A Boring Dystopia

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.

Shooting and Crying

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."

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.

“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

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.

"cop needs therapy after shooting unarmed child"

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

Ah yes, those hundreds of "terrorists" all nicely lined up in the road.

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.

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.

I swear this is almost trying to parody the title of the article about the 19 year old who was burned alive

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 sincerely hope his actions haunt him for the rest of his pathetic life

Some have labelled Israel as a rogue nation, but their actions are explicitly and implicitly condoned through other nation’s support and silence.