on the palestinian side. Both have puppets and puppet masters playing them against another to further their agendas.
Then you have the poor sods in the middle who want nothing to do with the conflict, desperately trying not to be involved.
I think we can say that Israel is worse than Hamas since Hamas has never committed a genocide on the scale that Israel is currently and the West is at best complicit and at worst actively funding it.
Yes Israel is worse due to the power imbalance.
What would Hamas do if they had the power of Israel. I doubt many can argue they would be better.
And if my grandma had wheels she would have been a bike. What difference does it make what they would do in a hypothetical scenario?
People like you said the same thing about apartheid South Africa.
That situation had significant differences. The power balance was not skewed as far as it is with Israel. And there was no religious hate driving the conflict. External powers were also not fueling the conflict to the same level.
Where it was similar was how the conflict was used by weak men to maintain their priveledged positions. Once the two parties negotiated how the weak men on both sides, were going to keep sharing the spoils, the conflict got resolved. Remember when Israel and the palastinian authority where starting to gain some traction in negoriations, Hamas took power. That would not have been possible without the religious indoctrination and external interference from Israel and the US.
I have been living in South Africa my whole life, was discrimination against by the apartheid regime and now by the new government using many of the same race based tools to maintain a political elite at the cost of the average South African.
Ah, so you don't just "both sides" the Palestinian genocide, you also do it to Apartheid South Africa.
You going to do the US Civil War too?
Conflicts are rarely one sided, if ever.
Just because one side is bad, does not make the other side good.
Believing otherwise is just naive, or based on ignorance.
Do you think the firebombing of dresden in WW2 was justified because the Nazi's were worse?
Oh god, you actually do "both sides" the US Civil War.
Do you even do it to the holocaust?
Why would you assume that?
Why is it so difficult for people to understand that you can condemn the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, the Holocaust of Jews and slavery(both old and current). All while still being critical of Hamas targeting a festival on oct 7, the allies firebombing German and Japanese cities and religious and cultural obliteration conducted by Islam and Christianity in the middle ages.
If you cannot hold that position, you may want to check yourself for indoctrination by the "us vs them" narrative.
So when people start criticizing Russia's invasion of Ukrainian, do you also make sure to start going on about all the imperfections of Ukraine? Or do you reserve that "both sidesism" for non-whites like you have so far?
Ukraine has been more honorable in their defensive war with Russia than most other conflicts. Is the country perfect, no. Is it being a lot more humane and professional in their conduct than say, Russia, Hamas, Israel and Iran, absolutely.
I am going to assume you are not a native english speaker. So please read carefully.
You are assuming that anyone striving to be objective is being "both-sidesims". In order to meet that definition, you need to be using the actions of the one party, to defend the actions of the other. I have not done that. That's called being an apologist.
Regarding the racist allegations. Please count the number of times I criticized a "white" (your definition not mine) power in this thread with you.
Lol. Turns out you do indeed reserve the "both sides bad" nonsense for non-whites.
Now you are trolling.
Nazi Germany is not white enough for you? Britain is non white enough for you? Usa is non white enough for you?
Pray tell, who is white enough for you?
Just noting how you were willing to both-sides Apartheid South Africa, the Palestinian genocide, and the US Civil War, but for some reason you changed your tune completely when it came to Ukraine.
Maybe it's because the conflict is different.
It has more in common with germany invading poland, than Israel invading Gaza.
Yeah, because Ukrainians are white
So being critical of the USA, Britain, Russia, Confederate America and Germany is irrelevant, but because I am also critical of middle eastern powers, now I am the racist.
I think your victim complex or virtue signaling is racist.
Notice how it was all "conflicts are rarely one sided, if ever", and "just because one side is bad, does not make the other side good", right up until the victims were white, then suddenly it was "different".
Please try again:
So being critical of the USA, Britain, Russia, Confederate America and Germany is irrelevant, but because I am also critical of middle eastern powers, now I am the racist.
I think your victim complex or virtue signaling is racist.
Notice how it was all “conflicts are rarely one sided, if ever”, and “just because one side is bad, does not make the other side good”, right up until the victims were white, then suddenly it was “different”.
Considering the entire East is supporting Russia's genocide in Ukraine, I'm going to say "we're not the only ones".
China and North Korea are the entire East?
Where do Japan and South Korea stand?
India's purchase of oil from Russia amounts to less than all the trade that the EU does with Russia and a lot of that isn't even for a vital resource. It's also purchased within a price cap framework set by the West and economists globally agree that someone needs to buy Russian oil or oil prices will skyrocket due to reduced supply.
I wouldn't see this as supporting the war unless you feel that the EU also supports Russia.
I don't think this can be painted as a simple West vs East issue.
And if we're going to talk about genocide I can think of one that most genocide scholars agree upon that happens to be heavily (if not solely) funded by the West.
Putin can freely set foot in the US, China, Orban's Hungary and... you guess: the good friend India.
Anywhere in the EU; he would been arrested and investigated for crime against humanity thanks to ICC agreement. But it's not all fine in the EU: fascist governments like Orban and Meloni are fighting back the ICC because they want to be free to "friendly host" criminals exactly like US, China and India are doing.
Who else would be jailed up and investigated for war crimes by ICC?
Netanyahu.
That's a wonderful sentiment but maybe they need to put their money where their mouth is and cease all trade with Russia if they're serious about it.
What's happening in the Ukraine is evil and fucked up but it's war, not genocide.
This isn't to cheapen the damage Russia has done nor excuse their actions but genocide has a distinct meaning.
Wikipedia (emphasis mine):
The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as any of five 'acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group'.[14][15] The acts in question include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. [14] Genocide is a crime of special intent (dolus specialis); it is carried out deliberately, with victims targeted based on real or perceived membership in a protected group.[15] The genocides recognised under the 1948 legal definition that led to trials in international criminal tribunals are the Cambodian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, and the Srebrenica massacre.[11]
Given that Ukrainian children are being captured and indoctrinated, and it's hard to see Putin being happy with the existence of the nation itself as anything but a suzerainty, it feels like we're ticking enough boxes not to clutch any pearls about applying the word "genocide".
It sucks to know that there are multiple concurrent genocides, some more intense than others, that are being treated way differently because of racism and money in politics. But it doesn't diminish the crimes of, e.g., Israel to call Russia's aggression also genocide.
Your definition isn't wrong. That's also why what Russia is doing isn't genocide.
That things have been done, or as you're saying MAY be done may apply to aspects of what is in actuality a horribly misguided war, does not mean it satisfies the criteria for fenocide.
Like. You understand that when you bold things that the stuff that you did not bold is still there right?
The war is horribly misguided, evil, and appalling but it is a war. War crimes have certainly been committed but not on the scale necessary to classify it as genocide, nor with the demonstrable intent to eliminate the Ukrainian people entirely.
Your cherry picking of the definition would mean that all war is genocide. Which, if you believe that, fine, but don't be intellectually dishonest about it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_genocide_of_Ukrainians_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War
https://icj-cij.org/case/182
https://unric.org/en/international-court-of-justice-ukraine-v-russia/
You might have missed the bit where genocide is any of the five things? It says it right there.
It doesn't matter. It shouldn't be happening and we can't stop it by bickering.
Whataboutism